The scene in Ariel, in the West Bank, after an Israeli security guard was fatally shot in a terror attack. Photo: Reuters

The international community provides hundreds of millions of dollars to the Palestinian people every year, through the Palestinian Authority (PA).

We are constantly told that the Palestinians live in desperate circumstances, while their “oppressors” — Israelis — live lavishly. It may then come as somewhat of a surprise to learn that the PA has been providing aid to Israelis. Well, not all Israelis — just those that try to murder Jews.

As was recently reported, the Palestinian Authority has been rewarding hundreds of Arab Israelis either because they, or a relative of theirs, sought to carry out attacks on Israel. It’s the same “pay-for-slay” system that rewards Palestinian citizens for acts of terrorism.

According to the report:

[The] Israeli citizens receiving the benefits are either serving prison terms for conducting terrorist operations, assisting such operations, or acting against Israel in other ways. In the event that the terrorists were eliminated while conducting terrorist operations, the payments are transferred to their relatives.

So much for the half-hearted attempt at justifying the “pay-for-slay” program as a welfare project.

No logical or legitimate welfare system would prioritize payments for non-citizens who committed acts of terrorism, but provide nothing for actual citizens when a parent dies of cancer. In any event, such “welfare” for non-citizens would be entirely unnecessary. Those Israeli citizens and their relatives would be covered under an actual welfare system, Israel’s National Insurance program.

It’s also worth noting how these payments to Israeli citizens similarly disprove another lame excuse occasionally used for the pay-for-slay program: that it is necessary because, for one alleged reason or another, the Israeli military justice system is unfair. That justice system is inapplicable for most (if not all) of the cases involving Israeli citizens. So the PA is paying murderers who fall under the jurisdiction f Israel’s domestic justice system, not its military one.

Aside from these obvious points, there’s another interesting and ironic aspect to this story that has largely gone unnoticed.

These terror payments are for Arab Israeli citizens who target Jews. Would the PA pay a Jewish Israeli citizen for murdering an Arab Israeli citizen? Would it provide financial rewards for Arab on Arab crime among Arab Israelis? Those are rhetorical questions, of course.

The only common link between those Palestinian citizens and those Israeli citizens who are given financial rewards is that they sought to spill Jewish blood.

Yet ironically, it is the Palestinian leadership and their enablers who falsely accuse Israel of behaving in this exact same discriminatory manner.

Contained in all the recent slanderous reports accusing Israel of “apartheid” are the claims that various Israeli laws discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion. That’s just another anti-Israel lie used to demonize the Jewish state. Yet here we have the PA, which makes a distinction that is clearly not based on citizenship, as are those Israeli laws, but instead on an actual, unjustifiable form of discrimination (the murder of Jews, specifically).

Will Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and United Nations officials — all of whom have decried the imaginary racist distinctions in Israeli law — issue any statements about the PA’s obviously discriminatory distinctions in its institutionalized system of incitement to murder?

Don’t hold your breath. Even if the PA pays a premium for it, in the eyes of the “human rights” industry, Jewish blood is cheap.

David M. Litman is a Research Analyst at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA).