By Maurice Hirsch, Palestinian Media Watch—
In August 2019, Palestinian terrorists detonated a bomb at a water spring, murdering 17-year-old Rina Schnerb and seriously injuring her father and brother. The investigation of the attack led to the arrest of dozens of terrorists from the internationally designated terror organization the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Four of the six main terrorists arrested were not only members of the PFLP, but were also central figures in Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that were the recipients of substantial aid from the European Union.
While the EU denied the possibility that EU aid given to the NGOs in which the terrorists worked had actually funded the attack, the EU announced after the murder that it had added a new condition to its “General Conditions” form for NGOs requesting support. According to the new requirement, all NGOs must now commit to preventing EU money going from them to any potential beneficiary on the EU’s restrictive measures list – i.e. EU designated terror groups:
“1.5 bis. Grant beneficiaries and contractors must ensure that there is no detection of subcontractors, natural persons, including participants to workshops and/or trainings and recipients of financial support to third parties, in the lists of EU restrictive measures.”
While the EU as a whole took steps to ensure that its aid to NGOs does not fund Palestinian terror, the Palestinian Coordination Committee of the National Campaign Against Conditional Funding has announced that Spain, France and Ireland have agreed to continue funding to Palestinian NGOs, even in the absence of any assurance that their aid is not funneled through the recipient Palestinian NGOs to terror organizations actively involved in murdering Israelis.
At a recent meeting, the Coordination Committee announced the success of a number of member organizations to receive unrestricted financing from France, Spain and Ireland:
“In this context, many positive indications and achievements recorded by the campaign were noted. One of the most important of them was the success of a number of the organizations that are members of the campaign in negotiating with three funders (France, Spain, and Ireland) on the conditions that appear in their contracts, which were replaced with contracts that do not harm the Palestinian national right. In this way the campaign proved the civil society organizations’ ability to reject all the political conditions on the funding. It called to unite the Palestinian institutions’ efforts on the basis of refusing to make any concessions, and to begin dialogue with the funders in order to cancel the political conditions on the funding. Continue Reading….