PLO op-ed: Israel, USA and Europe are blackmailing PA
Excerpt of an op-ed by former Director of PLO Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs Issa Karake
“The latest Zionist threat to the banks that are active in Palestine of arrests and being put on trial due to the opening of accounts for prisoners, Martyrs’ [families], and wounded (refers to the application of much of Israel's Anti-Terror Law to the West Bank, including rendering banks liable to punishment for facilitating PA terror salaries -Ed.)… comes after the occupation authorities’ pressures have not succeeded throughout all the recent years in causing the Palestinian leadership to abandon the prisoners, Martyrs, and wounded on the pretext of support for terror, and after [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas emphasized many, many times that the prisoners, Martyrs, and wounded are the most precious thing to us, and that any amount that is in our hands will be allocated for them…
The goal that Israel, the US, and Europe are seeking to achieve through this blackmail and through the pressures on the PA and the banks is not monetary; the goal is to put the entire Palestinian national struggle under the category of terror and crime, [and to claim] that the Palestinian resistance to the occupation – which is represented by the prisoners, Martyrs, and wounded – has become illegitimate, and that its legal and human foundations and international legitimacy – which has allowed every occupied people to resist the occupation for its freedom and dignity – have been revoked from it…
The interference began with the Israeli calls to disband UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) and erase the cause of the [Palestinian] refugees. The interference reached the Palestinian schoolbooks and the transparent policy of stealing, thieving, and pilfering everything in the Palestinians’ lives: stealing the water, the [freedom of] movement, the air, the freedom of knowledge, the land, and the trees, stealing the prisoners’ money in the Israeli military courts and collecting millions in fines and the policy of compensation (i.e., of terror victims -Ed.). In the Zionist period, the victim pays compensation to the murderer and the executioner…
The Palestinian people is dealing with a state of gangs and lowly people, who our poet Mahmoud Darwish already warned when he said: ‘I do not steal from anyone, But if I starve I will eat my oppressors' flesh; Beware, beware of my starving, And my rage.’”
Application of Israel's Anti-Terror Law to the West Bank