When 17th-century Anglo-Irish political commentator Jonathan Swift noted that “There are none so blind as those who will not see,” he probably did not realize that he was prophesying the 21st-century approach of the European Union toward the Palestinian Authority.
On June 23, 2025, as the war with Iran raged, the European Union announced that it was allocating €202 million to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the Palestinian Authority.
The announcement clarified that “€150 million has been allocated to support the P.A. in ensuring the delivery of key public services, including the payment of salaries of teachers, civil servants and healthcare workers,” while the remaining €52 million was allocated to UNRWA.
The digital paper trail underlying the E.U. contribution to the P.A. leads, initially, to a €1.6 billion “multiannual Comprehensive Support Programme,” to be distributed by the European Union from 2025 to 2027.
Closer inspection reveals that the entire program is predicated on a July 2024 “Letter of Intent” signed between the Palestinian Authority and the E.U. Commission.
According to the letter of intent, “The Palestinian Authority commits to undertake the necessary substantial and credible reforms, with support from the international community. These reforms aim at establishing a democratic, transparent, efficient, and sustainable governance system by the Palestinian Authority. It also aims to ensure budgetary sustainability and transparency, strengthening the rule of law, the education curriculum as well as fight against corruption.”
The commitments made by the Palestinian Authority expose the harsh reality of the failed E.U. support for it until now.
P.A. democracy
The E.U. aid tracker shows that from 2011 through 2023, the European Union donated hundreds of millions of euros to the Palestinian Authority to establish functioning democratic institutions. The goal was so substantial that the 2017-2020 E.U. “Joint Strategy in Support of Palestine” defined the goal as one of the European Union’s “non-negotiable principles.”
Thus, demanding that the Palestinian Authority show “substantial and credible reform” to create “a democratic, transparent, efficient, and sustainable governance system” is, in truth, recognition that despite the aid already given by the European Union to the Authority, the result has been abysmal.
P.A. law requires elections for the position of P.A. chairman to be held every four years, and that an incumbent can only run for one additional four-year term.
The Palestinian Authority has not held elections for the position since 2005. P.A. leader Mahmoud Abbas is now in the 21st year of his first four-year term.
Similarly, while P.A. law requires parliamentary elections to also be held every four years, the last elections were held in 2006.
At Abbas’s demand, Hamas, an internationally designated terror organization, was not only allowed to participate, but subsequently won 74 of the 132 parliamentary seats.
In December 2018, Abbas decided to dissolve the parliament—which had not functioned for over a decade—promising new elections “within six months.” Abbas eventually decided to hold the elections in May 2021, but cancelled them when he realized that Hamas would win again.
In the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas onslaught on Israel, P.A. elections for both the position of chairman and the parliament, which would require the participation of the Gazans, have never been more distant.
The Palestinian Authority has been devoid of any semblance of democracy for almost two decades, and realistically, there is little to no prospect of it ever truly adopting democratic principles.
Nonetheless, it would seem that the European Union is still willing to swallow the Palestinian Authority’s empty commitment to establish the elusive “democratic, transparent, efficient, and sustainable governance system.” Moreover, the European Union is still willing to provide the Palestinian Authority with more and more funds to achieve this goal.
Before providing the funds, the European Union should ask what happened to all the aid the Authority has already received to promote this goal.
P.A. budgetary sustainability and transparency
As part of the letter of intent, the European Union sufficed with demanding that the Palestinian Authority publish a “National Budget in the format of Citizen Budget.”
The “Citizen Budget” published by the Authority is a far stretch from providing any semblance of “transparency.”
While being one of the largest, if not the largest, per capita recipient of foreign aid, the last time the Palestinian Authority published a full budget was in 2018. Scrutiny of that budget showed that for that year, it allocated no less than 550 million shekels ($163.5 million) to fund its reward payments to terrorist prisoners and released prisoners, and another 687 million shekels ($204 million) to fund its terror reward payments to injured terrorists and to the families of dead terrorists.
Having been thoroughly exposed, it is clear why the Palestinian Authority would want to conceal its full budget. Why the European Union agrees to this fraud and allows the Authority to avoid rudimentary transparency is unclear.
Strengthening the rule of law
Despite having had over three decades and having received hundreds of millions of dollars/euros, the Palestinian Authority has colossally failed to establish a functioning judiciary.
Since its creation, the P.A. judiciary has always been dogged by corruption, and even suffered from a situation in which court rulings are sometimes ignored by the Authority and its security forces.
