Terrorism as a Well-Remunerated Profession

Palestinian Authority’s Direct Expenditure in Support of Terrorists and Their Families as Percent of Total Budget and Foreign Aid   Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs

	2013	2014	2015	2016
1. Salaries to imprisoned and released terrorists	423.8 million shekels	442.8 million shekels	481.3 million shekels	488.4 million shekels (530.5 million shekels total incl. administrative costs.)
	$111,516,570	$116,528,150	$126,662,890	$128,518,896
2. Salaries to “martyrs” families	603.6 million shekels	618.6 million shekels	620.4 million shekels	663.6 million shekels
	$158,843,940	$162,807,890	$163,268,940	$174,630,296
Total salaries to support terror (Lines 1+2)	1,027.4 million shekels	1,061.4 million shekels	1,101.7 million shekels	1,152.0 million shekels
	$270,360,520	$279,336,050	$289,931,840	$303,149,193
Percentage of budget and of foreign aid	7% of total budget	7% of total budget	7% of total budget	6.9% of total budget
	20% of foreign aid	24% of foreign aid	14.8% of foreign aid	29.6% of foreign aid
Total PA budget	14.387 billion shekels	14.771 billion shekels	15.673 billion shekels	16.577 billion shekels
	$3.786 billion	$3.887 billion	$4.124 billion	$4.362 billion
Total Foreign Aid	4.915 billion shekels (of which 4.532 billion current budget and 384 development)	4.402 billion shekels (of which 3.676 billion current budget and 726 million development)	7.410 billion shekels (of which 3.120 billion current budget and 4.290 billion development)	3.881 billion shekels (of which 2.925 current budget and 956 million development)
	$1.29 billion	$1.15 billion	$1.95 billion	$1.02 billion
Money Transfer from the PA to the PLO	267,922 million shekels	294.5 million shekels	775.319 million shekels	873.2 million shekels
	$70,505,789	$77,500,000	$204,031,315	$229,785,520

It has been a half-century that the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority have routinely issued beneficent salaries as awards for the commission of terrorist acts against Israelis, or as they are more commonly referred to in this context, as "Zionists", reflecting an organized and deliberate normalization within Palestinian society of acts of deadly violence against Jews.

Those committing terrorism have been weaned on it through their early childhood forward by way of school curricula, television, plays and public celebrations of terrorist carnage. Parents additionally teach their children that they are obliged to hate Jews. Palestinian attackers of Israelis are lionized as warriors in a conflict against a mortal enemy. Palestinians at a vulnerable age are taught to regard Jews as threats to their own existence, and encouraged to think of themselves as future martyrs dedicated to the cause of liberating 'Palestine' from Israeli oppression.

The historical and ongoing acts of violent carnage have perpetuated a situation where Israel must defend itself against suicide attacks that can and do take place anywhere and everywhere, taking the lives of innocent Israeli men, women and children, sometimes singly, sometimes in ghastly, mass carnage, all of which the Palestinians view as justified. They have by so doing placed themselves under military occupation as the only way Israel is able to defend its population. And when Palestinians are killed in the act of killing, the Palestinian Authority decries Israeli brutality.

Former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat set up the Society for the Care of the Families of Martyrs in 1965, initiating payments in an official capacity to those Palestinians who engaged in terrorism in recognition of their courage, daring and dedication to 'resisting' the establishment of the State of Israel. Financial recognition of deeds of carnage was meant to legitimize those acts as recognized, sponsored and issues of Palestinian pride, going to the perpetrators of violence, to Palestinians imprisoned by Israel for terrorism and their exultant families.

The family of Mohammed Tarayreh, who stabbed to death a 13-year-old Israeli girl in her bed, is now eligible for a monthly stipend from the Palestinian “Martyrs’ Fund.”   (AP Photo)

These are families who take pride in what their sons and daughters have accomplished in killing and maiming Jews, feeling those acts completely justified and marking their perpetrators out as heroes dedicated to the Palestinian cause of destroying the presence of a Jewish state in the Middle East, enabling in the process Palestinians to claim the geography as their own sovereign territory. That Jews have lived in that heritage geography since time immemorial is denied strenuously, the myth of Palestinian stewardship of land that was always theirs re-writing history and reality.

Social assistance payments and financial bonuses went out to over 20,000 Palestinian families by 1978, reflecting the purpose of the Palestine Mujahidin and Martyrs Fund, renamed Society for the Care of the Families of Martyrs. The responsibility for administering the fund is now with the Palestinian Authority, funnelled through the National Palestinian Fund in tandem with the Institute for Care for the Families of Martyrs, Palestinians being very fond of formalizing their vision of 'resistance'.

The coordination of these payments to the benefit of prisoners, convicts that have been released, and those that have died has long since been formally installed in Palestinian law which specifically sets out the provision that the PA is obligated to give prisoners a monthly allowance lasting the entire incarceration period, along with salaries and the offers of job placements within the PA once they are released from prison.

The Palestinian minimum wage averages $397 monthly, in figures released by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, with close to 40 percent of employees working in the private sector earning less than the minimum wage. In 2015, according to that same statistical source, close to 20 percent of West Bank employees earned an average of $292 a month, working for private interests. Contrast that with the $3,120 lavished monthly by the Palestinian government on a 19-year-old Palestinian by the name of Omar al-Abed.

Whose mother has declared her pride in her son for entering a home in the West Bank settlement of Halamish to kill a grandfather seated at the dinner table along with his two adult children, ages 70, 46, and 36 during a family celebration. This is all in the budget of the Palestinian Authority which has also in its 2017 budget release promised to pledge an increase to the tune of 13 percent for the salaries of imprisoned and released terrorists bringing that area of the budget up to $154.4-million.

Separately, funding allocated to the families of the "martyrs" against Zionism will be $192-million.

The total expenditure for the Palestinian Authority projected for the year 2017 to Palestinian martyrs will be approximately $345 million, representing almost half of all foreign aid the Palestinian government is expected to receive for 2017. International aid is helpfully funding payouts of appreciation to Palestinians engaged in violent terrorism against Israelis.

Moreover the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has been shown to have direct ties to Hamas recognized as a terrorist organization not only by countries in the West, the very countries that donate to the international aid reaching the Palestinian Authority and Hamas by way of the PA, but by some Arab countries as well.

Offensively sordid to human dignity by any measure.