But you'll never guess who they say is to blame for that.
The article on the negative effect that NGOs have on Palestinian society that I've noted in the past couple of days, written for an Islamic Jihad newspaper, adds a very Palestinian twist:
The role of the Palestinian Authority in the field of security coordination and economic policies, as well as harsh Israeli measures, are usually used to understand the low frequency of confrontations in the occupied West Bank. However, the issue of foreign-funded institutions (NGOs), which have been deployed in the Palestinian areas since the beginning of the 1990s is no less a dangerous fasctor. Although it represents a source of income for thousands of Palestinians, in light of unemployment and poor economic conditions, these NGOs are subject to the conditions of the foreign financier, including the signing of a "document of renunciation of resistance and non-incitement" or rejection of "anti-Israel" activities.They are saying that NGOs, many of whom force their employees to sign an anti-terror and anti-incitement pledge, are the ones who are killing the anti-Israel and anti-US protests!
...Little by little, a large number [of our young people] found themselves involved in these institutions controlled by the foreigner through the terms of funding, which provided the Israeli enemy with great services, which is to neutralize large numbers of young people from the arena of conflict with him, and their preoccupation with these projects. As a result, there is... a great void and a rift between the factions and the Palestinian society.
This is one of the reasons for the weak participation of the youth in the confrontations following the declaration of US President Donald Trump, the decision of the end of last year, despite the state of boiling anger in the street, the confrontations were fairly major for the first two weeks after the announcement, and then gradually began to fade.... According to statistics we obtained, the largest number of "contact points" with the enemy were recorded the first Friday following the decision of Trump, was 78 points of confrontation, and the level of confrontation gradually decreased and never went past 33 points of contact in the best cases since the beginning of this year.
There actually may be something to this.
Fatah has never been able to mobilize the kinds of mass rallies that Islamic Jihad and Hamas have, mostly because Fatah doesn't excite people so much to action, and Palestinian Arabs tend to be more energetic towards explicitly pro-violence messages.
But the danger of losing one's job for participating in these protests with rocks and firebombs is definitely something that will dissuade the employees of American and European NGOs. Remember that when I and UN Watch publicized UNRWA workers' pro-terror Facebook postings, UNRWA threatened the jobs of anyone who embarrassed them this way - and the postings have all but ended.
The NGOs employ tens of thousands, which is only a small percentage of the workforce, but part of the article is showing that youths would rather work for these NGOs - with relatively high salaries in a scarce job market - than join terror organizations like Islamic Jihad. In that narrow sense, these NGOs helping to move the anti-Israel protests from the violent to the political, because these NGOs are invariably anti-Israel and nearly their entire output is anti-Israel reports, some of which make it into the mainstream media and official UN and EU reports.
Palestinian Arabs would be far better served with jobs that actually contributed something to their society. NGO jobs do not give the same sense of pride that one gets from manufacturing or computer programming.
But in the medium term, the desire to make money is a huge incentive in how Palestinians act.
Which is the major reason why the PLO pays salaries to terrorists and their families.