When funding terror is more important than rehabilitating child terrorists
EU funding and the priorities of Palestinian NGOs
While the European Union continues its efforts to support Palestinian society, for at least one Palestinian Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), it would appear that the freedom to funnel EU funds to EU designated terror organizations is more important than rehabilitating Palestinian child terrorists.
As Palestinian Media Watch has conclusively shown, the Palestinian Authority indoctrinates Palestinian children to hate Jews and Israel and to seek Israel's destruction; brainwashes Palestinian children to admire murderers; and weaponizes Palestinian children while promoting their participation in violence. And the brainwashing and indoctrination has proved successful. Thousands of Palestinian children and teens have adopted these views taking an active part in terror, including scores who have attacked Israeli citizens. Some of the brainwashed teens have murdered Israeli civilians.
Hoping to influence, and possibly counter, the brainwashing these child terrorists have undergone, the European Union funds a number of programs designed to assist these kids.
According to the EU’s Financial Transparency System (FTS), one of the recipients of considerable EU funding in 2017 - 2019 was the Palestine section of Defense of the Child International (DCI-P). In one instance, DCI-P was one of four Palestinian NGOs that shared an EU grant of €981,298. In 2019, DCI-P was the sole recipient of a €732,477 EU grant.
However, for financial year 2020, the EU added an elementary anti-terror precondition to all of its external NGO funding. In order to be eligible for funding, the grant beneficiaries are now required to ensure that EU funding does not pass through them to EU designated terror organizations:
“1.5 bis. Grant beneficiaries and contractors must ensure that there is no detection of subcontractors, natural persons, including participants to workshops and/or trainings and recipients of financial support to third parties, in the lists of EU restrictive measures.”
While one would assume that any branch of Defense of the Child International would easily be able to commit that no funds it receives, irrespective of the donor, would ever find their way into the hands of designated terror organizations, for DCI-P this is not the case.
Incredibly, DCI-P Director Khaled Quzmar said that his organization had rejected the EU funding, rather than accept the EU condition not to pass money on to designated terror organizations, which he called a “political condition.” Clearly, DCI-P is prioritizing terror over rehabilitating children.
Attacking the administrative process by which the EU decides which organizations to designate as terror organizations, which is similar in nature to the practices of most countries in the world, Quzmar irrationally argued:
“There is no problem in dealing with any condition that is consistent with the law, but before any Palestinian or international institution or organization is put on the terror list there must be a fair trial… We think that no fair trial was held before [formulating] the European terror lists. On the contrary, they are the result of a political decision as part of the Israeli pressure on the EU.’
[Anadolu, Turkish state-run news agency, Sept. 22, 2020]
The Palestinian organizations that Quzmar apparently believes were designated as terror organizations without sufficient justification, include:
- The Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades - Fatah’s military wing responsible for the commission of hundreds of terror attacks that claimed the lives of hundreds of Israelis;
- Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) - a homicidal Islamic fundamentalist group whose only purpose is to carry out acts of terror. PIJ is also responsible for hundreds of terror attacks that have claimed the lives of scores of innocent people.
- Hamas - A homicidal Islamic fundamentalist group committed to the use of violence to bring about the destruction of Israel. Hamas is also responsible for hundreds of terror attacks that have claimed the lives of hundreds of innocent people.
- The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) - A communist group that has been involved in terror attacks for over five decades. Most recently, PFLP terrorists carried out the bombing attack in which 17 year-old Rina Schnerb was murdered, and her brother and father were seriously wounded.
Clearly, Quzmar, who presents himself as a human rights activist who runs the local branch of an international NGO that is meant to be devoted to the best interests of children, and which is the recipient of millions of dollars of donations, does not believe that groups who target and murder Israelis including civilians, in systematic terror campaigns, should be designated as terror organizations.
For years, Quzmar and DCI-P have been lying about the Israeli law enforcement to the EU. His argument is that Israel’s arrest and prosecution of the PA’s child terrorists is an inherent breach of their rights. Such child terrorists include murderers such as Hakim Awad, 17, who murdered five members of the Fogel family; Morad A-Dayis, 16, who murdered Israeli nurse Dafna Meir; Khalil Jabarin, 16, who murdered Ari Fuld; and many others.
The EU, which appears to have been all too willing to believe the lies, has provided Quzmar and DCI-P with hundreds of thousands of euros to “rehabilitate” the child terrorists and provide protection against the “rights violations”.
When accepting these lies, perhaps the EU missed the interview with the DCI-P Accountability Program Director, Ayed Abu Qteish, on official PA TV, in which he explained that many of the child terrorists carry out their attacks due to social pressure:
Ayed Abu Qteish: "There are children who, when they were in prison, told the lawyer: 'I want to be imprisoned.' The first time [the child] was imprisoned, he didn't confess, and they released him because there was no evidence to convict him in the Israeli military court. The second time, there was no evidence either. The third time, he wanted to be imprisoned so that his image won't be hurt in the eyes of his friends, even though he is actually innocent... In several cases [Palestinian children] carried out stabbing operations because of the way the public looks at them. They realized 'the best way to clear myself of this image [of helping Israel] is to participate in resistance operations.'"
[Official PA TV, Personal Encounter, Oct. 11, 2017]
When allocating funding, the EU also appears to have missed the alleged ties between DCI-P and the internationally recognized terror organization the PFLP. Among the numerous other signs, the EU appears to have missed the fact that one of DCI-P’s field workers, Hashem Abu Maria simultaneously “served as the coordinator of DCI-Palestine’s community mobilization unit” while also acting as a “leader,” in the PFLP, as NGO Monitor has documented.