The already compromised judiciary was further weakened in 2016 when Abbas quietly established a constitutional court and packed it with jurists from his Fatah party. It was this court that Abbas used in 2018 to dissolve the parliament.
Unsatisfied with the courts he had already invented, in 2022, Abbas unabashedly removed any last semblance of rule of law by establishing a Supreme Council of Judicial Bodies and Authorities, which he heads.
Commenting on the decision, the Palestinian Coalition for Accountability and Integrity, which partners with, among others, the European Union, noted that the “decree was a blatant violation of the Palestinian Basic Law. It also ignored the principles contained in the Declaration of Independence by compromising the concept of a democratic state, the principle of the rule of law and the separation of powers, as well as keeping government officials free of judicial control.”
Including the need for “strengthening the rule of law” as part of the Palestinian Authority’s commitments for reform is certainly critical for building a functioning Palestinian governance system. However, believing that the body, under the dictatorial rule of Abbas and the rest of his Fatah cronies, has either the will or ability to create a functioning judiciary is not just naive, but rather willful self-delusion.
Reforming the education curriculum
Over the years, the P.A. educational curriculum has been thoroughly analyzed by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), an Israeli research organization.
Critically, IMPACT-Se’s review of the 2020–21 Palestinian School Curriculum for Grades 1–12, found that the “textbooks remain openly antisemitic and continue to encourage violence, jihad and martyrdom while peace is still not taught as preferable or even possible.” The report added that “Jews and Israel are vilified to a greater extent than in previous curricula and antisemitism is more prevalent throughout.”
Soon after the publication of IMPACT-Se’s report, an E.U.-commissioned report of the Germany-based Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research found the P.A. books to have antisemitic content, present Palestinian violence and terror against Israelis as part of a “heroic struggle,” and deny the legitimacy of Israel’s existence through maps that erase Israel and label the entire area “Palestine.”
While the European Union demanded that the Palestinian Authority implement curricula reform, then-P.A. Prime Minister Muhammad Shtayyeh told then-E.U. Commissioner for Neighborhood and Enlargement Olivér Várhelyi that the Palestinian Authority opposes “having conditions placed on the European aid and wants to preserve true partnership based on respect and cooperation, and not on conditions.”
The disagreements even led to a temporary freeze on E.U. aid.
Continuing the freeze in March 2022, the E.U. Parliament’s Budgetary Control Committee adopted a resolution in which it noted that it:
“Deplores that problematic and hateful material in Palestinian school textbooks has still not been removed and is concerned about the continued failure to act effectively against hate speech and violence in school textbooks and especially in the newly created study cards; reiterates its position that all textbooks and materials supported by E.U. funds, that are used in schools must be in line with UNESCO standards of peace, tolerance, co-existence and non-violence.”
Astonishingly, this same Várhelyi who led the E.U. criticism of the P.A. educational curriculum in 2022 signed the new “Letter of Intent” on behalf of the European Union—effectively endorsing vague and unfulfilled promises by the Palestinian Authority to reform a curriculum that has only grown more problematic since.
What about the ‘pay-for-slay’ policy?
At first glance, an innocent reader may note the glaring omission from the E.U.-P.A. “Letter of Intent” of any reference to the Palestinian Authority’s “pay-for-slay” policy. While these payments clearly promote, incentivize, and reward participation in terror, shamefully, the E.U. program for reforming the Palestinian Authority lacked any reference to the abolishment of this policy.
In February 2025, Abbas issued yet another “Law by Decree.” In an attempt to again deceive the international community, in the decree, Abbas transferred the embattled “pay-for-slay” payments from the P.A.-PLO institutions to the relatively newly established P.A. social security system.
Considering the timeline of the P.A. commitment to the European Union, the decree issued by Abbas, and the current E.U. decision to funnel €150 million into the Authority’s coffers, cynics may deduce that the European Union was instrumental in advising the Palestinian Authority on how to try to conceal the “pay-for-slay” payments and deceive the world.
Conclusion
Clearly, in addition to the willful blindness noted by Swift, when it comes to the Palestinian Authority, it would seem that the European Union has another foundational principle: No matter how broken the product is, the solution is just to throw more and more money at the Palestinian Authority, even in the knowledge that nothing will change.
The bottom line is that no matter how much Europe tries to present its aid to the Palestinian Authority as leverage for reform, the truth is that the Palestinian Authority, apparently correctly, interprets Europe’s willful blindness as accepting and even condoning its actions, policies and outright deception.
Originally published by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.
