Memorandum submitted by the TaxPayers'
Alliance
1. At the TaxPayers' Alliance we have recently
been investigating the effects of British aid to the Palestinian
territories. The TaxPayers' Alliance is Britain's independent,
grassroots campaign for better value for taxpayers' money. Our
interest in this issue is to ensure that British taxpayers' money
makes an effective contribution to legitimate goals overseas and
is not used wastefully or counterproductively.
2. Our work should be particularly relevant
to two of the subjects you wish to address in your forthcoming
inquiry: the contribution of the Department for International
Development and the impact of restarting direct aid to the Palestinian
Authority. There are three points we wish to make:
— British aid money facilitates radicalisation
of the Palestinian population by their leadership.
— Existing checks are a flawed means
of addressing the problem.
— A new approach can allow British
aid to the Palestinian territories to make a better contribution
to a lasting peace in the region.
3. We identify two principle ways in which
the Palestinian Authority is contributing to radicalisation: through
the education system and television broadcasts.
4. The Palestinian Education system still
works with material containing extreme statements. Assurances
from the EU Heads of Department that the problem was dealt with
early this decade do not stand up to scrutiny. The textbook "Reading
and Texts" states "O heroes, Allah has promised you
victory . . . Do not talk yourselves into flight . . . Your enemies
seek life while you seek death. They seek spoils to fill their
empty stomachs while you seeks a Garden [Paradise] as wide as
are the heavens and the earth . . . death is not bitter in the
mouth of the believers. These drops of blood that gush from your
bodies will be transformed tomorrow into blazing red meteors that
will fall down upon the heads of your enemies" (page 16).
Another textbook "History of the Arabs and the World in the
20th century" states "The U.S. and Britain . . . stormed
Iraqi cities with the participation of military forces from different
countries and Baghdad fell. The Iraqis did not surrender to this
occupation but succeeded in organizing themselves and a brave
resistance to liberate Iraq began" (page 147). Both of these
examples are taken from books in use within the Palestinian Education
system (with the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Education logo
on the front) this year.
5. Television broadcasts also contain frequent
extremist messages. Some examples include a programme on the 12th
of February 2007 that said "Mohammed said in his Hadith:
`The Hour [Resurrection] will not arrive until you fight the Jews,
and the rock and the tree will say: Oh Muslim, servant of Allah,
there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!'". Another programme,
on 10 November 2006 stated "We want to kill the Jews and
that they should kill us. If they kill us, the Garden [Paradise]
is ours, please God. If we kill them, Paradise is ours".
On 28 November 2007, the day after the Palestinian Authority leadership
pledged to negotiate towards a peaceful settlement at Annapolis,
Palestinian Authority television displayed a map of Israel covered
by a Palestinian flag.
6. British aid money contributes to the
Palestinian Authority aid budget in two key ways. Directly, through
the resumed direct aid and indirectly, through the Temporary International
Mechanism—to be replaced by the new PEGASE programme—that
supports specific humanitarian and development objectives. Indirect
aid invariably makes an effective contribution to the Palestinian
Authority budget by removing the need to pay for one item, freeing
resources for spending on other priorities.
7. Also, the Temporary International Mechanism
is designed to support "the basic needs of the Palestinian
people including health, education, social affairs, fuel and utilities".
This means that there is a particular link between international
aid and the Palestinian education system and, therefore, a particular
duty to ensure that education system is not a radicalising force.
Whether it buys textbooks or pays teachers salaries is largely
immaterial when it is the system that is radicalising.
8. Existing checks are based around trying
to ensure that the particular money provided by British taxpayers
is not spent on radical materials, violence and other things that
we do not wish to support. This is too narrow an approach as it
does not provide for the ways in which spending on certain items
affects others; how aid from Britain can free up Palestinian Authority
resources and assist a radicalised education system.
9. A better model is provided by the Quartet
Principles. They provide a set of standards that we expect and
will pressure the Palestinian Authority to conform to instead
of precisely controlling how aid is spent. The acceptance of the
Quartet Principles by the Palestinian Authority shows that such
an approach can yield results.
10. The problem is that the Quartet Principles
are too focussed on how the Palestinian Authority itself behaves
towards the outside world and not the attitudes it inculcates
in the Palestinian population. We need to broaden our understanding
of what we require from the Palestinian Authority in order to
establish a lasting peace.
11. There is a clear precedent for the kind
of programme we might wish to see put in place in Northern Ireland
where the Government introduced, in 1989, a programme called Education
for Mutual Understanding. The objectives of that scheme were that
it should enable pupils: "to learn to respect and value themselves
and others; to appreciate the interdependence of people within
society; to know about and understand what is shared as well as
what is different about their cultural traditions; and to appreciate
how conflict may be handled in non-violent ways". An investigation
for the University of Ulster, while conceding that success in
such a field is hard to measure, argued that there is "evidence
to suggest that government support for Education for Mutual Understanding,
along with a range of other community relations initiatives, has
helped change the discourse in Northern Ireland by introducing
a language which allows people to express their support for cultural
pluralism and political dialogue rather than sectarianism and
political violence".
12. If our donations can encourage principles
like those of Education for Mutual Understanding to be put at
the heart of the Palestinian Authority's engagement with its people,
to replace the hate education we see today, then British taxpayers
might be getting rather better value for their money.
| 
