But what about the Palestinian people? Have they been helped by the estimated $1.2 billion in aid that the U.N. and International Monetary Fund say they received in 2006? Are they more likely to embrace peace and renounce violence? Are their lives better with more aid flowing in from international organizations?
In fact, the evidence suggests that all our millions have done is to further impoverish Palestinians, turning them into ever more helpless dependents, whose likely response to our largesse will be to despise us further. Palestinian gross domestic product went down by 6.6 percent in 2006, while poverty rose by 30 percent and more than one in three Palestinians were unemployed.
When have handouts ever worked? In the United States, we learned that welfare for our own citizens not only turned into a debilitating crutch, it created a more or less permanent underclass.
At least American welfare recipients weren't using the cash and their free time to build bombs to blow up their neighbors. The same can't be said for the Palestinians who have received Western aid. Israelis found a bomb-making factory in the West Bank town of Nablus just last month.
The Palestinians will never have a better life if they continue their destructive, self-defeating hatred of the Jewish state and its people. Palestinians have developed a culture built on hate. Until they learn to devote their energies into helping themselves rather than tearing down each other and their neighbors, we should not spend one more dime on aid.