Should the U.S. send $900 million to rebuild Gaza?

Yes

Aid will show our commitment to Arab peace

By John B. Quigley

COLUMBUS, Ohio —- Providing $900 million in aid to rebuild Gaza is the least the United States can do. We sat and applauded while Israel bombed Gaza with impunity for 22 days last December and January.

We are a major cause of the disaster that has befallen Gaza. U.S. taxpayers supplied Israel, free of charge, with the jet fighters, the Apache helicopters and the other sophisticated weaponry it used in Gaza.

Gazans know this, as does the entire Arab world. Israel’s assault on Gaza provided one more reason to hate America.

George W. Bush held the White House during the assault, but both he and the incoming administration greeted Israel’s assault with no hint of criticism. The destruction that Israel inflicted took the already low level of existence of Gaza’s population to new depths.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon visited Gaza after the assault and pronounced the situation “intolerable.” One of the few Americans to visit described the scene in Gaza City as “decimation, one building after another collapsed into rubble.” Gazan civilians figured among the casualties, as Israel targeted residential buildings. As Israeli forces commandeered Gaza houses, they blew up nearby houses, to ensure against attack.

During the assault, Israel shelled a U.N. compound, destroying much needed supplies. Gaza has been an economic basket case for over half a century, and we share a good deal of the blame.

In 1967, the Lyndon Johnson administration covered for Israel when it invaded and seized Gaza. In 1948, the Harry Truman administration covered for Israel when it drove Palestinians from the central coastal area of Palestine into Gaza, turning it into one of the most densely populated areas of the planet.

In 1950, the situation was already so dire that the United Nations set up the Relief and Works Agency to provide staple foods to Gaza, and to house and educate Gazans. That agency will distribute much of the projected U.S. aid.

Israel has been none too cooperative in letting aid trucks through the border crossings, which it controls. UNRWA Director Karen Abu Zayd has come down hard on Israel for blocking aid in the past.

Even before its recent assault on Gaza, Israel blocked shipments of food and other vital supplies into Gaza. It controls most access points to Gaza.

Abu Zayd said that every Gazan now lives with the trauma engendered by the conflict. “Aid dependency in Gaza,” she says, is “at an alarmingly high level.”

UNRWA is now feeding 1 million refugees in Gaza. The World Food Programme provides aid to non-refugee Gazans.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said that $300 million is humanitarian aid for Gaza, presumably to be handled by UNRWA. The other $600 million is for the Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank but not Gaza, to cover budget shortfalls, institutional reforms and economic development.

The Obama administration is adamant that the aid not be seen as aiding Hamas. Supplying aid while boycotting the government in charge is tricky business. State Department spokesman Robert A. Wood said details of the aid, “including the manner of distributing the money, are yet to be settled.”

Aid is critical to prevent further humanitarian disaster in Gaza. For all the contradictions of the U.S. involvement in the Gaza situation, the aid is badly needed and should be dispatched as quickly and efficiently as possible. Regardless of what one thinks about the rights and wrongs, the civilians of Gaza have paid a terrible price.

John B. Quigley is a professor of law at Ohio State University.

No

Assistance will benefit Hamas, help our enemies

By Ilan Berman

WASHINGTON —- “Fool me once,” the old saying goes, “shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” During the 1990s, the Clinton administration funneled millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian Authority and its gangster-in-chief, Yasser Arafat, in the vain hope that the Palestinian leadership would focus on development and reconcile itself to the existence of the state of Israel.

The funds, however, ended up doing no such thing. Fueled in part by American dollars, Arafat and his cronies preserved and strengthened their anti-Israeli animus, all the while entrenching a culture of corruption and cronyism that has crippled progress toward a Palestinian state.

Yet today, the Obama administration is poised to make much the same mistake in post-Arafat “Palestine.” During her trip to the Middle East, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged a whopping $900 million in U.S. assistance to the Palestinians. A major aim of the funds, according to State Department spokesman Robert Wood, will be to rebuild infrastructure destroyed during the recent three-week war between Israel and the Hamas terrorist group in the Gaza Strip.

There is a hitch, however. Today, the Palestinian Authority is hardly a cohesive, unitary entity. Ever since it managed to seize power in Gaza through a rapid, bloody coup nearly two years ago, Hamas has established what amounts to a separate state there. It would be hard to overstate the effect this development has had on Palestinian politics.

Formally, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas may still be in charge of both the West Bank and Gaza. In practice, however, Arafat’s beleaguered heir, now sequestered to the West Bank, has little control over Gaza politics and even less capability to enforce order or disburse aid on its streets.

Which means that, whatever officials in Washington might intend, the Obama administration’s new Gaza aid package is likely to turn out to be a financial boon for Hamas, which wields actual physical control over the places the aid is destined to go.

That, in turn, would put the White House on the wrong side of the very federal laws it is charged with upholding. For more than a decade, the State Department has formally defined Hamas as a “foreign terrorist organization.” That label, made pursuant to a 1996 law known as the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, bars U.S. citizens and companies from providing the group with “material support or resources” that could assist or sustain it. The prohibition goes in spades for the U.S. government and its various agencies.

All of which goes a long way toward explaining why the White House has been so eager in recent weeks to promote the idea of a “unity” government between Hamas and its secular rival, Fatah.

If such a power-sharing arrangement can be reached, it will formalize the fiction that American aid will not end up in Hamas’ hands —- and that it will be used for development, rather than destruction. Never mind that Hamas has already formally rejected such an arrangement, or the reality that —- if a unity government does indeed materialize —- Hamas is bound to be a senior partner in it, and may even end up in control of both the Palestinian Authority’s politics and its finances.

When Israel launched its military offensive in the Gaza Strip late last year, the objective was clear: to convince the leadership of Hamas that, quite simply, continued terrorism does not pay.

It would be both sad and ironic if America’s economic assistance to Gaza in the aftermath of that conflict ended up convincing Hamas that the exact opposite is true.

Ilan Berman is vice president for policy at the American Foreign Policy Council.