In Terrorists and Kleptocrats: How Corruption is Eating the Palestinians Alive, featured in the June 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine, Aaron Menenberg describes his two years serving in the Israeli Ministry of Defense’s Civil Administration. Menenberg’s job, as he describes it, was “to ensure aid projects funded by foreign governments in the West Bank were executed successfully and lawfully.”
In the course of his job, Menenberg interacted with many Palestinians, “most of whom were hard working, entrepreneurial-minded people focused on societal and self-improvement.” On the other side was the Palestinian Authority, whose “priorities and goals were often in conflict with those of its people, and held them back.”
Menenberg’s key observation about official Palestinian Authority corruption is that “[y]ou will not find a single example of a people governed by such a regime that has achieved long-term success.”
In the essay, Menenberg describes his conversations with a Palestinian farmer, Sammy Khalidi, who was being pressured by the PA to switch the packing plant he used from a Jewish-owned one to one that was run by a wealthy, well-connected Palestinian.
The USAID-funded program Sammy was participating in was a good one. As an American taxpayer I really liked the concept. It provided assistance to small- and medium-sized agrobusinesses in the West Bank to help them export their products to Europe and Russia, where profit margins were higher than the Palestinian, Israeli, and Jordanian markets where they normally were sold. The project provided affordable financing and, in partnership with Israel, access to materials and expertise to meet the required product standards of destination markets. Israel then, on its own dime, set up an Israel-West Bank border crossing dedicated to agricultural transport, and helped the participants partner with Israeli companies who could get their product to market via Israeli ports. I had met a number of participants, and all of them seemed pleased with the project. I could understand why Sammy was worried.
The story turned out well, in the end, with Sammy being allowed to continue using the Jewish-owned packing plant. The pressure to which he was subjected was not for his own good or the good of any of his workers, but for the good of an organization “using its political influence to send more business its way.”
Menenberg cites Jonathan Schanzer’s State of Failure as identifying the main problem with the peace process: “It revolves around ‘getting to yes’ in the peace process without transforming the PA into a responsible and trustworthy government.” Schanzer contributed We Really Need to Talk about Corruption to the December 2013 issue of The Tower Magazine, which asked, “How can you build a legitimate, peaceful state out of a kleptocratic regime?”