When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, we didn’t airdrop food aid on Tokyo. When the Germans bombed London during the blitz, Churchill didn’t send care packages to Hitler. So why is America insisting that Israel provide its enemy with resupply and materiel whilst simultaneously prosecuting an existential war in which Hamas continues to hold 133 hostages, including 5 Americans, as bargaining chips?
The U.S. Agency for International Development’s motto is “USAID: From the American People.” However, the way in which the world’s largest bilateral provider of assistance to developing countries handles its $40 billion annual budget might surprise the American people, particularly in light of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war and conflict in the Middle East.
Under the Trump administration, when I was the Chief Operating Officer of USAID, we cut all aid to the Palestinians for a number of reasons. Chief among them was that Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas refused to speak to the U.S. after President Trump announced his intent to move the American Embassy in Israel to the country’s capital city, Jerusalem. Additionally, the administration supported bipartisan legislation making it illegal for any U.S. government agency to provide economic support to the PA as long as it continued its longstanding, immoral practice of paying terrorists and their families lifetime annuities for murdering Americans.
President Trump signed this legislation into law in March 2018 and named it the Taylor Force Act in honor of a U.S. military veteran who was stabbed to death by a Palestinian terrorist in broad daylight in Tel Aviv. The Palestinians refused to engage in peace talks with Israelis, they were not party to the Abraham Accords. Generally speaking, there were better relationships for the U.S. government to foster through development assistance in other parts of the world than with the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. American tax dollars could be better spent and the values-based generosity “from the American people” could be better appreciated elsewhere.
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We also cut funding to UN agencies that operate at odds with U.S. national and moral interests including UNRWA, the standalone refugee agency whose sole job is to fund Palestinian so-called refugees. To be clear, the UN Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) does not help Palestinian “refugees” lead safe lives in third countries as the much larger UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) does for refugees from every other country in the world. Rather, UNRWA’s mission is to keep Palestinians in a permanent state of dependency on the UN until the day they can overthrow the state of Israel and replace it with a one-state solution of Palestine.
Fast forward to 2021. USAID under the leadership of Obama’s former UN Ambassador, Samantha Power, reopened our closed USAID offices and found clever workarounds to allow funding to flow to Palestinians in violation of the spirit of the Taylor Force Act if not necessarily the letter of it. Power and Secretary of State Antony Blinken also turned the spigots back on for UNRWA and other UN agencies that had been defunded by Trump.
What makes USAID’s funding of Gaza relief efforts most disheartening is that it runs counter to American values.
How so?
On Oct. 7, Hamas gleefully perpetrated the most gruesome massacre on Jews since the Holocaust. The ensuing war launched by Israel to rout Hamas and free 253 hostages is what we are seeing play out on TV and computer screens. What we’re not seeing are the thousands of so-called “innocent” Gazan civilians who joined in the gang rapes of Israeli women and girls and who also massively plundered Jewish homes, stole cars, and kidnapped Israelis to hold for ransom or to sell to Hamas. I’ll repeat that. “Civilians in Gaza” sold Israeli hostages they kidnapped to Hamas.
The story of slave-trading is never told because it doesn’t fit the age-old narrative of Palestinian victimhood. It allows U.S. government officials like Samantha Power and Antony Blinken to forget who started the war in the first place as well as to ignore the 133 people, including 5 of our fellow Americans, who remain hostages in unimaginable circumstances in Gaza’s vast underground tunnel system (built by donor funds that were diverted from UNRWA to Hamas).
While playing victim, “innocent” Gazans have delayed Israel’s ability to win the war and free the hostages. This is part of Hamas’ strategy. They have also gained incredible traction in the public relations campaign against Israel. What Hamas cannot win on the battlefield they hope to win in the court of public opinion.
Hamas and its enablers in Qatar are keenly aware that in the minds of social media-addled youth and politicians, the loudest voice wins. We see that now as President Biden is perceived as capitulating to Hamas demands in order to secure votes in Dearborn. But a Pyrrhic victory in Michigan should not be the price America pays for a moral loss in Gaza.
USAID’s substantial reputation and budget are crown jewels in America’s national security toolbox. The gems have been tarnished by this administration’s misuse of them.
Israel may be alone on the battlefield, but poll after poll shows “the American people” stand with Israel. America’s assistance to the rest of the world, “From the American People” should reflect that and it should not be delivered to those seeking to destroy Israel.
Japan and Germany would not have changed their murderous path post-WWII if they hadn’t been utterly destroyed by the allies. The same is no doubt true of the Islamofascists of Hamas and their enablers in Iran and Qatar. The terrorists must be utterly destroyed, not enabled with assistance from America and the free world.
Bonnie Glick was the Deputy Administrator and Chief Operating Officer of the US Agency for International Development from 2019-2020. She is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies
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