What Roger Waters Won’t Tell You About His Latest Fundraising Effort

Pink Floyd has seemingly endorsed a “pro palestinian” call from their former member, rock’n’roll BDSHole Roger Waters. Or at least whoever administers their Facebook page.

 

waters appeal

Well done Waters and Pink Floyd for mobilizing in the wake of what you call “catastrophic devastation” wrought in Gaza. I am sure the almost 200,000 so far killed in Syria appreciate your efforts.

What Waters isn’t telling you is how Makassed hospital ended up needing the money. Probably because Israel is not to blame.

For over 40 years, this hospital has been one of the premier medical centers for Palestinians, with its state-of-the-art facilities and dedicated staff providing some of the best care available to patients from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It’s also a center for training doctors and nurses and offers some treatment competitive with Israelis hospitals such as pediatric cardiac surgery.

But all that is under threat of being shut down. Only the blame is not being leveled at Israel, the traditional scapegoat. This time, the hospital has taken the rare step of blaming the Palestinian Authority (PA) for the crisis.

“The Palestinian Authority has failed to pay for the cases referred and as a result the hospital ran into huge debts. We had to borrow tens of millions of dollars from local banks and pay interest, and since we couldn’t pay it back, banks are refusing to give us loans anymore,” said a hospital statement.

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As a charitable hospital, most of its equipment, including a newly installed MRI machine, is donated by bodies such as the Islamic Development Bank in Saudi Arabia and donors in Europe, the US and the Gulf states. But it must cover its running costs on its own, something that has become a huge challenge.

In the past, the hospital was supported by Kuwait, which funded it from its health ministry budget. But Kuwait halted the arrangement after PLO leader Yasser Arafat sided with Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Iraqi invasion of the Gulf state.

The hospital has scrambled for funding ever since, and eventually found support from the Palestinian Authority, which was set up in the West Bank and Gaza in 1994 as part of the Oslo peace agreement.

Today some 65% of its patients are referrals from the PA. Until this year, the PA covered some 90% of the bill, but as a charitable hospital even the 10% is often difficult to pay and Al-Makassed ends up swallowing the difference.

Its monthly income is $2.5 million while its running costs are nearly $3.5 million, putting it a million dollars in the hole every month that operations are normal. But this year a financial crisis in the PA has created a dire situation. The PA hasn’t paid the hospital for months and currently owes it nearly NIS 30 million.

Some 15-20% of the cases are from east Jerusalem Arabs who have coverage from Israeli sick funds. Some 15% of patients come independently and the rest from the PA, Rafai said.

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The PA has recently begun to trickle some funds to Al-Makassed, but it still hasn’t relayed the millions that it owes. A spokesman for the PA Ministry of Health declined to return repeated telephone calls.

What else he won’t tell you is that many of the hospital’s patients are East Jerusalem Arabs with medical benefits from Israel.

Some 15-20% of the cases are from east Jerusalem Arabs who have coverage from Israeli sick funds. Some 15% of patients come independently and the rest from the PA, Rafai said.

Nor the fact that even palestinians from the palestinian-controlled areas are treated in Israeli hospitals. Even terrorists. And there would be even more, had they not exploited our humanitarian gestures.

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