We have a history in this Congress of lurching forward at the first sign of any optimistic sign, and I freely concede that this is such a moment in the Middle East. We, the taxpayers, are the first to put money on the barrel head: $612 million up to now, including $20 million in direct aid to Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas. If the name sounds familiar, it is because the $20 million was not offered and proposed during this administration of Mahmoud Abbas. It was the last time. That money went in direct aid, and it is now gone.

We have a tendency all too often to want to wish things to go well in the negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis, and the way we express that wish as taxpayers is by essentially giving money and more money and more money.

There is no doubt in my mind that we in the United States have an important role to play here in the peace that hopefully will ensue. But what we should be doing is offering money based on performance, money based on transparency, money based on democratization, money based on furtherance of U.S. interests.

We are offering this money now, and it is tied to nothing. There does not have to be compliance with the road map. There does not have to be compliance with past agreements. There does not have to be any type of democratic reform, and there does not have to be any type of transparency.

You know, I am not the first to say this. The IMF acknowledged in 2004 that $900 million, $900 million in funds that went to the Palestinian Authority were not unaccounted for.

Now, the funds we provide do not go to the Palestinian Authority except for the $20 million I referenced earlier. They go to NGOs in the region. But I will argue to you that just the same way we would not fund an NGO in Iran or North Korea until we started to see some dramatic change in behavior, we should not do it here either.

What we should do is we should pass my amendment. The committee should return to the administration and say look, we want to be participants in this peace process as well. Here is what we will do. Rather than $200 million now at the front end, we will say $25 million. At the end of the year, if you have complied with the road map towards peace that the President has laid out, we will put in another 50 or another $75 million. If after a year and a half there seems to have been 100 percent effort to cut down on violence, not the nonstop falling of Kassam rockets that is going on now, then maybe we do another $50 million or another $75 million, essentially using the money as a reward for the type of activity that the United States and our taxpayers want.

Now, no one could argue that today, despite the changes in the Middle East, ones that, frankly, have me optimistic, no one could argue that Mahmoud Abbas has shown 100 percent effort to end violence. No one could argue that the Palestinians now have transparent government. No one could argue first and foremost that they can show us where the $900 million that the IMF said had been absconded, where it has gone.

I am not saying do not provide aid. I am saying that this is the least beneficial way to do it. You give them $200 million. If tomorrow we learn that the Palestinian administration has not lived up to its commitments, then we will have lost the money.

Now, let me conclude before I reserve my time with this thought. You know, this is not the first time we have been in this pattern. We can learn a little something. At the Wye River Accord we put in money. Wye River went away. The Israelis walked away from it because the Palestinians violated it. Our money was still going.

The Oslo Accords the same way. U.S. dollars were going long after the Oslo Accords had run aground. The Tenet plan, the Mitchell plan, the road map to peace. You know, we forget that $20 million in direct aid went to the Palestinians and the same exact arguments that my good friend, the gentleman from Arizona, is going to make here today were made then. These are optimistic times. There is a new administration. We need to foster, we need to encourage it. I do not dispute that. The only question is do we put the money on the barrel head first, or do we wait till later.

And one final point. You know, the Israeli position I do not really know on this issue. And frankly I do not care. Lobbying organizations on behalf of the peace process, that is not what this is about. This is about taxpayer dollars and how they are most wisely spent.