Lt. Col. Maurice Hirsch (res.), an international law expert specializing in the prosecution of terrorists, the Palestinian Authority, and the law as it applies in the West Bank, currently serves as director of the Initiative for Palestinian Authority Accountability at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCSFA). He is also a research fellow at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) and the Israel Defense and Security Forum (IDSF). Hirsch spoke to a September 14 Middle East Forum podcast (video). The following summarizes his comments:
The Oslo Accords, introduced more than three decades ago to bring about peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, are an “absolute colossal failure.” The conflict is not a territorial argument, but “is about a fundamental, idealistic, religiously driven war, a jihad by the Palestinians against the Jewish state.” The 1974 plan of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which predated the Oslo Accords, basically states that any territory the Palestinian Arabs are given is to be used “as a platform to then destroy the State of Israel.”
Post-October 7, there are two primary reasons for the failure of the Oslo Accords. The first is the “pay-for-slay” system under the Palestinian Authority (PA), a.k.a. the Palestinian Authority Martyrs Fund, which “pays hundreds of millions of shekels every single year in rewards to terrorists.”
Post-October 7, there are two primary reasons for the failure of the Oslo Accords. The first is the “pay-for-slay” system under the Palestinian Authority (PA), a.k.a. the Palestinian Authority Martyrs Fund, which “pays hundreds of millions of shekels every single year in rewards to terrorists.” Seven percent of the PA’s entire budget goes towards pay-for-slay. According to the testimonies of jailed terrorists, these prisoners would not have committed terrorist acts without its incentivization.
The pay-for-slay system is invaluable to the PA because global governments “do nothing” despite knowledge of the PA policy for years. Perversely, Canadian and U.K. bureaucrats sanction Israeli government ministers as “fanatics” for favoring Jewish settlements “in our 3,500-year-old ancestral homeland” while turning a blind eye to the PA’s pay-for-slay system and its president, Mahmoud Abbas, “the father of the entire program.”
The second reason for the Oslo Accords’ failure is the PA’s civilian police force, which was meant to number no more than 12,000 in Judea and Samaria and be equipped with no more than 4,000 pistols and 4,000 rifles. Purportedly established to “fight terrorism,” the force has fought neither terrorism nor any of the Palestinian Arab terror groups, including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Instead, the PA force has ballooned to 70,000 with “tens of thousands” more weapons than they were meant to have, including heavier weapons like anti-tank and shoulder-held missiles.
The PA even has a military training center in Jericho, where the U.S. trains their forces, despite America’s adoption in 2018 of the Taylor Force Act, which is intended to stop pay-for-slay. After the introduction of the act, Abbas publicly announced his support for continued payments to prisoners and the families of slain terrorists, even if there was “only a single penny left in its budget.”
Witnessing such brazen disregard for the 2018 U.S. law leads to the realization that the PA forces “are unfortunately being trained for one mission, I believe, and one mission alone. And that is to carry out another October 7, but on a much wider scale.” If Israel does not act soon, the force, which has grown to 10 times the size of the Gazan forces that invaded Israel October 7, can potentially breach all the checkpoints and enter densely populated civilian areas in Israel’s heartland.
Although the PA presents itself in international venues as moderate in contrast to Hamas’s radicalism, the PA considers the October 7 massacre “an extraordinary success.” The Palestinian disinformation campaign spreads the libelous charge of “genocide,” which fuels global vilification of Israel, notwithstanding that the bulk of the Gazans who were killed in the Israel Defense Forces’ counter-attack were terrorists. Disregarding the evidence that counters Palestinian propaganda, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister, and the U.N. adopted multiple resolutions condemning Israel. To this day, the U.N. still “does not define Hamas as a terrorist organization.” Canada, France, and the U.K. recognize “the nonexistent state of Palestine,” while the “useless idiots in England” lead the way for other countries to impose sanctions on products from Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
Countries vilifying Israel message the Palestinian leadership to continue business as usual “under the umbrella [of] ‘Let’s perpetuate the Oslo Accords.’” The Oslo Accords never addressed a two-state solution, “and there is no two-state solution. There’s only a two-state delusion.” The sooner the Oslo Accords are pronounced dead and buried, the better it will be for both Israelis and Palestinians.
