Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Photo: Reuters / Mohamad Torokman.

The Palestinian Coalition for Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights sounds like one of the scores of NGOs set up in the territories solely to attract European cash — and to bash Israel.

The group has a number of members, including the Ramallah Center for Human Rights Studies, the Stars of Hope Foundation, the Kader Foundation for Community Development, the Al Haq Foundation, and a number of trade unions.

Yet its most recent press releases are all missing the word “Israel.” Amazingly, they blame the Palestinian Authority for what every Palestinian (and few Westerners) know: that the government of Mahmoud Abbas has been systematically oppressing Gazans for well over a year now — largely for political ends.

Last week, the NGO issued a statement saying,

The Palestinian Authority has taken punitive measures against its employees in the Gaza Strip, which accounted for a 30% to 60% reduction of their salaries since April 2017, in the context of pressure on Hamas to resolve the administrative situation of the sector and enable the government to exercise its functions. These measures have affected all aspects of life in the sector, especially after imposing more penalties and wage cuts, and the transfer of a large number of employees to forced retirement, exacerbating the humanitarian crisis to the detriment of the citizens’ decent living.

Moreover, the group started a social media campaign “#ارفعوا_العقوبات” — Lift the Sanctions — directed not at Israel but at the PA.

Graphics have been published for a rally that was planned for last Sunday in Ramallah to protest the PA’s treatment of Gaza. (I have not seen any news articles about such a rally, which was to be held at Manara Square. If it did occur, the PA-run media would not have covered it.)

It is difficult to know if this kind of activism has an impact on the PA, but one thing is certain: despite more than a year of the PA restricting electricity, fuel, medicine, exit permits, and more from Gazans, the Western media and most NGOs will continue to only blame Israel.

Elder of Ziyon has been blogging about Israel and the Arab world for a really long time now. He also controls the world, but deep down you already knew that.