‘Deal of the Century’ dead on arrival - Part 2: How U.S. aid to Palestine deliberately perpetuates the occupation
This is the second in a series of articles exploring how the ‘Deal of the Century’ is a natural culmination of decades of bipartisan consensus on U.S. foreign policy, aid, and security cooperation vis-a-vis Israel and Palestine. This series shows that in terms of substance, Trump’s approach to Palestine differs little from that of his predecessors.
Read Part One: ‘Deal of the Century’ dead on arrival - Part 1: How U.S. military aid sabotaged the Israel-Palestine ‘peace process’
“Activists holding names of young Palestinians who were shot and killed since last October 2015 during the Palestine Marathon, April 1, 2016.” / Creative Commons via Flickr user duoyen
In May 2019, Jared Kushner spoke at a Washington, D.C. dinner on the prospects for the ‘Deal of the Century’, which he, as White House senior advisor, had then spent some two years preparing. Kushner noted that around the Arab world, “there’s a lot of impatience with the Palestinian issue ... People have been funding this thing for a long time. They’ve gotten more aid than any group of people in history, and what we have to show for it is really not much at this point, unfortunately.”
What Kushner left unsaid is that by every relevant metric, cumulative and current U.S. aid to Israel far outweighs American support to Palestine. Since the year 2001 alone, U.S. support to Israel has totaled $52.3 billion. By comparison, funding allocated for the Palestinians since 1950 is approximately $11 billion. At current annual rates set under the Obama administration ($3.8 billion), Israel receives more aid every three years than Palestine has in nearly seven decades.
Notably, U.S. aid includes support to the Palestinian Authority itself as well as U.S. contributions to UN bodies that support Palestinian refugees displaced by the violence that birthed modern Israel. As such, much of U.S. aid for Palestinians actually takes the form of support to programming in host communities in neighboring states, namely Lebanon and Jordan — not in Palestine.
“In reality, much of U.S. support to Palestine is — in effect — support to Israel.”
This is a crucial throughline. The ‘Deal of the Century’ has been lambasted as a facile attempt by the Trump administration to “bribe” Palestinians and regional states to accept the status quo of Israeli occupation and permanent Palestinian displacement. This reading of the Trump administration’s approach is difficult to contest. However, it would be a mistake to ignore the fact that U.S. aid to Palestine has always functioned this way.
In this sense, the volume of aid to Palestine is not the only issue at hand. In reality, much of U.S. support to Palestine is — in effect — support to Israel. As such, it is crucial to note that the use of U.S. aid to stack the deck in favor of Israel and deprive Palestinians of basic rights and the means of effective self-determination reflects a bipartisan consensus that long predates Trump.
To this end, the touchstones of U.S. aid to Palestine under Republican and Democratic administrations alike are punishment and coercion. This has taken two distinct forms: security cooperation and economic assistance. U.S.-Palestinian security cooperation is designed to empower Palestinian security forces only inasmuch as they complement the Israeli security apparatus. Likewise, U.S. economic support is not meant to create a flourishing, independent Palestinian economy; instead, this support is palliative. By making life under occupation more tolerable, it holds open the door to the ‘peace process’, defuses surface-level tensions, and reduces the likelihood that untenable conditions in the occupied territories will prompt violent resistance against Israel.
‘Securing’ Israel with Palestinian aid
U.S. military aid to Israel weighs in at $3.8 billion annually, making it the most generous bilateral relationship of its kind in the world. By contrast, U.S. ‘security’ assistance to Palestine totalled $268 million in 2018, the latest year with full reporting.
“Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, left, meets with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah in the West Bank, on Oct. 3, 2011. Panetta is traveling in the Middle East to discuss a variety of defense related issues.” / Department of Defense
This staggering difference is not the only point of note. The Palestinian Authority receives U.S. ‘security’ assistance only insofar as its outputs complement the far more generous support to Israel, and can be co-opted by the Israeli security apparatus, thus perpetuating the status quo.
For that reason, U.S. ‘security’ assistance to Palestinian Authority security forces predominatly takes the form of training and ‘non-lethal’ military hardware, such as uniforms, crowd control gear, computers, and even office supplies.[1] Crucially, Israel also retains the authority to approve every article the U.S. puts into Palestinian hands. In this sense, U.S. funding packages to Palestine are overtly crafted to cater to the artificial security framework created by and for the Israeli security establishment. As a result, U.S. support extends the life of dangerous and pervasive mantras that stress the need for ‘rule of law’ and the imperative to suppress ‘militant threats’ in Palestine.
