WILL SENATE GIVE ARAFAT $500 MILLION IN THE FACE OF HIS ONGOING SUPPORT FOR TERRORISM, OPPOSITION FROM MOST AMERICAN JEWS?

(Washington, D.C.): Tomorrow, the Senate
Appropriations Committee is scheduled to complete action
on the FY1996 foreign operations appropriations bill. As
things stand now, that bill will include legislation
originated by the Foreign Relations Committee’s chairman
and ranking member, Sens. Jesse Helms and Claiborn Pell.
The Helms-Pell language would allow Yasser Arafat and his
Palestinian Authority to continue to receive $100 million
per year in U.S. tax dollars — despite evidence that he
is actively fomenting terrorism against Israel and
diverting such foreign assistance to personal and
political purposes equally inimical to peace. More
astonishing still, this initiative would also appear
at odds with the desires of nearly two-thirds of American
Jews.

‘Go to the Videotape(s)’

This evidence is to be found in two forms:
authenticated video tapes and official Palestinian
documents. The former, which record various recent
speeches given in Arabic by Arafat in Gaza and Jericho
have been produced by the Institute for Peace Education
in Israel. These tapes show the PLO chief using
various public platforms in Gaza and Jericho to applaud
Palestinian Arab terror against the Israelis. Those
responsible for the murder of Israelis are described
repeatedly as “heroes” and “martyrs.”
He identifies the PLO with their “jihad in
the path of martyrdom.” Arafat also explicitly
describes it as a “jihad via death, via
battles” — belying the excuse sometimes given by
his apologists that such language refers simply to a spiritual
crusade.

Even more appalling is the exculpation served up by
some in Israel and the United States to the effect that
Arafat’s innumerable paeans to terrorists are merely an
obligatory, but nonetheless inconsequential sop to the
radical Palestinian factions. There are just three
problems with this: First, under the terms of the Oslo
Agreement, Arafat is obliged to suppress terrorism, not
endorse it.

Second, according to recent public opinion data
reported in the June 1995 edition of Middle East
Quarterly, those committed to violence against Israel
are not a small, irrelevant fraction of the Palestinian
Arab population. In a summary of this research published
in the Wall Street Journal on 8 June 1995, the Quarterly‘s
editor, Daniel Pipes, noted:

“Fully 46% of those [West Bank and Gaza
Palestinian Arabs] questioned support armed attacks
against Israeli targets; among Fatah sympathizers —
in other words, those who support negotiations with
Israel — an astonishing 40% support such violence. A
plurality of the Palestinian population, in other
words, advocates both the peace process and violence
against Israel.”

And third, after their experience with Adolf Hitler,
whose murderous exhortations were also dismissed as
“mere rhetoric,” the Jews are well advised to
take Arafat’s threats seriously.

‘Hard Copy‘

Further, and in some ways even more stunning,
evidence of Arafat’s bad faith is to be found in
documents from the files of Arafat’s Palestinian
Authority, the organization he intends shortly to
transform into the government of an independent
Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Comprised of 14 pairs of letters between Arafat’s
Minister of Finances, Muhammad Nashashibi, and a
representative of the Palestinian Economic Council for
Development and Reconstruction (PECDAR), these documents
indicate that foreign assistance funds are being
diverted to enrich Arafat and his cronies and to pursue a
strategic agenda inimical to Israel and adverse to
durable peace between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs.

American Jews Want No Part of Aiding Arafat

If Senators are under the illusion that American Jews
want them to reward Arafat notwithstanding this damning
evidence — and despite the personal misgivings many in
Congress feel about foreign aid in general and aid to the
PLO in particular — the results of a new poll sponsored
by the American Jewish Committee should be instructive.
It found that fully 63% of American Jews oppose
further U.S. “economic aid to the Palestinians”
while just 30% support it. (N.B. This stunning result
was obtained even though the question was formulated in
such a way as to describe not discredited Arafat
organizations [i.e., the PLO or PA] but generic
“Palestinians” as the recipients).

Members of the Senate Appropriations Committee may
find even more relevant other findings of this poll: 56%
of the sample averred that the Arabs’ goal remained the
destruction of the State of Israel (versus only 37% who
disagree); 71% responded that Arafat and the PLO cannot
be relied upon to honor their commitments or refrain from
terrorism (versus just 17% of American Jews who think
they can be); and a stunning 91% agree that the PLO is
not doing enough to prevent Arab terrorism against
Israelis.

