The Palestinian Authority Leadership’s Inconvenient Truths

PA President Mahmoud Abbas at the United Nations. Photo: UN.

The truth sometimes hurts; that is why the Palestinian Authority (PA) has been working hard to prevent the outside world from hearing about many occurrences that reflect negatively on its leaders or people.

In recent years, the PA leadership, often with the help of the mainstream media in the US and EU, has been successful in its effort to divert all attention only toward Israel.

Here is a list of 10 inconvenient truths that Palestinian leaders would prefer you not know:

1. More than 100 senior Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Fatah officials hold Israeli-issued VIP cards that grant them various privileges denied to most Palestinians. Among these privileges is the freedom to enter Israel and travel abroad at any time they wish. This privileging has existed since the signing of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO in 1993.

2. Out of the 600 Christians from the Gaza Strip who arrived in the West Bank to celebrate Christmas, dozens have asked to move to Israel because they no longer feel comfortable living under the PA and Hamas.

3. Dozens of Christian families from eastern Jerusalem have moved to Jewish neighborhoods in the city because they too no longer feel comfortable living among Muslims.

4. PA security forces in the West Bank continue to summon and arrest political opponents, journalists and bloggers who criticize the Palestinian leadership.

5. The PA government, which has been complaining about a severe financial crisis for the past few months, just canceled outstanding electricity debts for Palestinians in the West Bank. Palestinians pay their bills to the Arab Jerusalem Electric Company, which buys electricity from the Israeli Electric Company. The Palestinians have not been paying their electricity bills and many have been stealing electricity from their Arab company.

6. Tens of thousands of PA civil servants in the Gaza Strip receive salaries to stay at home and not work. The practice has been in effect since Hamas seized control over the Gaza Strip in 2007. According to Fatah spokesman Ahmed Assaf, the PA, which is funded mostly by American and European taxpayer money, spends around $120 million each month on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

7. Mahmoud Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction has allocated more than $1 million for celebrations marking the 48th anniversary of the “launching of the revolution”—a reference to the first armed attack carried out by Fatah against Israel in 1964.

8. Despite the calls for an economic boycott of Israel, more than 40,000 Palestinians have received permits to work in Israel. Moreover, another 15,000 Palestinians continue to work in Jewish communities beyond Israel’s pre-1967 borders in spite of an official ban.

9. Top PLO and Fatah officials continue to do their shopping in Israeli-owned businesses both in the West Bank and Israel. Last week, for example, a member of the PLO Executive Committee and his family were spotted shopping in Jerusalem’s Malha mall. Of course, the PLO official did not forget to bring along his private driver and maid.

10. The wife of a senior PLO official recently spent $20,000 for dental treatment in Tel Aviv at a time when there is no shortage of renowned Palestinian dentists in Ramallah, Bethlehem and Nablus.

These are only some of the inconvenient truths that the Palestinian Authority does not want the outside world to know. Palestinian journalists often avoid reporting about such issues out of concern for their safety or for “ideological” reasons. These journalists have been taught that it is forbidden to hang out the dirty laundry.

Western journalists, donors and decision-makers who deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict need to know that there are many truths being completely ignored or hidden from their eyes and ears.

Originally published by the Gatestone Institute, www.gatestoneinstitute.org.

Khaled Abu Toameh, an Arab Muslim, is a veteran award-winning journalist who has been covering Palestinian affairs for nearly three decades, including for the Jerusalem Post since 2002.