Soccer Dad

Here in status symbol land

Last week The Spine contrasted the lavish lifestyles of Palestinian leaders to those of Israel's leaders.

It is of the mansion of Rashid Abu Shbak, a bit rough upped by Hamas fighters, that is, the mansion, not the man who was away when the thugs came. I know that the Gaza Palestinians are suffering but now certainly more from their own than from Israel.

Still, the mansion shocks. I knew where Ben Gurion lived...actually in a bungalow on a kibbutz. I visited Golda Meir many times, both in the prime minister's residence in Jerusalem and her own private house in Tel Aviv. Maybe like a middle class house in New Rochelle. With Michael Walzer, Henry Rosovsky and David Landes (how did I fit into this eminent crew?), I visited Menahem Begin in his own apartment, also in Tel Aviv, the small and extremely spare apartment where he had hid from the British before independence and the place to which he retired after being prime minister. Yitzhak Rabin lived in a tasteful but modest apartment in North Tel Aviv. And Ehud Olmert lives in a not at all so grand house, but with a big garden.

And Rashid Abu Shbak lives in a mansion. Perhaps he thinks that it will serve as motivator for the depressed people he polices.

(Elder of Ziyon, reminds us that the well-appointed mansion has a armed and masked thug at every landing.)

This is an ongoing problem. As we've recently learned that foreign aid to the Hamas government is 3 times the level the Fatah run government received the previous year, Shiloh Musings has been taking pictures of the Arab mansions going up around Yerushalayim (Jerusalem).

There is nothing new to this. More aid, means more comforts for the Palestinian elites. But little or nothing for infrastructure. Or peace education.

Back in 2001, Israel shelled the house of Jibril Rajoub, one of Fatah's "security chiefs." Here's what the NY Times saw:

Reporters traipsed through the master bathroom of Jibril Rajoub's house today, getting a highly unusual glimpse of a Palestinian security chief's whirlpool bath and shampoo collection. The marble floor was still littered with the brown glass that blew from the windows when Israeli tanks' shells struck on Sunday.

Rajoub's opposite number in Gaza, Mohammed Dahlan, too, did quite well.

It is, quite literally, a house built on sand. On a bluff above the coast road overlooking the stagnant pools of Wadi Gaza stands a half- built mansion belonging to Mohammed Dahlan, the head in Gaza of Preventive Security, the largest of the 11 Palestinian security forces.

Not all is going well with construction. Mr Dahlan's four-storey house, said to have another two storeys under ground, and the new road built to its gate, are proving too heavy for the sand on which they are built. In recent months a 10ft wall of oil barrels has been built along the base of the bluff to stop the house sliding into the sea.

For many among the million Palestinians in the Gaza strip, living on average income of pounds 1,100 a year, the new wealth of Mr Dahlan and the leaders of the Palestinian Authority is a sign that they alone are benefiting from the Oslo peace accords, under which they returned to rule Gaza in 1994.

Rajoub and Dahlan didn't just benefit from mis-directed foreign aid. Rajoub and Dahlan are, what we could call in America, "Robber Barons."

The gas station owners have no business relationship with Dor Energy. Dor sells the fuel to the Palestinian monopoly at a certain price, and the monopoly sells it to the station owners at a much higher price. The monopoly keeps the difference. The station owners have no alternative, because Rajoub's outfit in the West Bank and Muhammad Dahlan's in the Gaza Strip prevent any other, competing importation and assign armed guards to escort Dor's tankers right up to the stations themselves.

Another way in which the security apparatuses finance their augmented activity is through the collection of unloading taxes. Rajoub and Dahlan control, in effect, all the discharging platforms at the transit points to the Palestinian Authority. Dahlan is also the owner of the loading pitchforks at the Erez checkpoint. Every merchant and truck owner must pay the preventive security apparatus a tithe in order to proceed. Sometimes, its done in a simpler fashion. An Israeli importer of cleaning products, who opened a branch in Gaza, was asked to pay $2,000, a "donation" to Force 17. A year ago,a rich Arab from East Jerusalem was asked to purchase 14 new jeeps, out of his own money, for Rajoub's organization's use.

Still, foreign aid has its uses as the late Michael Kelly described

Everyone had behaved perfectly fine; no one had so much as mentioned the inconvenient London Sunday Times story the day before, which said that the Palestinian Authority had swiped $20 million in British aid intended to build housing for the poor of Gaza, using the money instead to build luxury flats for Arafat's military and bureaucratic elite.

Palestinian nationalism has been a extremely lucrative pursuit for its foremost proponents. It allows them to criticize Israel with impunity and make a nice living doing so.

I've pointed out many times that Danile Pipes's How Important is the PLO? described the framework within which the PLO (now the PA and Hamas) operated. Fighting Israel was their cause. But accumulating wealth, rather than an independent state was their real goal.

Israel, Palestinians, Corruption.