Administration weighs aid approach

WASHINGTON, March 17 (JTA)— With the prospect looming of a terrorist-ruled enclave on Israel’s doorstep, the Bush administration is weighing how to isolate the terrorists — without hurting the Palestinians who voted them into power. Administration officials are pushing hard against proposed congressional legislation, strongly favored by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, that would profoundly change the way the United States assists the Palestinians. The officials say a humanitarian crisis is likely once the aid flow stops. A World Bank report published Wednesday envisions 47 percent unemployment and 74 percent poverty in the West Bank and Gaza Strip by 2008 if aid restrictions described in the legislation are imposed. Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. secretary of state, said the United States would forestall such a scenario. “We’re committed to the well-being of the Palestinian people,” she said Wednesday in Indonesia, where she was on a state visit. “We will continue humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people, to Palestinian refugees, to food assistance where it’s needed, to the health and well-being of Palestinian children and families.” The legislation also could cripple attempts to maintain the current lull in violence, officials said. In testimony Wednesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Gen. Keith Dayton, the U.S. security envoy to the Palestinians, pleaded with senators not to tie his hands. “The less restrictive that the legislature can be on our activities, the more flexibility it will give me as a military man to deal with situations that are inevitably very chaotic and unexpected,” Dayton said. It was highly unusual for a military figure to explicitly oppose legislation. Like every other Western official who deals with the Palestinians, Dayton was emphatic about the need to cut off Hamas, the terrorist group that won a landslide election in Jan. 25 elections. Hamas has yet to assume power. Western nations and Israel have said Hamas will remain a pariah until it recognizes Israel and renounces terrorism, which no one expects to happen soon. Proposed legislation in both houses of Congress would ban assistance not just to Hamas, but to anyone associated with a Palestinian Authority run by Hamas. Furthermore, it would set unprecedented markers for the P.A.’s return to the United States’ good graces, no matter who’s in charge in Ramallah. Some have advocated maintaining aid but channeling it through relative moderates in the Palestinian Authority, such as P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas, who is from the Fatah Party. Speaking on background, backers of the House bill in Congress and in the pro-Israel community are concerned that such an approach would only bolster Hamas by freeing it from the business of government and allowing the terrorists to focus on arming. It also would undercut the intention of the sanctions, which is to show the Palestinians the dire impact of having a government run by a terrorist group. Still, some senators worried that abandoning the Palestinian Authority could have dire consequences. “A diminishment of aid from the West could further radicalize the Palestinian people or expand the influence of Iran and Syria,” considered by the United States to be rogue states, Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said in prepared remarks. Proponents of the bills say they provide for humanitarian aid, but aid providers say the exceptions the president would have to seek from Congress would crimp such assistance. James Wolfensohn, the former World Bank president who is now the envoy for the diplomatic Quartet — the grouping of the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia that is guiding the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — said the legislation would hamper efforts to circumvent Hamas. “Some of the recommendations would make it difficult for some of the alternatives that we’re looking at because they would not meet rigidly the requirements of that legislation,” he told the Senate committee. Additionally, aid officials say the Palestinian Authority cannot be divorced from the delivery of assistance. “The P.A. delivers the vast bulk of public services,” the World Bank report said. “It would be difficult to ramp up emergency/humanitarian assistance levels quickly if humanitarian flows required new verification procedures.” Wolfensohn said donor nations needed to come up with an alternate structure to the Palestinian Authority. That might not be possible in the short time — as little as days — before Hamas takes power. “The notion of trying to re-establish a framework that deals with 4 million-plus people overnight, when you’re given these constraints, is just something that I think may be beyond human capacity,” he said. The Senate version of the bill, sponsored by the majority whip, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), and Sen Joseph Biden (D-Del.), allows Bush the narrow loophole of unfettered dealing with Abbas. The House, traditionally more hawkish on the Palestinians, would ban such a loophole. Yet even there, the bill, sponsored by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) and Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), has run into resistance. Six weeks after its introduction, and 10 days after a lobbying blitz by 5,000 delegates to the AIPAC policy conference, the number of co-sponsors remains stuck at about 150. Once a bill passes the halfway mark of about 220 co-sponsors, its passage becomes inevitable. In an alert sent to supporters Tuesday, AIPAC sounded a note of alarm. “After weeks of lobbying and hundreds of meetings at last week’s policy conference, the House International Relations Committee is scheduled to meet on Wednesday, March 29th to ‘mark up’ this bill,” the alert said in an underlined passage. “Once this occurs, no new co-sponsors can be added.” A “mark up” refers a bill to the full House for passage. The implication was clear: Without a majority co-sponsoring the bill, its passage is not guaranteed. But no mark-up was scheduled for March 29, leaving lawmakers confused: Why was AIPAC telling this to its supporters? It might be an innocent mistake, AIPAC insiders said. Others wondered whether the lobby was lighting a fire under its activists in the face of successful counter-lobbying by groups that oppose the legislation, including Americans for Peace Now and the Israel Policy Forum. “There’s a very active counter-lobbying effort going on,” said a senior staffer in the office of one congressman who strongly backs the bill. APN blitzed the Hill with a bulletin headlined “questions to ask AIPAC,” the first time the dovish group has openly taken on the pro-Israel powerhouse during its policy conference. “Why should Congress change U.S. law, permanently, in a way that weakens and embarrasses our best hope for a future Palestinian partner (people like former Minister of Finance Salam Fayyad, who is now an elected member of the Palestinian Legislative Council), and strengthens extremists?” it asked. Additionally, the staffer said, two critical players appear detached from the legislation: the Republican leadership, and Israel, where officials have hinted that they may seek a bit of flexibility in dealing with relative moderates. “I don’t think there’s been a signal from the Republican leadership that they favor this,” said the staffer, who would not comment on the record on pending legislation. “And there hasn’t been a clear signal from the Israelis.”