This week, the US Federal Appeals Court reinstated a $656 million judgment against the PLO and Palestinian Authority in a lawsuit brought by American victims and their families over terrorist attacks in Israel.
The decision comes after a battle through the US court system of many years, and deserves to be welcomed. It is a just ruling, and one that may impede the nefarious “pay to slay” policy of Abu Mazen’s terror authority, the Palestinian Authority, which gives salaries to the families of murderous terrorists.
No country should tolerate payoffs for crimes against humanity. No democracy should normalize that.
Payoffs for terrorists
How are terrorists in prison for crimes against humanity given monthly payoffs? Through money that continues to reach the PA, including tax funds that the State of Israel collects and transfers on its behalf. Israel collects these tax payments and passes them on. That is the arrangement. In practice, it means that Israel is helping sustain the very financial system that the US rejected, the policy that rewards terrorism.
The practical effect of this legal ruling may be that where those funds cannot be collected directly from the PA, the victims’ families may be able to seek them from the State of Israel instead. In other words, Israel is not only caught inside a morally grotesque arrangement. It may also find itself paying the price for helping keep that arrangement alive.
This is a paradox so outrageous it should shame every responsible Israeli policy-maker.
A country that has lost so many innocent civilians to terrorism should never be in a position where it is effectively cooperating with the financial operations of an entity that pays the families of terrorists. Yet that is exactly what this situation exposes. However officials may try to dress it up in technical language, legal formulas, or diplomatic necessity, the underlying reality is impossible to deny.
Israel is complicit
Israel is transferring money into a system that helps reward terror.
There is no respectable way to explain that away. People will say the situation is complicated. They always do. They will say there are agreements, tax frameworks, international pressures, security calculations, and political constraints. But some things are too morally obvious to be hidden behind complexity. A government that truly opposes terror cannot continue participating in a process that helps finance an authority tied to salaries for the families of terrorist murderers.
That should be the simplest moral line in the world.
The Americans have done something just. They have acted against a system that should never have been allowed to continue so comfortably. It will certainly not solve the problem alone, but it interrupts, however slightly, an intolerable reality. It limits, at least to some degree, the ability of this process to continue unchecked. It draws a clear moral line.
Would that the same could be said for the people in Israel who should have stopped this process long ago. The State of Israel needs to accept its own mantle of leadership and set precedent as a moral compass, not follow. That is the ultimate mission of the Jewish people, a mandate overdue as we soon celebrate our 78th year of independence as a sovereign nation.
Israel must, at the very least, take inspiration from American judicial righteousness in this case, and finally do the right thing.
The writer is a former deputy speaker of the Knesset, a former member of its Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, and the founder of the Zehut Party. He is the author of the recently released Israel Is Just the Beginning: How Israel’s Fight Against Radical Islam and Progressivism Protects the Identity and Liberty of the Civilized World.