Rice Spared a Grilling From Lowey Over Palestinian Aid

ELI LAKE

WASHINGTON — The chairwoman of the House subcommittee that funds America's foreign aid will lift her objections to disbursing some $100 million in economic assistance to the Palestinian Arabs, a week after freezing the funds. Rep. Nita Lowey, a Democrat of New York, will lead a hearing of the House Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs today on the foreign aid budget, featuring testimony from Secretary of State Rice. With a fragile cease-fire taking hold between Israel and Hamas days after her return from the Middle East, Ms. Rice may have avoided a grilling from Ms. Lowey.

Last week, Ms. Lowey and others in Congress were threatening to withhold $150 million in aid from the Palestinian Authority as fighting between Hamas and Israel worsened. Days earlier, President Abbas said in an interview with a Jordanian newspaper that the Palestinian Arabs could take up armed resistance if negotiations failed. Western powers had backed Mr. Abbas for the Palestinian presidency in part because of his speeches against the suicide terror offensive in 2000, 2001, and 2002 known as the second intifada.

"I remain skeptical about the political will of a Palestinian leadership that all too often lapses into inflammatory rhetoric that belies their stated commitment to peace," Ms. Lowey said in a letter yesterday to the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Henrietta Fore.

But with the release of a new memorandum of understanding between America and the Palestinian Authority on how to spend the funds, Ms. Lowey informed Ms. Fore that she would withhold $50 million in aid, not $100 million, until the Palestinian Authority transferred its funding into a single treasury.

Yesterday, Senator Obama, a Democrat of Illinois and the leader in pledged delegates for his party's presidential nomination, called the Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, and expressed his support for Israel's right to defend itself against rocket attacks, expressed his shared concern about Iran's nuclear program, and expressed condolences for the attack on Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva last week, a campaign spokesman, Tommy Vietor, said. He added, however, that the senator also "expressed admiration and support for the ongoing commitment to negotiations with President Abbas," a sentiment in line with the Bush administration and European leaders.

Last week, the activist group Palestinian Media Watch circulated a report that said the Palestinian Authority-funded newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida ran a front-page photo of the man who killed eight Israeli yeshiva students in Jerusalem, Alaa Abu D'heim, and called him a shahid, or martyr. A recent study from the same organization found that 12th-grade Palestinian history books referred to the Iraq insurgency as a "resistance."

While this kind incitement rhetoric may be par for the course for Hamas, the Islamic supremacist party that now controls Gaza, the Palestinian Authority under Mr. Abbas is expected to end incitement as a condition for the receipt of American aid.

A top negotiator for the Oslo process, Dennis Ross, said in an interview last week that he saw no evidence that the Bush administration was trying to tackle the incitement issue. "I have not even heard the Bush administration talk about it," he said. "I still say this is something you can do."

Mr. Ross said that during the Oslo negotiations, the Palestinian Authority participated in a committee with Israelis to review textbooks and other media, but he said little work had been done to end the practice.

"Palestinians have not stopped the incitement for even a single day," an Israeli diplomat in Washington, Ron Dermer, said. "Sometimes it's in the newspaper, sometimes it's on the television, sometimes it's in the textbooks, sometimes all three."

Mr. Dermer, a co-author with Natan Sharansky of "The Case for Democracy," said the incitement issue is "very bad for the prospects of peace." "You cannot live next to a society that is poisoned to hate you," he said.

The State Department takes incitement issues seriously, a department official said, noting that America does not fund Palestinian Arab textbooks. (Aid for the books comes from the European Union.)

The department issues a secret annual review of the textbooks, which it declined to share with The New York Sun. "Having now completed the books for all 12 grades, the Palestinian Authority is examining the books again, and is considering possible revisions," the official, who requested anonymity, said. "We always encourage them to take note of our previous reviews as they consider revisions."