The Palestinian Problem Is Dying of Natural Causes
By 2040, the stone-throwing kids of the First Intifada will be close to retirement age, and the gun-toting young men who dominate today's Palestinian employment picture (or those who still are alive) will have families. If they missed out on high-tech jobs, the spillover from the West Bank's economic growth—driven in turn by Israel's economic miracle—will keep them employed in service industries. Absent additional violence, the West Bank will flourish while Egypt and Syria descend into penury and chaos.The UN Agency for Palestinians Is Even Worse Than You Think It Is
There is no urgency to make peace, except in the minds of the Palestinians' present leaders. The world has allowed them to rule a little fiefdom as warlords of private armies, with little accounting for billions in foreign aid, and the opportunity to indulge in a grand ideological tantrum on the tab of Western donors.
The window is closing for radical Islam. That makes the present an exceptionally dangerous period, because the radicals know that it is closing. Contrary to what Obama said on May 22, the radicals understand better than anyone else that time and demographics are against them. The Palestinians of the West Bank are better off than any other Arabs in the region by any tangible measure—health, literacy, higher education, per capital income. They have the good luck to reside next to one of the world's most dynamic economies. In a generation the world may have moved beyond the likes of Mahmoud Abbas. That gives Abbas an incentive to gamble while he still has chips on the table. If the radicals can be contained through the present generation, though, they can be extirpated in the next.
Last month, news broke that the Swiss head of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA)—the organization that caters to Palestinian refugees and their descendants—promoted his mistress so that she could join him on his frequent and expensive travels, which his subordinates complain have kept him away from his duties. His deputy, meanwhile, used her influence to have her husband promoted. While these revelations have been greeted with outrage by some of the European governments that fund UNRWA, Alex Joffe and Asaf Romirowsky argue that these abuses are the natural consequence of what has long been known about the organization:
In the past, UNRWA has . . . employ[ed] Hamas members and us[ed] anti-Semitic textbooks [in its schools]. Rockets have also been found hidden at UNRWA schools on several occasions. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that an organization so corrupt at the bottom is even more corrupt at the top. . . .
One lesson to be learned from this scandal is that funders must demand internal controls, external audits, and public access to information. . . . Scrutiny is also needed on the Palestinian Authority, which uses foreign aid to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in pensions to terrorists and their families.
A second lesson concerns the danger of devoting an international organization to a single population. UNRWA was effectively taken over by Palestinians decades ago. Politicization began at the bottom with school curricula, but crept upward. . . .
This latest scandal is an opportunity for the U.S., together with other angry donors, to demand a phase-out plan for the entire organization. UNRWA’s 30,000 employees could join the Palestinian Authority, which would take over its health, education, and welfare responsibilities like the state it claims to be. UNRWA’s expensive international cadre, including lobbyists in Washington and Geneva, should be disbanded. And Palestinian residents of Arab states . . . should become citizens of those states, as they are in Jordan, or of the Palestinian Authority. If Palestinians truly desire a state, they should join the call for UNRWA’s abolition.
PMW: The PA initiated clashes on the Temple Mount
A guide to the Temple Mount published in 1925 by the Supreme Moslem Council of Mandate Palestine declares that its "identity with Solomon's Temple is beyond dispute." This senior Muslim authority repeated this confirmation of Jewish and Christian traditions in 1950 in a new guide, when Jerusalem and the Temple Mount were then under Jordanian rule. Despite these repeated affirmations by the top Muslim authority of the land, the Palestinian Authority is constantly attempting to rewrite even Muslim tradition, by denying the Jewish nature of the Temple Mount. Accordingly, it refers to visits by Jews to this holy site as "invasions" and calls on Palestinians and the International community to defend the site and prevent its "Judaization." The PA deceptively refers to the entire Temple Mount as the "Al Aqsa Mosque", even though the actual mosque sits on a relatively small area in the south-western corner of the mount.
On Sunday, Israel marked the 9th day of the Jewish month of Av. According to Jewish tradition, on that day both the first and second Temples were destroyed. The same day marked the start of the Moslem Eid Al-Adha [Feast of the Sacrifice]
While some sources have blamed the Sunday clashes on the Jordanians, Palestinian Media Watch can show that it was the PA who was most instrumental in instigating the clashes and ensuing violence.
In an attempt to disrupt Jews' right to access the Mount on Sunday, the PA took a number of steps, including changing the times of the Moslem prayers on the Mount and calling for mosques around Jerusalem to remain closed in order to "recruit" as many people as possible to defend the site against the "invasions."
While the published time schedule for the 5 daily Moslem prayers, set the first prayer time for 04.29, the second (last morning prayer) for 05.56, and the third (first afternoon prayer) for 12.44 on Aug. 9, 2019 the PA appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the Palestinian Territories decided to delay the second morning prayer to 07.30. The goal was to ensure that as many people would be present on the Temple Mount when the Jews were scheduled to start arriving.


















