Establishment by the Quartet of a fund to channel aid to cash-starved Palestinians is an acknowledgment that the international aid freeze imposed after Hamas’ surprise election victory in January has had unintended and harsh consequences for ordinary Palestinians. Yet while the fund will release more than $120 milion to support local health services and cater for the basic needs of poor Palestinians, there are hitches everywhere. The fund is temporary and is limited and the need for it will be reassessed in three months. Also, there is no mention of paying Palestinian government workers. About 165,000 government employees, including teachers, health workers and security personnel, have not been paid for three months as a result of the aid freeze.
The biggest problem with the fund is the resultant split which will no doubt be created within the already divisive Palestinian camps. The money will be distributed in such a manner that it stays out of the hands of the Hamas government. The conditions for all necessary aid to be released are that the government will renounce violence and recognize Israel’s right to exist. Until that is done, the fund for paying the Palestinians will be managed by the World Bank and the EU, working with the office of Mahmoud Abbas. This parceling of assistance is sure to foment even more ill will between political rivals Fatah and Hamas.
It would have been far better had the EU chosen to deal directly with the democratically elected Hamas government. That would have shown respect for democracy. Hamas is, when all is said and done, the legitimate voice of the Palestinian people. About that, there is no disagreement.
And by announcing its willingness to renew a cease-fire with Israel — in the wake of the Israeli terrorist beach attack which killed eight innocents — Hamas is proving it is a true government in the community of nations, accepting the international ground rules Washington claims that it ignores. Any attempt to divide the Palestinians by withholding aid and refusing to talk to their elected representatives is nothing less than sinister considering that the Palestinians are willing to offer a truce in the wake of such a bloodbath.
The new fund shows that the West has not yet washed its hands of the steadily deteriorating Israeli-Palestinian situation, one in which gunmen from Fatah are fighting it out with gunmen from Hamas and one in which Israel is building unilateral fences and defining unilateral borders. That temptation to walk away must be strongly resisted. As bad as things are now, they can get a great deal worse and almost certainly will if the outside world averts its attention.
EU countries are showing they will not remain silent about the sufferings of the Palestinian people or abandon them in their desperate financial plight. But true friends of the Palestinian people need to talk straight with Hamas if true justice, along with the aid, is to be meted out.
