Have the Palestinians received ‘more aid than any group in history’?

By Glenn Kessler
May 8 at 3:00 AM

“There’s a lot of impatience with the Palestinian issue. ... People have been funding this thing for a long time. They’ve gotten more aid than any group of people in history, and what we have to show for it is really not much at this point, unfortunately.”

— White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, remarks at Soref Symposium dinner hosted by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, May 2

This article has been updated.

President Trump’s son-in-law has been crafting a still-secret plan designed to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These remarks — that the Palestinians “have gotten more aid than any group of people in history” — cried out for a fact check.

Is this really the case?

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So we were not surprised when a senior White House official told The Fact Checker that Kushner “was referring to development and humanitarian funding received per capita since the Oslo accords” signed in 1993. Irritatingly, the official refused to provide a number, even though a figure was supposedly calculated.

But notice that Kushner framed it publicly as “more aid than any group of people in history” and then narrows it down to just development and humanitarian aid in the past quarter-century when directly queried. That’s because when it comes to all aid, Israel has received more aid than the Palestinians, even on a per-capita basis, according to U.S. government data.

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