Auditors in the European Union have just discovered that $1.3 billion that the EU has given in aid to Gaza has been paid out in salaries to thousands of Palestinian civil servants, who in fact have not been to work for four or five years. With a clear sense of outrage at what top officials see as an exploitation of the EU aid system, it is now being said that the funds would have been better directed to the West Bank, where there is a fully functioning civil service. In some of the statements that have come out of Brussels, there seems to be the clear suggestion that the Palestinian bureaucrats who pocketed their salaries, while they had no work to do, were well aware that they were cheating the system. Seen from the ivory towers of the Brussels' machine, this may very well be how it appears. But the truth of the matter is that EU taxpayers have not been ripped off in Gaza. Moreover, those EU officials on the spot, who have maintained this program, have behaved honestly and with great wisdom. First some perspective. Before the startling Hamas election win in 2007, the bureaucracy was dominated by Fatah members. This did not make them better or worse officials. Governments around the world, not least in the US, tend to fill key administrative positions with their own people. However, with the Hamas win in the 2007 general election and the subsequent split between Hamas and Fatah, Gaza and the West Bank, many of the civil servants in Gaza stayed on. But because they were seen as Fatah-oriented, owing their places to Hamas' now deadly rival, Hamas had no interest in employing them. But rather than fire them and hire replacements, Hamas preferred to leave the job in notional existence. And EU people on the ground were equally happy with the deal. For them, what it meant was that there was a trained civil service kept in place, against the time when there would be a Palestinian settlement. At that point, the new Palestinian state will need all the expertise and assistance that it can get. Now the EU-paid Gaza civil servants may not all be high level, and some will almost certainly need retraining and refreshers. Nevertheless, they represent a key resource for the new Palestine. And in any event, though they would doubtless have preferred to be working and drawing their pay for a full day's effort, the money they earned has been important for Gaza. The EU mandarins are perfectly well aware that Gaza is an economy that the Israelis play with like a cat with a mouse. They have, and indeed regularly exercise, the ability to turn Gaza's economic tap on and off. The humiliation and hardship of border closures and blocked imports, such as cement, is all too real. Any income, such as the $1.3 billion that has come to Gaza civil servants under the EU's Pegase program is, therefore, extremely welcome. The EU auditors may protest that the money has been squandered, but they would be entirely wrong. The EU cash has gone into the fragile Gaza economy and if it had not been provided under this program, would almost certainly have come through some other, perhaps less-targeted, EU aid channel. At least this way, keeping unemployed bureaucrats on the payroll means that the new Palestinian state will have an experienced cadre of officials from which to draw.
