A report by Palestinian Media Watch recently revealed that British taxpayers have been paying salaries to terrorists. It revealed that £3 million every month is paid by the Palestinian Authority (PA) in salaries to Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. The salaries come from the PA's general budget. That "general budget" is kindly provided by the U.K., among other EU countries.
Many British taxpayers, struggling to pay their family's way through a recession, might rightly wonder why their money is going to pay as much as £2,000 a month to people serving the longest sentences—those who have targeted Israeli buses and other civilian targets with suicide bombers, for instance. That is higher than the average wage in nearly all of Britain. You might be forgiven for wondering, if you were a struggling teaching assistant in the North of England, why failing to tick "suicide bomber" on your careers form should have left you so much worse off than a terrorist in the Middle East.
The Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, where students from Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority learn together, may not open its gates in the next academic year.
Located in the southern kibbuz of Ketura, the institute was established in 1996 as an engine for the vision of Israeli-Palestinian peace. This is the only place in the Middle East dealing with the common environmental problems of Israel and its neighbors.
“From my point of view it's a severe blow,” explained Dr. Tareq Abu Hamed, director of the institute's Center for Renewable Energy and Energy Conservation. “We won’t have partners on the other side, the environmental problems won't go away and it will be increasingly difficult to solve them.”
The institute, Abu Hamad says, doesn't only promote international cooperation, but peace between peoples as well.
“We need $1.5 million to begin 2013. Some donors promised us hundreds of thousands of dollars over a span of years, but those contributions have shrunk or vanished."
Yes, the terrorists get paid far more every month than a real example of cooperation and peace needs to start its academic year.
No one in the "pro-Palestinian" crowd supports the existence of real peace programs between Israel and the Arabs. Because they aren't "pro-Palestinian" at all - but anti-Israel.
Both those stories are worth reading in full for other reasons.
The British story notes how Britain's International Development Minister Alan Duncan adamantly refuses to accept the evidence and insists that paying these prisoners - whose payscale increases with the time they are in prison - is really "social welfare."
The Arava story notes that the institute has to hide the fact that it is in Israel when recruiting students from Jordan.
(h/t Ian, Zvi)