‘Economic Support’: Sidelining Palestinian priorities
Likewise, at its core, the purpose of U.S. monetary support to Palestine is to make life under a pervasive regime of subjugation more tolerable. The policy instrument that sustains this approach is the Economic Support Fund (ESF), which has a nominal focus on the development of healthcare capacity, physical infrastructure, and legal and administrative entities. Available figures show that ESF funding amounted to approximately $215 million in 2018. However, through its narrow focus on technical assistance, this support ignores (and perpetuates) the very conditions that make it necessary in the first place.
To this end, ESF programs should be seen as a tool to secure the existing 131 West Bank settlements. This continues in spite of the fact that settler communities regularly displace neighboring Palestinian populations and illegaly exploit scarce natural resources. As recently as 2016, the United Nations Security Council determined that Israeli settlement activity contains “no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law.”
These settlements are currently under review by the International Criminal Court (ICC) as being, in and of themselves, war crimes. Moreover, these settlements pose an urgent and direct threat to U.S. economic support to Palestine in two ways. First, as noted above, growing settler populations are expropriating greater shares of the natural resources that are the legal and basic human rights of Palestinians in surrounding areas. Thus, these funds not only jeopardize life in those Palestinian communities by increasing baseline service and aid needs, but they also infringe upon Palestinians’ self-determination — putting a just peace further beyond reach. Second, there is an alarming trend of deliberate and repeated demolition of Western-funded humanitarian and development projects in Palestine by settler populations and the Israeli state itself.
The Jordan Valley / Creative Commons via Flickr user duoyen
Increasingly, the U.S. has also enacted deliberately cruel cuts to Palestinian economic support. Without doubt there is intrinsic value for Palestinians in improved hospital conditions and better access to water. Nonetheless, Congress suspended economic aid to Palestine for the duration of 2019 with the passage of the Taylor Force Act, which was conceived after an American veteran visiting Israel was killed by a Palestinian. The provision, which passed with bipartisan support as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2018, stripped the Palestinian Authority of ESF aid over its refusal to suspend a sovereign program that gives basic financial support to Palestinian “prisoners, ‘martyrs’ and injured,” who are often the sole bread-winners in their households. Congress was aware that the PA’s safety net program would remain in place; this knowledge made the Taylor Force Act a purposeful means of suspending funding to Palestine.
Notably, the passage of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2018 was opposed most vociferously by members of the Israeli security establishment, who correctly noted that U.S. aid to Palestine is predominantly oriented toward supporting Israel.[2] Ironically, it was only when Israel’s perceived ‘national security’ interests were threatened by the cut that funding to Palestine was restored, nearly a year later through the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2020.
Stabilizing the occupation
At all levels, the U.S. government has a long track record of treating aid to Palestine as a ‘stabilizing’ force to maintain the status quo of the occupation. It should be no surprise that establishment think tanks and lobby groups have been among the chief proponents of this approach to Palestine, which requires that American aid — that is, taxpayer dollars — perpetuates the occupation.
The ‘Deal of the Century’ was — of course — dead on arrival as a result of this generations-long deck-stacking. However, the increasing hostility of attempts by Congress to strip Palestine of U.S. funding and diminish Palestinians’ agency and basic human rights, suggests that a more confrontational approach that is even more stick than carrot may be on the horizon.
In the next part in this series, we’ll examine how the U.S. abuses its veto authority in the United Nations Security Council to shield Israel from accountability for its actions in the occupied Palestinian territories.
[1] Further items provided to Palestine include helmets, ambulances, radios, generators, printers, and tools for controlling demonstrations, coordinating the activities of security forces, and administrative tasks. See: https://www.gao.gov/new.items/d10505.pdf. Much of this support is channeled through the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INCLE) and Non-proliferation, Anti-terrorism, De-mining and Related Programs (NADR) programs.
[2] Congress is uninterested in applying pressure to the Israeli government to reign in the high rates of settler violence, pervasive discrimination and violence against Palestinian-Americans, or even Israel’s decision to bar entry to two Muslim members of Congress.