Not surprisingly, the poll’s sponsors — an
organization that refuses to acknowledge the dismal
results to date of the so-called Israeli-PLO “peace
process” — would prefer that legislators focus on
the finding that many (68%) in the American Jewish
community remain reluctant to criticize the Israeli
government’s “handling” of that process. Even
here, however, the trends are interesting: After two
years of Rabin-Peres “handling” of the peace
process, the number of American Jews who approve of their
performance has fallen from 84% to the present level of
68%. During the same time, the fraction of Jewish
Americans who agree that the Arabs’ goal remains the
destruction of Israel has risen from 42% to the current
56%.

Senators should beware: Taken in toto, the
AJC poll’s results suggest that there is no greater
popular support within the important American Jewish
constituency than among the larger electorate for the
abusive expenditure of foreign aid to dubious recipients
like the PLO.

Hear No Evil

These and other relevant points would almost
certainly have been brought out in full, balanced
hearings on the subject of U.S. aid to the PLO.
Unfortunately, the Senate Appropriations Committee has
not had any such hearings prior to its action on the
Helms-Pell legislation. Neither, for that matter has the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee nor have the House
counterpart committees.⁽¹⁾

Indeed, the entire manner in which the question of
extending aid authority provided under the terms of the
Middle East Peace Facilitation Act (MEPFA) suggests that those
in the Clinton Administration and on Capitol Hill
responsible for the PLO aid program are aware that the
proposed grant of $500 million in taxpayer funds to
Yasser Arafat cannot withstand public scrutiny and
debate.⁽²⁾
It is, therefore, no accident that each of the previous
two, short-term extensions of MEPFA have been performed
literally in the dark of night, adopted without fanfare
or warning by a Congress largely uninformed of the
implications of doing so.

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy believes that the
Helms-Pell legislation is seriously deficient. It
allows an eighteen-month extension of MEPFA — and,
therefore, the continued flow of over a hundred million
dollars to Arafat and his Palestinian Authority. What is
more, by providing such assistance, the United States
effectively provides a “Good Housekeeping” seal
of approval for other bilateral and multilateral aid
arrangements worth billions to the PLO. Worse yet, aid
given in the face of Arafat’s increasingly brazen acts of
non-compliance with solemn international obligations can
only encourage him (and others, like Hafez Assad) to
believe that such behavior carries no penalties, and may
even be rewarded. This is hardly a formula for
genuine peace with security for Israel.

The Helms-Pell initiative purports to respond to
widespread concerns along these lines by tying further
aid to PLO compliance. In fact, there is no such
linkage. Language about compliance is only hortatory,
non-binding expressions of congressional desire for such
compliance. There are loopholes designed to permit
presidential certification of PLO/PA compliance even if
it remains wholly absent.

If Congress actually intends to ensure that it is not
blindly allowing half-a-billion dollars to be applied to
purposes inimical to peace by people bent on the
destruction of the State of Israel, several steps are in
order: MEPFA should not be extended again without open
and informed hearings and an opportunity for real debate.
If another, short-term (i.e., 30 day) extension is
necessary to permit such hearings and debate, so be it.
If not, Members of Congress would be far better advised
to use legislation sponsored in the Senate by Sens.
Alfonse D’Amato, Richard Shelby and Larry Craig and in
the House by Reps. Michael Forbes, Jim Saxton and others.
This legislation makes full PLO/PA compliance a
precondition to further U.S. assistance and ensures that
such funding is henceforth channeled through American
government agencies and U.S. registered, and readily
monitored, private voluntary organizations.

(1) The Center has learned that
the Helms-Pell language was inserted without notice, even
though the Foreign Operations Subcommittee members and
staff had been told that a 45-day extension of the
Middle East Peace Facilitation Act (MEPFA) would be
incorporated in the bill — not Helms-Pell — and despite
the fact that members present at the mark-up were not
allowed to see the amendment offered by Sen. Connie Mack
(R-FL) before voting on it. Such unseemly procedural
practices have reportedly outraged a number of
Appropriations Committee members and may increase the
chances that the Subcommittee’s action will be revisited
by the full Committee tomorrow.

(2) Committee staff have pointed
out to the Center that the Middle East Subcommittee,
chaired by Senator Hank Brown, has held two somewhat
related hearings in recent months — one concerning
development programs in the Gaza Strip and Jericho and
the other an omnibus hearing on U.S. foreign aid to
countries of the Middle East. Members of the Subcommittee
did not have an opportunity to hear from critics of the
PLO aid program at either hearing, however.