Hungry Palestinian Arabs

• How does one reconcile this:

Around 46 per cent of Gaza and West Bank households are "food insecure" or in danger of becoming so, according to a UN report on the impact of conflict and the global boycott of the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority.

The unpublished draft report, the first of its kind since the boycott was imposed when the Hamas government took office last March, says bluntly that the problem "is primarily a function of restricted economic access to food resulting from ongoing political conditions".

With this:

As the United Nations under-secretary general for political affairs reported on the recent anniversary of Hamas' election victory, international aid to the Palestinians increased in 2006 by nearly 10 percent, amounting to a staggering $1.2 billion. Indeed, Palestinians are today the largest per capita recipients of foreign aid in the world.

How can people who are getting more aid that is specifically earmarked for humanitarian issues like food be getting less food?

The unpublished report notes that the food situation has not really changed since the last time they checked, in 2003. Just that since the population is growing, there are more people who have problems getting proper nutrition, but the ratios are roughly the same.

The report links the lack of food to lack of money in the average PalArab household. Yet somehow Hamas and Fatah are finding the money to purchase new weapons and ammunition smuggled in daily from Egypt.

The amount of oversight of the moneys channeled through NGOs and the UN has been reduced sharply since the security situation in the territories (especially Gaza) is so bad.

It seems highly likely that the Fatah and Hamas terrorists have found ways to get part of the $1.2 billion welfare check the world pays the poor, hungry Palestinian Arabs and to use the money for their own purposes.

The irony is that reports like these will be used as instruments to guilt the West into increasing aid - which will end up back in terrorist pockets.

And there will remain unanswered questions:

• Why, in the face of an apparent pressing need for food, is there no major Arab initiative to feed their fellow Arabs? (h/t Yid with Lid)
  
• What responsibility does the PA have for this situation, and how come the world gives them a free pass? To wit:
• The Gaza greenhouses that generated tens of millions in revenue for Israel have been mostly inactive since Israel left, because there is no security.
• Gaza borders the Mediterranean - why hasn't a fishing industry blossomed?
  
• Why aren't there farms growing grain and raising animals that can feed the population? Gaza has plenty of open space, despite how the press spins it.

Palestinian Arab unemployment and economic problems are a direct result of PA policies of terror and corruption. It does not take a rocket scientist to see that fixing those problems will solve the apparent problem of poverty.

The subtext of this report, and others like it, is that Palestinian Arabs have no ability to take care of themselves; that they are unable to restrain their corruption and their seemingly genetic desire to shoot everything that moves. When the international community starts treating Palestinian Arabs like adults who need to solve their own problems without relying on the blank checks that they have received for decades, they will grow up.

There are plenty of genuinely hungry and poor people in this world who truly do not have the ability to improve their own lot. Palestinian Arabs do not fit in that category.