Here's more. Again, I don't like doing google and I believe you can prove just about anything by using its resources. However, you conspiracy "theorists" do it all the time so "when in rome....."
Did you know that Arafat does not use the billions he has in foreign bank accounts to aid his own people?
Yasser Arafat's personal wealth is estimated in the billions of dollars. In accordance with an Arab League decision made 35 years ago, Arab and Gulf state countries contributed tax money obtained from Palestinian laborers working in their countries to the PLO coffers. Arafat also received large sums of money for military training from various Arab countries that filled the PLO coffers. Arafat was not only deft in collecting taxes. He was also an accomplished arms trader and drug trafficker.
Throughout the 1970s and 80s the PLO, and Arafat in particular, accumulated billions founding in the process a mini-empire in investments and real estate. According to a British National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) report published on the eve of the famous "handshake" on the white House lawn, PLO assets, which were then close to $14 billion originated from "donations, extortion, payoffs, illegal arms dealing, drug trafficking, money laundering and fraud"
Chairman Arafat resorted to hiding large amounts in Swiss and other bank accounts and making large investments in real estate and industry in the United States, Australia and the UK. What was left over was used to purchase arms and afford the PLO elite, living in exile in Tunis, luxurious lifestyles.
Very little of the funds that the PLO acquired in those years and even the foreign aid it has received since has found its way into the hands of ordinary Palestinians. Instead the West Bank's economy, since the PLO's assumption of authority in 1994, commenced a dramatic slide into poverty and collapse.
According to surveys by the Yad Tabenkin Research Center, the West Bank per capita gross domestic product (GDP) before the Oslo Accord in 1993 was approximately $3,500 and in Gaza about $2, 800. Now the per capita for both territories is about $1,300. Before May 1994, the Palestinian per capita GDP in the West Bank was about 40% of the $8,000 Israeli per capita GDP for the same period and for most of the early 1990s economic growth in the West Bank exceeded that of Israel. If that trend had been allowed to continue in the West Bank's GDP would have reached $7,000 by now, which would make its prosperity similar to Saudi Arabia and 700% higher than other Arab states such as Egypt, Syria and Jordan.
However, economic development and national prosperity have clearly never been at the top of Arafat's agenda. Joint Palestinian-Israeli industrial parks, designed to encourage Palestinian entrepreneurship, were scotched by Arafat while still in the planning stages. Money slated for housing projects to rehabilitate refugee camps were funneled into extravagant condominium projects for the Palestinian elite. In 1998, the International Monetary Fund reported that half of the Palestinian budget was simply missing and could not be accounted for. The very basics of a responsible fiscal management - the transparency of investments, open accounting practices and general accountability are non-existent in the Palestinian controlled areas. The impression is unavoidable: the Palestinian areas constitute one contiguous plutocracy maintained for the benefit and enjoyment of a handful of PLO loyalists.
Why? Why, if Arafat is committed to the welfare and liberation of his people, are all the resources that could be used to alleviate their suffering withheld from them? The tragic answer is that Palestine's 'national liberation' has little if nothing to do with the welfare of the Palestinians themselves. Its focus and drive is solely on the hatred and intended destruction of Israel. Anything that distracts attention from this supreme goal, such as economic development (undeniably dependent on open trade and economic cooperation with Israel) or even social welfare is to be avoided. In the meantime, Palestinian poverty and suffering is usefully employed as propaganda to demonstrate Israeli injustice instead of being attributed to those who are most responsible for its creation.
Thus, the Palestinians' true tragedy remains not Israeli oppression nor occupation but the corruption, greed and hubris of their own leaders.
British National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS)
Yad Tabenkin Research Center International Monetary Fund
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