While the PA incentivizes terrorists to kill Jews, the international community communicates to the Palestinians that “it doesn’t matter how despicably they act.”
While the PA incentivizes terrorists to kill Jews, the international community communicates to the Palestinians that “it doesn’t matter how despicably they act.” Israel’s global critics minimize the Palestinian Arab barbarism live-streamed on October 7 and ignore the indoctrination of Jew-hatred permeating the PA’s education system, which glorifies martyrdom for killing Jews.
The PA leaders-in-waiting for Abbas’s death are no different in their attitude towards Israel, as each carries the taint of pasts steeped in terror acts against Jews and Israel. “Unfortunately, it appears that in order to be a leader of the Palestinians, you need to be a terrorist who murdered Jews.” Israel’s steps to curb the PA’s pay-for-slay fall short. The Oslo Accords stipulated that Israel collect the PA’s taxes and transmit them to the PA. In 2018, Israel did pass a law to punish the PA by deducting the amount paid to terrorists in the pay-for-slay system from the PA’s tax revenue, but it was inadequate to halt the practice.
Tactically, payments to the terrorists and their families are accessed through stand-alone ATM’s that are disconnected from the Palestinian banking system. The IDF should map those ATMs, and when the PA deposits monies in them for the terrorists to withdraw, seize those ATMs to stymie the PA from moving forward with its deadly system. There are those who object to this approach, warning that the PA’s banking system would fail and the PA economy would then collapse. “Let it collapse. There should never be a system in which Jews [and every person even perceived to be a Jew] are the subject of a reward on their head.”
The system fuels itself and led to October 7. The three phases of pay-for-slay are: the allowances paid to families of dead and injured terrorists, payments to terrorists serving time in prison, and payments to terrorists who have been released. Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind behind the October 7 massacre, was a recipient of pay-for-slay for many years, along with many other Gaza terrorists who were freed in prisoner releases and returned to Gaza after Israelis were kidnapped. While Palestinians were planning October 7, they were also on the PA payroll.
The PA, which bears responsibility for these payments, knows that kidnapping Israelis pays off. It began in 1970 when a terrorist was released in exchange for an Israeli hostage. It grew in 1985 with the release of more than a thousand terrorists in return for only six Israeli soldiers. These terrorists were the “backbone of the First Intifada.” The practice has only grown since the signing of the Oslo Accords.
The PA eschews co-existence because it “envisage[s] the embodiment of really Nazi ideology.” It seeks to create a Jew-free Palestine as the first stage in the destruction of Israel and then use it as a launchpad for its terror army to attack Israel, murder its citizens, “and again, gain that political advantage in the international arenas.” This is the message the international community teaches post-October 7, and it is why the Oslo Accords must be called out for what they are: “A death trap for Israel, a death trap for Palestinians.”
PA forces need to be dismantled, “and I believe that we need to do more immediately” to eliminate the potential for another terrible massacre.
The Jewish people should settle the area west of the Jordan River in Israel’s ancestral homeland, but without the wanton violence being perpetrated by a few hundred settlers out of the “750,000 law-abiding Israeli citizens who live in Judea and Samaria.” This land should be settled because “that is the area that was given to the Jewish people as part of the mandate for Palestine back in 1922, and nothing has changed from a legal point of view since then.” Israel’s goal should be establishing a population of a million Israelis in Judea and Samaria by the end of next year. Expanding settlements is imperative because “the settlements are an anchor for security around them.”
Presuming the PA does not have an incentive to act “is fundamentally wrong.” The same “conception” the Israeli government and some of the security forces held on October 6 proved fatal. PA forces need to be dismantled, “and I believe that we need to do more immediately” to eliminate the potential for another terrible massacre.
