PrintMay 10, 2005
Subsidizing Palestinians
The Los Angeles Times endorses a recent Rand Corporation analysis calling for $33 billion in international aid for the Palestinians over ten years, to build or rebuild their society. The history of providing money to the Palestinian Authority since Olso is that the money came and went, and no new job creating infrastructure appeared as a result.
The money was used for beachfront villas, deposits to personal foreign bank accounts, luxury cars (several hundred foreign cars were just ordered by the PA), weapons, and salaries for the tens of thousands of gunmen and militia members (security forces, as they are called). In a functioning civil society, where there is some history of productive work effort and economic development in the past, huge infusions of cash can make a substantive economic difference: think Japan and Germany after World War II. But those nations first had to defeated in war and their aggressive intentions crushed. Under military occupation, they embarked on a...(Read Full Article)
