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Why I’m Suing the Palestinian Authority
By: Rabbi Leo Dee
On the 6th April 2023, CNN’s headline read, “Israeli police storm Al-Aqsa Mosque”, referring to the IDF operation to disarm the terrorists that were storing weapons in that holy building. The following day, the next Palestinian operation to obliterate all Jews from Israel and beyond, began with the murder of my wife Lucy and daughters, Maia and Rina, in a terror attack in the Jordan Valley. This was the beginning of the Arab war against the Jewish people that would later be named by them “The Al-Aqsa Storm”.
The Hamas terrorists that gunned down these three beautiful, kind women in the prime of their lives, would later be eliminated by the IDF, but their families continue to receive thousands of dollars per month in compensation from the Palestinian Authority, the ruling government of the Arabs living in Judea and Samaria. We have been led to believe that Hamas is the main extreme Palestinian political and military force and that it operates exclusively in Gaza. This is not the full picture. In fact, the “Pay for Slay” Martyrs Fund that compensates terrorists’ spouses and children to the tune of over $350 million per year (using UK, US and European tax-payers money) is funded by the Palestinian Authority – the supposedly democratically elected organization that is recognized as governing areas of the West Bank including in Ramallah, Bethlehem and Jericho.
For thirty years, since Yasser Arafat took power in 1994, the Palestinian Authority (previously known as the PLO) has been supporting terror against innocent Jews around the world. The PA has received international aid to the tune of $40 billion over this time, with around 20% of this money directly funding their “Foundation for the Care of the Families of Martyrs” – the largest terrorist incentive scheme in the world. (Another portion funds terror training of Palestinian youth in UNRWA schools throughout the region.)
Approximately 33% of the aid given to the Palestinian Authority is donated by European governments, and over 15% comes from the US government. In 2023 alone, the UK donated over £100 million to support this terror funding scheme and its collaborators.
It is bizarre that taxpayers in democratic Western countries do not seem to care how their international aid money is spent, but I have discovered that there is a limit to who they will pay. A few months after our tragedy, I spoke to the British Ambassador in Tel Aviv and asked whether my family would be eligible for any compensation from the British “Terror Victim Aid Fund”. The answer was a resounding “No”, based on the fact that we had lived outside the UK for more than five years. Apparently, whilst happily funding foreign terrorists, the British taxpayer’s generosity stops short at compensating British victims of that same terrorism.
In order to wage my small war against Palestinian terror, I have chosen to sue the Palestinian Authority for 50 million shekels under a new compensation law that recently passed in Israel. Because Israel withholds millions of shekels of PA money through its collection of sales taxes from Palestinian goods sold on their behalf, this money can be awarded legally as damages to terror victims by any Israeli court. If 1,000 families of terror victims in Israel were to sue the PA, we could collectively bankrupt the Palestinian government and end their terror funding scheme once and for all.
Alongside our agreed goal of destroying Hamas, we need to encourage world governments to stop their funding of Palestinian terrorism through their aid to the Palestinian Authority, and challenge their support of UNRWA.
Rabbi Leo Dee is an educator living in Efrat. His book “Transforming the World: The Jewish Impact on Modernity” was republished in English and Hebrew in memory of his wife Lucy and daughters Maia and Rina, who were murdered by terrorists in April 2023.
