washington | President Bush’s stunning $350 million offer to the Palestinians raises concerns about a U.S. tilt away from Israelis.
His request to Congress for the money in last week’s State of the Union speech — followed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s announcement of an additional $50 million in immediate aid — caught Palestinians, Israelis and pro-Israel groups off-guard. Even the senior officials in the Bush administration who deal with the Middle East were scrambling to figure out how Bush added up the numbers.
Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said Jewish groups would seek assurances that the money would be used strictly for reforms subject to U.S. review and scrutiny, not direct grants to the Palestinian Authority.
“We have to see how they define it,” he said.
One thing was for sure: The money underscores Bush’s commitment to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president elected last month to succeed the late Yasser Arafat.
“The beginnings of reform and democracy in the Palestinian territories are now showing the power of freedom to break old patterns of violence and failure,” Bush said. “The goal of two democratic states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace is within reach — and America will help them achieve that goal.”
An aid breakdown provided by a senior administration official shows $50 million set aside for “bridge building” between Israelis and Palestinians, a euphemism for the high-tech terminals that Israel says will expedite the transportation of Palestinians and goods between Israeli- and Palestinian-controlled areas.
That’s money Israel has been seeking since it ran a test on the terminals late last year and found that they reduced passage to about three minutes.
Palestinians and dovish pro-Israel groups have been worried about the terminals because they fear Israel will use them along its West Bank security barrier, perhaps making it more likely that the barrier will become a permanent border.
“We would be supportive of improving crossing points on the Green Line,” said Lewis Roth, assistant executive director of Americans for Peace Now, referring to the pre-1967 boundary between Israel and the West Bank. “But we would have problems with contributing to the fence in the West Bank.”
American Jewish officials later said they understood the money would be reserved strictly for crossings on the Green Line.
Other projects to be funded, as described by the administration official, sound innocent enough, but could prove worrisome to Israel once further details are announced.
The official said $150 million would go toward home construction for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, expansion of educational opportunities, development of economic infrastructure for a Palestinian state and social services.
Another concern is where the money would come from. The administration official said $200 million — the money that would pay for enhanced checkpoints and infrastructure development — would come in supplemental budget requests for the financial year beginning in October.
An additional $150 million would be in the budget itself, double the $75 million that U.S. administrations began setting aside for the Palestinians each year in the mid-1990s.