The State Department and the White House are not preparing to withdraw US aid to the Palestinian Authority after it applied to join the International Criminal Court, according to some of its representatives in Washington.
Lobbyists for the Delegation of the Palestine Liberation Organization to the US said that the Obama administration doesn’t believe the clause of last year’s budget mandating the cessation of American assistance to the PA has been triggered.
They made the comments on Capitol Hill to a Sentinel reporter who was working on a story, published Thursday by Mondoweiss, about a Congressional hearing on the subject matter.
In December, as part of the annual year-end budgetary legislative frenzy, Congress passed a law requiring the US to stop aiding the Palestinian Authority in the event that it initiates or actively supports an ICC investigation into allegations of Israeli war crimes.
As The New Republic noted, the PA’s application to join the ICC and an investigation by the court itself don’t necessarily, by law, require the US to stop aid. The ongoing probe, the magazine’s Jessica Schulberg noted, “was initiated by the ICC prosecutor, not by the PA.”
“It is possible to argue that by joining the ICC and granting the court jurisdiction in Gaza and the West Bank, the PA is ‘actively supporting’ the investigation—which is also prohibited in the appropriations bill,” she did note, however.
In early January, after the Palestinians’ ICC application was announced, State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki said that the administration was reviewing US aid to the PA.
“We continually review our assistance to ensure it complies with the law. That certainly is the case as it relates to assistance to the Palestinians,” she said to a reporter, adding that she didn’t “believe that applies here,” in reference to the aid withdrawal clause.
In a letter sent last week to Secretary of State John Kerry about the ICC matter, 75 Senators claimed they “will not support assistance to the Palestinian Authority while you undertake a review of this matter.”
On Wednesday, at the aforementioned House hearing on the assistance withdrawal clause and the ICC, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) said that “the State Department is reviewing, as we speak, whether that provision is now triggered.”
If the PLO Delegation to the US has it right, however, that review is over in earnest, and the lawmakers may need to pass additional legislation if they want to cut off aid to Palestinian leaders, as the ICC seeks to address Palestinian civilians’ complaints.
Palestinians and international observers have said that Israel committed war crimes when it killed and wounded thousands of civilians last summer, as its military carried out an often-indiscriminate bombing campaign in Gaza that flattened entire neighborhoods. Israel’s expropriation of land in the West Bank to build Jewish-only settlements, they say, is also considered a war crime.
Palestinian militants’ indiscriminate firing of make-shift rockets into Israel–a source of grief for Israelis–could also be found to be a war crime by the ICC as a result of the PA’s application to the body.
