from Mondoweiss
US President Donald Trump’s Gaza plan has finally surfaced its central contradiction. The so-called “Board of Peace” cannot fund its own reconstruction project, and Washington is now considering asking Israel to redirect part of $5 billion in clearance revenues it has been withholding from the Palestinian Authority (PA) toward the Gaza Strip – money that belongs to Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank, whom the PA nominally represents.
The Trump administration has not formally decided whether to make the request, and as of late May, neither Israel nor the PA had reacted to the idea on the record. Yet the PA may be asked to pay for the reconstruction of Gaza despite not being invited to join the Board of Peace, which treats Gaza as a wholly separate jurisdiction from the West Bank, while the Palestinian population in the West Bank is already living through the deepest fiscal crisis the Authority has faced since its creation, engineered by the very withholding that now serves as a slush fund for an external reconstruction authority.
Ramallah has historically refused any cooptation of its funds, even for purposes that would benefit civilians in Gaza, treating it as a violation of its sovereignty. A PA official has now told reporters that the Authority is reconsidering that position, out of desperation to access even a fragment of its money held by Israel. The coercion, in other words, is already working...
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