While Quzmar claims that the EU procedures for the proscription of terror organizations are the basis of his refusal to receive EU donations, there are two other possible explanations. The first, is the close association of DCI-P with the EU designated PFLP terror group. Accepting the EU condition would mean that DCI-P accepts that its murderous associate organization, and other organizations such as Hamas and PIJ, are indeed terror organizations and that DCI-P is prohibited from funding them. The second possibility is DCI-P’s desire to avoid persecution and prosecution at the hands of the PA.
While the new EU clause simply prohibits NGO’s who receive EU aid from funding EU designated terror organizations, the PA has a different approach. Referring to the new EU funding clause, the PA Head of the Commission for Non-Governmental Organizations, Sultan Abu Al-Einein, declared that agreement to the condition would “violate the principles of the Palestinian people” and would not "go unpunished".
“Some countries or international institutions are in intensive contact with [Palestinian organizations carrying out] non-governmental activities, in order to [make] them sign documents that may violate the principles of the Palestinian people, in exchange for funding their social and cultural programs and activities…
Abu Al-Einein again warned that consent to such funding is a betrayal of the homeland and a deviation from the national line, something that will not go unpunished. He stressed that the relevant parties will work to persecute these organizations on legal and national level, and to expose those who head them to the Palestinian public, which unites around its national principles.”[WAFA, the official PA news agency, Oct. 12, 2020]
The PA sees, the internationally designated terror groups, as legitimate Palestinian factions who have an inherent right to receive EU funding. In the eyes of the PA, the rights of these terror organizations to use international funding to further their terror goals, even outweigh the desire of the EU to help better Palestinian civil society.
Whatever his reasons may be, Quzmar and DCI-P’s refusal to commit to a simple and elementary anti-terror funding requirement - which should be an obvious and simple requirement for any NGO, and particularly for an NGO that deals with children - should sound all types of alarm bells in the EU. In order to ensure that EU funding does not end up in the coffers of EU designated terror organizations, the EU should meticulously implement its new funding condition.
The following is a longer excerpt of the interview with Quzmar and the statements by Abu Al-Einein:
Headline: “A Palestinian organization: Donors are excluding children released [from prison] from their projects”
“The Palestinian [PA-funded] Prisoners’ Club said on Tuesday [Sept. 22, 2020] that donors have pulled their funding for initiatives to rehabilitate children who were released from the Israeli prison…
It referred to the new trend of some of the donors: Demanding to consider a number of the Palestinian factions as illegal due to them being ‘terrorist entities,’ and this is in the framework of the civil society organizations’ funding contracts.
The club welcomed ‘the position of the organizations that refused to sign the conditional funding contracts,’ but expressed ‘deep concern over the agreement of other Palestinian organizations (whose names it did not mention) [parentheses in source] to sign this condition.’
It should be noted that in December 2019, the European Union (EU) added new clauses to funding agreements for the civil society organizations in 2020. One of them determined that the names of those who appear in any way on the EU’s restrictive measures lists will not benefit [from the funding].
The Prisoners’ Club emphasized that ‘This kind of conditioning by the donors, and especially the Europeans, constitutes a blow to the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, legitimate struggle, establishing political forces, and defending the male and female freedom fighters.’
It called ‘to completely remove this condition from the funding contracts, and not to impose it on the Palestinian organizations.’
The club also called ‘on the organizations that have agreed to the humiliating funding condition to recant,’ and emphasized: ‘The program to rehabilitate released child prisoners must be a matter of pure human rights, which is not subjected to political conditions.’
Director of Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCIP) Khaled Quzmar said that his non-profit organization ‘has already refused to sign on conditional funding for a project for released child prisoners.’
Speaking with [the Turkish state-run news] agency Anadolu, he said: ‘We as an institution refused to cooperate with any political conditions. We are committed to the Palestinian and international laws and procedures, and therefore we have rejected a number of projects.’ …
Quzmar noted that this project, which his organization refused to sign on its conditions, ‘deals with defending Palestinian children who are being held in the Israeli prisons, and taking care of child victims of social violence in the PA.’ …
Quzmar explained: ‘There is no problem in dealing with any condition that is consistent with the law, but before any Palestinian or international institution or organization is put on the terror list there must be a fair trial.’
He added: ‘We think that no fair trial was held before [formulating] the European terror lists. On the contrary, they are the result of a political decision as part of the Israeli pressure on the EU.’
Quzmar noted: ‘Among the Palestinian organizations that appear on the European list are the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades (i.e., Fatah’s military wing) that were dismantled by the Fatah Movement (sic.), and also Islamic Jihad, the Hamas Movement, and the Popular Front [for the Liberation of Palestine] (PFLP).’”[Anadolu, Turkish state-run news agency, Sept. 22, 2020]
Headline: “Abu Al-Einein warns not to agree to conditional funding while aligning with the normalization plans of the occupation”
“The head of the Commission for Non-Governmental Organizations, Sultan Abu Al-Einein, warned the non-governmental sector not to serve as a gateway to normalization or marketing of programs aimed at eliminating our national issue, embodied in the "deal of the century" and the normalization agreements by agreeing to conditional funding or politically oriented programs, whose purpose is to put pressure on our leadership and our people. Abu Al-Einein said that some countries or international institutions are in intensive contact with [Palestinian organizations carrying out] non-governmental activities, in order to [make] them sign documents that may violate the principles of the Palestinian people, in exchange for funding their social and cultural programs and activities…
He said that the consent of some [Palestinian] NGOs to this conditional funding would be a blow to positions that represent [our] resolve that have been declared by the Palestinian leadership…
Abu Al-Einein again warned that consent to such funding is a betrayal of the homeland and a deviation from the national line, something that will not go unpunished. He stressed that the relevant parties will work to persecute these organizations on legal and national level, and to expose those who head them to the Palestinian public, which unites around its national principles.”[WAFA, the official PA news agency, Oct. 12, 2020]