Dichter to PM: Enforcing law against PA ‘pay for slay’ not optional
Bennett: "You say you want to fight terrorism. The best way to do it is to dry it out and take away its money."
By YONAH JEREMY BOB, LAHAV HARKOVMoney for terror. (photo credit: POLICE SPOKESPERSON'S UNIT)
Likud MK Avi Dichter on Wednesday blasted his own government’s decision to ignore its own law that when it transfers funds to the Palestinian Authority, it must reduce the amount transferred by amounts the PA uses as “pay for slay” money.Under the PA’s long controversial “pay for slay” program, for decades it has paid funds to terrorists in Israeli prisons or to families of terrorists who were killed while carrying out an attack either as a reward or to maintain the loyalty of Palestinians “resisting” Israel.With profound cognitive dissonance, the PA has maintained this policy at the same time as it has avoided directly engaging in violence with Israel and claiming it is different from Hamas since it embraces nonviolence.Speaking to KAN radio, Dichter said, “the message from this decision is bad... The law is not a [mere] recommendation, not for the prime minister and not for anyone else.”He added, “In order to avoid offsetting, one would need to amend the law – I find it hard to believe there will be a situation where the law would be changed.”“Funds for terrorists are fuel for the terrorist machine against Israel. The war on finance is a war on terror,” said Dichter.The Prime Minister’s Office responded, “The delay in offsetting terrorists’ salaries did not come from a change in approach. We will act in accordance with the law.”However, the PMO did not explicitly go into why it had ignored the law, what legal basis it had for doing so or when it would return into compliance with the law.Before the law passed, the Defense Ministry under then-minister Avigdor Liberman sought to have the deduction be optional, but Dichter and the bill’s co-sponsor, Yesh Atid MK Elazar Stern, fought to make it a requirement.Since the law went into effect in 2018, Israel has offset NIS 700 million from what it transferred to the PA against the PA’s “pay for slay” funds.However, when the coronavirus pandemic hit and caused a global and local economic crisis, Israel started transferring the PA the full funds with no offset and even arranged an additional loan of NIS 800 million last month.Dichter’s attack on the government, and even on the prime minister, come a day after the PA Prisoner’s Authority director Kadri Abu Bachar confirmed that for three months, Israel has transferred the full funds to the PA that were expected, with no offset in connection with the “pay for slay” issue.Abu Bachar also said that it was not clear if Israel would continue to fully transfer funds in May and beyond or start to offset the funds transfers.The PA has been adamant that it will not stop paying “pay for slay” even if Israel offsets portions of the funds transfers which the PA is due as part of the Oslo Accords arrangement in which Israel collects customs taxes on its behalf.According to the PA, the funds are not to support terrorism, but to support families who have lost their primary income-earner by no fault of their own. There are also implications that the PA worries that it could lose some of its citizens’ loyalties to Hamas if it did not pay.The PA also has announced a plan to establish a new private bank to be used expressly for “pay for slay” fund transfers in order to insulate other Palestinian banks from Israeli or international sanctions targeted at banks which support terror financing.KAN said that on a technical level, the failure to do the offset can be “blamed” on the absence of a report by Naftali Bennett (who recently stepped down as defense minister) on the matter. The report was supposed to quantify the PA’s recent “pay for slay” practices in recent months in order to determine how much to offset.However, Bennett said he did what the law required of him and prepared the report.Bennett said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu never convened the necessary Security Cabinet meeting on the matter.“You say you want to fight terrorism. The best way to do it is to dry it out and take away its money,” Bennett said.
