A bill that would sanction sponsors of Palestinian terrorism was watered down significantly after a lobbying campaign by the Palestinian Authority and Qatar targeted Bronx Rep. Eliot Engel, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, public filings show.
When the Palestinian International Terrorism Support Prevention Act was first introduced by Florida Republican Brian Mast in 2017, the bill called out Qatar for aiding and abetting terrorists.
“Hamas has received significant financial and military support from Qatar. Qatar has hosted multiple senior Hamas officials, including Hamas leader Khaled Mashal since 2012,” it read.
“Qatar, a longtime US ally, has for many years openly financed Hamas, a group that continues to undermine regional stability,” US Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David Cohen said in language which was also included.
The bill made it out of committee, but never onto the floor for a vote.
In 2019 Mast tried again with an almost identical bill — except the tough talk on Qatar was stripped entirely. In addition, a new section was added offering a number of loopholes around sanctions for organizations or individuals offering “humanitarian assistance to Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or any affiliate.”
Both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have been listed as foreign terrorist organizations by the US State Department since 1997.
“After it became clear last Congress that the bill wasn’t going to pass as it was currently written these changes were made to make it more likely the bill could get enough support to pass,” a spokesman for Mast’s office told The Post, who insisted that the bill remained functionally as robust as before.
The 2019 version easily passed the House on a voice vote in July.
It angered Jewish groups. “There is certainly no excuse for organizations and countries to give money to a designated terror organization in the name of helping people of Gaza. There are other channels to do that such as via the United Nations,” the Orthodox Jewish Public Affairs Council told The Post.
In both the critical moments before and after the bill was reintroduced without the language, Engel was lobbied heavily on the issue.
Between February 7, 2019 and May 7, 2019 lobbyists for the Palestinian Authority at Squire Patton Boggs hit up Engel’s office seven times to discuss “US-Palestinian Bilateral relations.”
On March 19 — two days before the updated bill was submitted to the committee — a rep for Engel, Mira Resnick, took a meeting with lobbyists from the same firm. The day after the new language was formally released, she followed up with a phone call.
A spokesman for the committee denied the meetings had centered on the sanctions bill, but did confirm Resnick had been lobbied on the issue by the Qatari embassy.
“Eliot told me directly that he was getting a lot of pressure from the Qataris,” a professional acquaintance of Engel’s told The Post. “The Qataris did a full court press to remove themselves from the bill.”
“I had meetings with the Qatari embassy,” over the issue, a committee staffer confirmed to The Post.
“The committee heard from the typical range of outside interests during the legislative process, but the idea that chairman Engel or the committee caved to anyone’s demands is just silly,” committee spokesman Tim Mulvey told The Post.
“There was bipartisan pushback. There was some significant pushback that led to the bill kind of getting watered down,” said another staffer familiar with the matter, who added that legislators from both parties on and off the committee had pressed for the removal of the language.
The pushback – at least in part — comes from a concerted Qatari lobbying campaign. Engel is far from alone in fielding inquiries from Qatar’s agents in Washington. Public filings show a sustained effort by the country to influence public policy, spending millions of dollars and employing multiple lobbying shops for the effort. They have targeted dozens of D.C. lawmakers.
Engel did not respond to multiple messages seeking comment.
Despite a long and well-documented history of financing terrorist organizations, Qatar remains a key US regional ally. The Al Udeid Air Base — the largest US air base in the Middle East — is in Qatar and is home to roughly 11,000 US military staff.
“We’ve run our air war out of Afghanistan out of there, the air campaign against ISIS is run out of there,” F. Gregory Gause, a regional expert and Professor of International Affairs at Texas A&M University told The Post.
“The Pentagon is interested in maintaining close relations with the Qataris … dropping the hammer on the Qataris really wouldn’t be practical politics.”