A New York City-based federal jury on Feb. 23 ordered the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority to pay $218.5 million in reparations to American citizens who were targeted by terror attacks in Jerusalem, and to the victims’ families.
“This is a significant ruling because the jury has discarded the long-held fiction that the Palestinians are not responsible for their actions,” said Stephen M. Flatow, a New Jersey attorney and father of Alisa Flatow, who was killled by the Palestinian terrorist group Islamic Jihad in 1995.
The court ruled in favor of 10 American families who sued the PLO and PA for six different terrorist attacks linked to those groups during the second Palestinian intifada. Thirty-three people were killed in those attacks between 2002 and 2004, and 450 were injured. Since the lawsuit was filed in a U.S. court under the Anti-Terrorism Act, the reparation amount is expected to triple to $655.5 million.
Among the families involved in the landmark ruling were representatives of four victims of a Hebrew University cafeteria attack in 2002, in addition to Palestinian shooting attacks and suicide bombings in Jerusalem.
The plaintiffs won the case after a 10-year legal battle in which the defense claimed that the PLO and the PA were not directly responsible for the attacks, which were carried out by the al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade and Hamas. Defense lawyers said the groups had condemned terror attacks and that any payments made to terrorists were done by low-level employees acting independently.
The PLO and the PA pledged to appeal, and they accused Israel’s supporters of manipulating the judicial system to political ends — the same way Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others have characterized Palestinian moves at the International Criminal Court.
Mahmoud Khalifa, the PA’s deputy information minister, told the Financial Times that the verdict was “just the latest attempt by hard-line anti-peace factions in Israel to use and abuse the U.S. legal system to advance their narrow political and ideological agenda.”
The verdict is likely to bolster Israel’s longstanding claim that Palestinian factions such as Mahmoud Abbas’ PA — which many in the West consider to be more moderate than Hamas — support terrorism.
“The PA and the PLO and the Fatah faction were all involved in terrorism during the second intifada,” said Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former terrorism finance analyst at the Department of the Treasury. “Abbas reined in those groups and has done a reasonably good job of preventing their resurgence. But the sins of his predecessor, Yasser Arafat, continue to haunt him. And now it looks as if it will cost him as well.”
The ruling comes as the PA finds itself under severe financial strain. Israel is withholding the transfer of tax revenue it collects for the PA, in response to Abbas’ successful gaining membership in the ICC as a mechanism to bring war crimes charges against Israel. U.S. lawmakers are also advocating for the suspension of aid to the PA over to the ICC move.
The Feb. 23 ruling “delivers a financial blow to the Palestinian Authority at a time when they are already cash-strapped,” Schanzer said.
Jewish organizations were quick to praise the federal jury’s decision.
“This verdict sends a clear message that inciting terrorism, supporting terrorism and celebrating terrorism cannot and will not be tolerated, and that those responsible for perpetrating acts of terror will be held responsible and forced to pay a heavy price,” the National Council of Young Israel said in a statement.
“Perpetrators of terrorism and their sponsors must be held accountable,” said David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee. “Though the legal process took a long time, the victims’ families have finally seen justice in the admirable, reasoned decision of the jury in a federal court in New York.”
“Now the PLO and the PA know there is a price for supporting terrorism,” said Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, a lawyer for the plaintiffs and the head of Shurat HaDin, Israel Law Center.
While it may be too early to know the significance of the ruling for the U.S.-Palestinian funding relationship, the decision’s practical impact for families of the victims of Palestinian terror is clear.
“While no amount of money will ever bring back the murdered children, fathers, mothers and loved ones, or adequately compensate the survivors, the jury’s message was clear: Terrorism has a price, and the terrorists and their sponsors must pay for it — not with lip service, but in hard, cold cash,” Flatow said.
JTA contributed to this report.