PA Rewards Antisemitic Rioters with US Taxpayer Funded Prize

“Yes, we want to burn you alive. That is all we are working for,” the Yasser Arafat Foundation prize winners had asserted.

By Akiva Van Koningsveld, Honest Reporting

The Palestinian Authority-controlled Yasser Arafat Foundation, during a ceremony at the Ramallah Cultural Palace, presented its annual prize to the West Bank [Judea and Samaria] village of Beita. Explaining the decision, Endowment Committee Chair Ola Awad praised the residents of Beita for their “popular resistance” against Israel, echoing earlier calls by the PA’s ruling Fatah faction to export the “Beita model” to “all Palestinian towns.”

As HonestReporting has repeatedly highlighted (see here, here, here, here, here and here), this “model” involves violent riots, ecoterrorism, setting off powerful explosive devices and burning swastikas.

According to its website, the Yasser Arafat Achievement Award aims to encourage “serious and exceptional work and to recognize real achievements in national, cultural, social, economic, scientific, or academic areas of work.”

Other 2021 nominees included NGOs, youth groups and a charity serving disabled Palestinians.

But the Beita residents were deemed most worthy.

By signing the US-brokered Oslo Accords in the 1990s, the Palestinian Authority formally vowed to “apprehend, investigate and prosecute” those involved in “acts of terrorism, violence and incitement.”

To this day, Palestinian terrorists are rewarded by the PA with Oscar-like prizes.

Few, if any, English-language news outlets have deemed this newsworthy.

The West Bank town of Beita was awarded the Arafat Award last night for its “resistance” against Israel.

80,000 tires were burned in Beita this year.

The prize was given by PA PM @DrShtayyeh, who blamed Israel for destroying the environment at #COP26. pic.twitter.com/tBKcubdQoo

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 11, 2021

So-called “popular resistance units” from Beita, located south of Nablus, have terrorized Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria for over 150 days. Between May and August 2021, violent rioters reportedly burned over 80,000 tires, seriously damaging the environment and posing a grave health threat to residents – Arabs and Jews alike.

The resulting toxic smoke clouds, in addition to the deployment of so-called “night confusion” tactics first developed by terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip, were aimed at driving out the local Jewish population.

The rioters on at least three separate occasions burned makeshift swastikas embedded within Jewish Stars of David.

“You [Israelis] are worse than Hitler and the Nazis,” the organizers of the Beita riots have said. “Yes, we want to burn you alive. That is all we are working for,” the Yasser Arafat Foundation prize winners previously asserted.

In line with their publicly stated goal, they have set ablaze a model of an Israeli village and an effigy of an Orthodox Jew.

SICKENING- Palestinians are burning mock ups of Jewish homes. pic.twitter.com/FQgBlCqx7u

— StopAntisemitism.org (@StopAntisemites) August 20, 2021

Palestinian rioters from the Samarian town of Beita, who previously burned makeshift Nazi swastikas juxtaposed against a Star of David, last night set fire to an effigy of an Orthodox Jew.

Yet @EUpalestinians remains silent about this PA-backed Jew-hatred pic.twitter.com/EVnxWeYrX9

— Akiva van Koningsveld (@koningsveld) September 10, 2021

But in the words of the Yasser Arafat Foundation’s Ola Awad, who also heads the PA’s Central Bureau of Statistics, Beita’s residents “wrote the epics of heroism in defending [their] land and rights.”

Indeed, Fatah-connected residents of the town received a check for $25,000 from Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh, who presides over the foundation’s board of trustees.

In July, Shtayyeh’s government already allocated $950,000 to support “the steadfastness of the citizens” in Beita. Ironically, the Associated Press ran an article a few days earlier in which Shtayyeh accused Israel of rejecting peace.

The financial support is just one of many examples of official PA-backed violence.

HonestReporting’s exclusive research revealed that Ramallah is actively backing Beita’s extremists. In fact, a senior Palestinian official praised them just hours after they had set alight a swastika. Two days later, members of Fatah’s legislative body held a meeting in Beita to “support the popular resistance.”

At Wednesday’s gala, the Yasser Arafat Foundation also praised The Nation’s Palestine Correspondent Mohammed El-Kurd, a longtime apologist for terrorists. In her speech, Ola Awad commended the resident of Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah/Shimon HaTzadik neighborhood for “conveying the suffering of our people to the whole world.”

HonestReporting has exposed Mohammed El-Kurd as a Jew-hater.

Nevertheless, The Nation’s D.D. Guttenplan has inexplicably defended the decision to hire El-Kurd despite widespread backlash.

As the Palestinian Authority continues its policy of rewarding terrorism — perhaps striving to fulfill Arafat’s pledge to make the Jews “flee from Palestine [sic] like mice fleeing from a sinking ship” — too many media outlets are devoted to doubling down on their fake narrative that Israel is the root of all problems even if they are demonstrably caused by Palestinian rejectionism and support for terrorism.