Israel passes law cutting funding to PA over its payments to terrorists
The Knesset voted into law on Monday a bill to slash funds to the Palestinian Authority by the amount Ramallah pays out to convicted terrorists and the families of Palestinians killed while carrying out attacks.
The bipartisan law passed by 87 to 15.
The law’s backers said the legislation would send a message to Palestinians that terror does not pay.
“The PA turned itself into a factory that employs murderers [of] Jews mostly but also Muslims, Christians, Druze, Circassians, and others, including tourists,” said co-sponsor MK Avi Dichter (Likud), who leads the Knesset’s influential Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.
He said the law is meant to send a “moral and principled message” that Israel will not assist in sending money to terrorists, as well as cause the PA to rethink its policy of “encouraging terror.”
Yesh Atid MK Elazar Stern, who also cosponsored the law, said similar legislation in the US, known as the Tayor Force Act, had prompted the Israeli bill.
Interview: Taylor Force’s father hopes ‘pay-for-slay’ law will help Palestinians in need
In the two years since his son was killed in a terrorist stabbing spree in the coastal Israeli city of Jaffa, Stuart Force has become a regular traveler from his home town in South Carolina to Washington, DC, where he lobbied US lawmakers to adopt a law limiting aid to Palestinians, until they end stipends for terror convicts and families of slain attackers.
On Monday, three months after the US congress passed the Taylor Force Act into law, Stuart Force traveled for the first time to Israel to see the Knesset pass a similar law to slash funds to the Palestinian Authority by the amount Ramallah pays out to convicted terrorists, a policy nicknamed “pay-for slay.”
Speaking to The Times of Israel ahead of the Monday evening vote, Force said he had made the journey in order to pay back the support he had been shown since the death of his son Taylor.
“The Israeli people have been so supportive of the Taylor Force Act, and it feels right for me to be here and support them,” he said. “It’s going to be very emotional for me to be there during the vote, I’m sure, but I’m glad to be witnessing it. It’s important to our family that I’m here.”
Vanderbilt graduate student Taylor Force was killed Tuesday March 9, 2016, in a terror attack in Jaffa. (Facebook)
An MBA student at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and a West Point graduate, the 29-year-old Taylor Force was visiting Israel in March 2016 when he was stabbed to death by 22-year-old Palestinian Bashar Massalha. Force’s death elicited a passionate response from US lawmakers, who, in response, took up the hot-button issue of PA funding to Palestinian terrorists.
We just voted and passed the Israeli version of the Taylor Force Bill which cuts funding that the Palestinians use to pay terrorists for their crimes. Before the vote I met Taylor’s father and thanked him for his strength and for everything he has done to honor his son’s memory. pic.twitter.com/y7YvoH2stx
— יאיר לפיד Yair Lapid (@yairlapid) July 2, 2018
‘Black Forest,’ a chilling post-terror attack manhunt, gets English premiere
Kay Wilson was certain she was going to die.
The extraordinary story of how Wilson survived a brutal 2010 attack in which her friend was murdered is the subject of the Israeli television documentary “Black Forest.”
The Times of Israel and Beit Avi Chai will host the English premiere of “Black Forest” along with IsraelB on Monday, July 9 at 7:00 p.m.
Following the screening, Wilson will share her experiences in a live interview with journalist Matthew Kalman. Also present will be the filmmakers, police detectives involved in the post-attack investigation, and family members of other victims.
‘I believed him’
“Bound, gagged and barefoot, with machetes at our throats, we were pushed through the trees to the site of our execution,” Wilson recalls in a blog post for The Times of Israel. “I whimpered, ‘Please don’t kill us.’ One of the terrorists looked me in the eye, put his hand on his heart and declared, ‘I am good, I not kill.’”
“I believed him,” she says.
But she was wrong.
It was December 2010. Wilson and her friend Kristine Luken were walking through a picturesque forest southwest of Jerusalem, a popular site for hikes and picnics, when they were attacked by two men from a West Bank village near Hebron.
Kay Wilson, survivor of a 2010 stabbing terror attack outside Jerusalem. (Courtesy)
Within minutes Luken lay dead, hacked to pieces in a killing frenzy. Wilson should have died, too.