Muslim nations are reneging on pledges to rebuild Gaza

The World Bank is keeping track of how the nations that have pledged to rebuild Gaza after Operation Protective Edge have been keeping their promises.

It finds that only 40% of the pledges  - $1.4 billion out of pledges of $3.5 billion - have been paid so far, two years after the war.

However, if you break down the numbers by Muslim-majority countries and all others, an interesting pattern emerges.

Non-Muslim countries and NGOs pledged about $1.4 billion and so far paid about $1 billion, about 71% of their pledges.

Muslim nations pledged the bulk of the money meant to rebuild Gaza - $2.1 billion - but have paid only $360 million, which is only about 16.5% of what they pledged.

Qatar pledged a whopping billion dollars to rebuild Gaza - and has paid only $150 million of it.

Saudi Arabia paid only about 10% of its $500 million pledge.

Kuwait, which pledged $200 million, has not paid a dime.

Even Turkey, supposedly Gaza's best friend, has only paid 32% of its $200 million pledge.

We've seen this pattern many times before when Arab and Muslim nations pledged huge amounts of money to Palestinians and simply didn't pay up.

Arab nations paid only 21% of what they pledged at the Paris Donors Conference in December 2007.

In 2010, an Arab conference to help make Jerusalem an Arab city resulted in $500 million of pledges - of which only 7% was paid.

The Arab League committed to providing 7.7% of UNRWA's annual budget. As of 2010, they were only paying 1.5%.

Then PA prime minister Salam Fayyad complained bitterly about Arab nations failing to pay their pledges to his government.

If you follow the money, you can see that the Arab world has far less interest in helping Palestinians than their rhetoric would indicate. I believe that this is in a large part due to the intransigence and feelings of entitlement from Palestinian leadership.

The Arab and Muslim worlds are sick and tired of the Palestinian issue and they have been for many years now. The Palestinians are panicking over how the priorities of the Arab world have moved away from them. But a lot of it is their own fault for refusing to negotiate with Israel in good faith and accepting a state that is a little bit less than their demands. Arab leaders are wondering whether it was worth it for Palestinians to refuse Israeli offers of peace which should have ended the conflict long ago.

Palestinian leaders whining for attention from their villas in Ramallah while there are real crises in the region are making them look more and more foolish, but decades of basking in the glow of Arab pro-Palestinian propaganda have made Abbas and his people blind to what is really going on.

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