TEL AVIV – Former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon joined the chorus of security officials expressing support for U.S. congressional legislation that would cut off American funds to the Palestinian Authority until it stops paying salaries to terrorists and their families.
“The Taylor Force Act is a very important bill,” Ya’alon told the Algemeiner on Tuesday. “It is immoral to ignore the ‘pay-for-slay’ phenomenon. It is immoral to ignore the promotion of terror by the PLO. It is immoral to ignore the encouragement by the PA of the murder of Israelis.”
On Monday, Breitbart Jerusalem reported that a group of former security officials, led by Brig. Gen. (ret.) Yosef Kuperwasser, wrote a letter saying that failure to pass the Taylor Force Act would mark a “surrender to terror.”
Kuperwasser’s letter, which was co-signed by Ya’alon and ex-National Security Adviser Uzi Dayan, as well as Maj. Gen. (ret.) Gershon Hacohen and Brig. Gen. (ret.) Oded Tira, comes days after a letter expressing the opposing view was published by Commanders for Israel’s Security (CIS), a group of hundreds of former Israeli security figures, who warned that the congressional bill could actually harm Israel’s security cooperation with the PA and even result in the collapse of the Authority.
“I don’t agree with the claim that the PA is going to collapse,” Ya’alon said. “I heard this claim before Operation Defensive Shield in 2002 from retired Israeli commanders and experts who rejected the idea to move from defense to offense after we had absorbed more than a thousand casualties. They were proven to be wrong,” he said.
“Rejecting the Taylor Force Act means being blackmailed by the PA, surrendering to terror and legitimizing the phenomenon,” Ya’alon added.
He also dismissed CIS’s claim that the bill would harm harm security cooperation between Israel and the PA since “it is in the interest of both sides to maintain and develop it.”
When asked if the bill would affect the peace process, Ya’alon retorted, “Is there a peace process? Is [PA President] Mahmoud Abbas ready to recognize Israel’s right to exist as the nation-state of the Jewish people in any boundaries? He tries to roll back the Balfour Declaration.”
“Israel has to operate according to its interests, based on the assumption that there is no chance for a final settlement in the coming future, on the one hand, and we don’t want to rule the PA or to have a binational state, on the other hand,” he added.
In a slight to former president Barack Obama, Ya’alon said, “there has been a change in the U.S. approach to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. So far it seems that the Trump administration deals with this challenge in a more realistic way than its predecessor.”
Following a distinguished 37-year military career that was capped off with a three-year stint as IDF chief of staff in the early 2000s, Ya’alon entered politics as a member of the Likud party and was appointed defense minister in March 2013. He served until his resignation in May 2016 after sparring with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, inter alia, over the rights of IDF commanders to speak their minds about the fate of Elor Azaria, the soldier who shot and killed a subdued Palestinian terrorist.
The 67-year-old former lieutenant general recently announced the formation of a new political party which he will head.
The proposed bill is named after U.S. Army veteran and Vanderbilt University graduate student Taylor Force, who was killed in a stabbing attack while he toured Tel Aviv with his school in March 2016.
President Donald Trump raised the issue of terrorist payments with PA President Mahmoud Abbas during both of their May meetings.
Palestinian media reported on Friday that PA President Mahmoud Abbas was “fuming” following his Thursday meeting with Trump’s advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner in which American concerns about the payments to imprisoned terrorists were raised. Abbas reportedly refused to comply with watered-down demands from Washington that the PA cease payments to 600 terrorists imprisoned on multiple counts of murdering Israelis.