LONDON (Middle East Eye) – The European Union has withheld millions of euros in annual aid from the Palestine, after Hungary’s EU delegate accused Palestinian school textbooks of containing “antisemitism”, according to Haaretz.
Oliver Varhelyi, a Hungarian diplomat and the commissioner for neighborhood and enlargement in Brussels, has proposed that aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA) requires the removal of “antisemitism and incitement” elements in textbooks taught in Palestinian schools.
On Tuesday, the EU decided to delay paying the PA annual aid of €214mn ($235mn) until a final decision was made by its executive branch, the European Commission (EC), in the coming days.
Since it was established in 1993, the PA has relied heavily on foreign aid to pay its employees’ salaries and pump cash into the economy. However, in recent years, the U.S., UK, and EU had been using these donations to push the PA for political compromise.
According to Haaretz, Palestinian diplomats travelled to Brussels this week in a bid to block the Hungarian proposal, first put forward in April 2021, from being adopted by the EU.
But the proposal was neither adopted by the EU nor scrapped, as it failed to garner a majority vote of 14 countries, leaving the EC to issue a final decision.
Around €150mn ($165mn) of the EU’s annual aid is reserved for the PA’s budget for salaries, infrastructure projects, and civil society groups.
A PA official told Haaretz that the Hungarian delegate was “behaving like the far-right in Israel, and constantly raising demands regarding the aid”.
At the same time, the Zionist regime has not objected to the EU funding in principle.
On Monday, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Palestinian Affairs Hady Amr met officials in the PA, including Hussain al-Sheikh, the influential figure who oversees coordination with the Zionist regime in the occupied West Bank.
Haaretz said the U.S. administration was pushing for shuffling personnel within the PA, calling for ‘political reform’ and the holding of elections.