Still think *rump is anything but a sh*t-stirrer meddler where I/P is concerned? Try this:
September 16, 2018
(JTA) — The United States has cut $10 million of foreign aid money that was supporting coexistence programs between Israelis and Palestinians.
It is believed to have been the last remaining U.S. aid for Palestinian civilians.
The cuts were first reported Friday in The New York Times.
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has frozen $25 million in funding to Palestinian hospitals in eastern Jerusalem, halted all funding to the UNRWA,** the United Nations refugee agency that aids Palestinians, and cut more than $200 million for humanitarian and development aid in the West Bank and Gaza.
The portion of the money involving Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip was being redirected to programs between Jewish and Arab Israelis, a U.S. Embassy official told the AFP news agency.
In a statement Friday, the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, said it is “currently unable to engage Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza as a result of the administration’s recent decision on Palestinian assistance.”….
The money already had been budgeted by Congress for allocation in fiscal year 2017, which ends on Sept. 30.✱
The program, known as the Conflict Management and Mitigation Program, receives $26 million annually from Congress and was established in 2004 by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. The other $16 million is spent elsewhere in the world, according to The Times.
“Senator Leahy regards the decision to cut off funding for the West Bank and Gaza as a sign that this White House has failed at diplomacy,” Tim Rieser, foreign policy aide to Leahy, told the newspaper. “This is not a partisan view. It’s the view of those who recognize that you don’t advance the cause of peace by cutting off programs that are designed to promote tolerance, understanding and address shared problems.”
Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East peace negotiator for the United States, slammed the cuts in a tweet.
“[What the] Trump Administration is doing to Israelis and Palestinians is cruel, stupid, and counterproductive,” he wrote. “It’s precisely because there is no peace process that you need these P2P programs.” P2P stands for people to people programs…..
Full text of the news brief here,
In a manner of speaking, successful in the near-or-long-term in any degree and as strangely assorted a meeting of minds as they seem, the independent negotiations among Egypt Hamas/GS, PNA/Fatah/WestBank, Israel, and Qatar etc have managed not just to show but make *rump irrelevant and (forgive the sexism) impotent where I/P issues are concerned — except of course for doing more damage, always his best thing, for the usual reasons: by scrolling down to around August 15-20 alone at the I/P talks diary, one can read there ALREADY that the *rump regime has been calculating its cuts in reaction to bills Qatar in particular commits to covering in order to decrease harsh conditions that are, at base, most of what the conflict is about. It’s as if *rump & co. intend to make absolutely certain that nothing improves in & for Palestine without the Us running the show.
✱ Allocated but NEVER paid out. Across innumerable administrations, Congress has a of “making” allocations it never pays out on, ranging from medical/NIH-etc to infrastructure, and on and on. The practice of allocating serves a huge range of purposes, many of them merely political and manipulative, intended to silence or satisfy various sectors without putting the federal govt under any legal or financial constraint to follow through.
** An indication of rough totals the current & earlier halts, cuts etc, amount to, according to today’s source article:
...the United States released $60 million to UNRWA in January, but withheld another $65 million that it had been pledged to contribute, saying that it expected other countries to donate more in order to prevent the imbalance that made the United States the agency’s single largest donor.
The US donated $370 million to the agency in 2017 and $355 million in 2016 [by comparison].
...“Imbalance” as a euphemism for sustaining the status quo that generates the harsh conditions that fuel rage, hatred, conflict, and violence.
And multimillions of Americans with safe comfortable lives —in global terms, at least— are pleased that *rump ‘saved’ them multimillions of their tax dollars by stopping spending it on inferior foreignors.
And with the mid-term elections coming up.
Surprise…