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governing it are repealed.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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