8 | JUNE 17 • 2021 

Editor’s Note: In April 2021, 
President Joe Biden reversed for-
mer President Trump’s freeze and 
restarted aid to the Palestinians.
T

he Biden administration 
has resumed aid to the 
Palestinian Authority 
(P
.A.) as a way to jumpstart the 
moribund Israeli-Palestinian 
“peace process.
” The obstacle 
to peace, however, was not the 
absence of U.S. assistance but 
the P
.A.
’s incentivizing of terror-
ism. The bipartisan Taylor Force 
Act blocks U.S. funding for the 
P
.A. until it changes this behav-
ior. There is no indication that 
it has, making any resumption 
of U.S. taxpayer aid a contraven-
tion of this important law and a 
further hindrance to peace.
The P
.A.
’s “pay-for-slay” policy 
was highlighted by the 2016 
murder of an American tourist 
in Israel by a Palestinian terror-
ist. The tourist, named Taylor 
Force — a West Point graduate, 
U.S. Army veteran and son of 
one of the authors of this post — 
was in Tel Aviv on a school trip 
when he was stabbed to death.
Force was neither Israeli nor 
Jewish. Yet, the P
.A. celebrated 
the killer repeatedly as a “heroic 
martyr” and held a large, festive 
funeral where he was hailed as 
a national hero. The murderer’s 
family soon began receiving 
benefit payments from the P
.A.
The P
.A. spends massively 
on these payments to terrorists 
and their families and treats this 
perverse benefits system as a 
sacred obligation. Codified in 
P
.A. law, the system adds bonus 
payments for Israeli Arabs and 

Arab residents of Jerusalem who 
have Israeli IDs and therefore 
more freedom of movement to 
carry out attacks. The longer the 
prison sentence, the greater the 
payments — meaning the dead-
lier, the more lucrative. The P
.A. 
employs some 550 people in its 
pay-for-slay bureaucracies and 
devotes over 7% of its budget, 
or $350 million, to the program, 
compared to just $220 million for 
non-terrorist welfare programs.
To address this despicable 
system, Congress passed the 
Taylor Force Act (TFA) — a bill 
the American Center for Law & 
Justice (ACLJ) has long support-
ed — cutting off U.S. aid to the 
P
.A. until the pay-for-slay bureau-
cracy is dismantled and the laws 
governing it are repealed. The 
logic is simple: since money is 
fungible, aid that supplants the 
governance responsibilities of 
the P
.A. frees up P
.A. money to 
reward terrorists.
The Taylor Force Act correct-
ed a profoundly immoral policy 
that had American taxpayer 
funds being laundered unwit-
tingly through P
.A. accounts 
to incentivize murder. The bill 
also offered a simple litmus test 
of the P
.A.
’s seriousness about 
making peace: If the P
.A. cannot 
revoke the laws and infrastruc-
ture conferring special treatment 
for terrorists, then the P
.A. 
itself remains an obstacle to the 
“peace process.
”
Yet, the Biden administra-
tion claims renewed aid for the 
Palestinian people does not 
violate TFA, which bars aid pro-
grams that “directly benefit” the 
P
.A. And news reports indicated 

the P
.A. believes it can satisfy the 
U.S. administration by making 
terrorist compensation “needs-
based” rather than based on the 
success of attacks, as it is now.

EMPOWERING THE P.A.?
The Biden administration also 
appears set to endorse and 
empower the P.A. by giving it 
preemptive rewards, such as 
reopening the PLO mission in 
Washington, D.C., the office 
that directly administers the 
pay-for-slay program.
Both these concepts are not 
only deeply cynical but also 
violate the plain meaning and 
intent of the law that sought to 
remove the United States from 
complicity in the P
.A.
’s blood-
soaked support for terrorism.
The TFA already exempts 
aid programs that Congress 
determined help the Palestinian 
people, such as water treatment 
projects, childhood vaccina-
tion programs and money for 
East Jerusalem hospitals. And 
it requires a complete disman-
tlement of the prisoners and 
martyr payments bureaucracies, 
not the introduction of a needs-

based model for them.
Indeed, heeding the TFA 
and demanding that the P
.A. 
end pay-for-slay is a bipartisan, 
pro-democracy policy. To spend 
American taxpayers’ dollars 
funding an unreformed P
.A., 
against Congress’ wishes, would 
be neither.
If the Biden administration 
genuinely wishes to support the 
Palestinian people, it should 
insist that the P
.A. cannot be a 
peace partner until it stops the 
glorification of terrorists. The 
P
.A.
’s refusal to make peace with 
Israel, accompanied by its cel-
ebration of violence, is the real 
source of economic and human-
itarian problems in Palestinian 
society, not the loss of U.S. aid.
If the Biden administration 
tries to run around the TFA, it 
will be guilty of money laun-
dering for terrorists. The Biden 
administration should disable 
terror by focusing on funda-
mentally reforming Palestinian 
governance, not enabling the 
unrepentantly terror-sponsoring 
P
.A. by circumventing the plain 
meaning of a bipartisan bill 
passed just three years ago. 

Mike Pompeo served as America’s 70th 

secretary of state and is currently ACLJ 

senior counsel for global affairs. Sander 

Gerber is the CEO of Hudson Bay Capital 

Management, a distinguished fellow at 

the Jewish Institute for National Security 

of America (JINSA) and a fellow at the 

Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. 

Stuart Force is the father of Captain 

Taylor Force. This essay was first pub-

lished by the American Center for Law 

& Justice.

commentary

Has the Biden Administration 
Violated the Taylor Force Act?

PURELY COMMENTARY

By Mike Pompeo, Sander Gerber and Stuart Force

Taylor Force

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