Did Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz set himself up as a laughingstock when he complained last week, at a meeting of donor countries to the Palestinian Authority, that PA President Mahmoud Abbas hadn’t issued Arabic-language condemnations of this month’s killings of Israeli soldiers Tomer Hazan and Gal Kobi? That’s what Palestinian news agency Ma'an claims in its report on Wednesday's meeting of the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee for coordinating international assistance to the Palestinians at the UN building in New York.

Frankly, it’s hard to imagine the high-ranking people on the committee — U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, Quartet representative Tony Blair and Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide among them — daring to laugh openly at the statements by this representative of Israel's government.

It’s also hard to imagine them thinking up the appropriate response: "And did Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu condemn, in Hebrew or English, the killings this year of Uday Darwish, Samir Awad, Salah Amarin, Lubna al-Hanash, Mahmoud Titi, Amer Nassar, Naji al-Balbisi, Muatazz al-Sharawneh, Majd Abu Shahlat, Robin Zayed, Younis Jahjouh, Jihad Aslan, Karim Sabih and Islam al-Tubasi? Did he condemn, in Hebrew or English, even one of the 276 attacks by settlers against Palestinians since January 1, 2013? And did President Shimon Peres cluck his tongue over the 527 residential and other construction that the army and Civil Administration demolished and the 862 Palestinians they uprooted from their homes this year?"

Casualties and condemnations aren’t within the mandate of this permanent political-economic forum established on October 1, 1993, as part of the negotiation process between Israel and the Palestinians. This panel was supposed to accompany the process until 1998, the date of the Palestinian state's establishment — remember?

Reports galore

In its first years, every meeting and speech at the committee caused a bustle in the media. Before each meeting, reports on economic development, and the lack thereof, were published. They still are. Every agency has its reports: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and the Palestinian Authority (or to use its self-deluding name, the State of Palestine).

And these reports have been saying: Palestinian gross domestic product rose, then fell; the unemployment rate fell, then rose; the PA upgraded its tax-collection apparatus, or needs to upgrade it further; and its public sector is swollen, or it has shrunk and should shrink further.

Meanwhile, the Israeli government must lift its restrictions, the PA must improve tax collection, and the Palestinian Monetary Authority deserves high praise. Then there’s the propaganda pamphlet that the Israeli government submits to the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee; the pamphlet sometimes makes big headlines here: The Civil Administration has improved something, it’s upgrading something else, Israel is making gestures.

After 20 years of coordination meetings, the reports seem copied from last year with only the date changed. But no, the statistics do change, and they show a further decline in the Palestinian economy: 6-percent growth in 2012 compared with 11 percent in 2011, with the situation now worse since Egypt closed the Rafah tunnels; 22.3-percent unemployment (19 percent in the West Bank, 30 percent in Gaza); 1.6 million families suffering from food insecurity compared with 1.3 million in 2011; 74 percent of Gaza families and 23 percent of West Bank families receiving some sort of assistance.

This year's World Bank report mentions - no fewer than 18 times - Israel’s restrictions as the main factor in the gloomy Palestinian economy.

In addition to the reports, this year the Quartet presented the Economic Initiative for Palestine, which focuses on mobilizing the private sector to develop eight sectors in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The eight sectors are water, energy, tourism, light manufacturing, agriculture, construction and housing, building materials, and telecommunications and IT.

'Enabling measures'

This is the kind of Marshall Plan that Kerry got rolling when he enticed Abbas back to the negotiating table. It’s based on a development plan drafted by the Palestine Investment Fund, which handles the Palestinians’ public money. The plan, which seeks to boost the Palestinian economy between 2014 and 2016, was also submitted to the Israeli government, which prepared a series of "enabling measures," as the Quartet described them, to carry it out. The allowing of construction materials into Gaza over the past few weeks is one such measure.

According to Ma'an's report, Kerry met with the heads of 80 international investment firms to persuade them to get on board. Palestinian officials told Ma'an they didn’t want to divulge too many details so as not to get people's hopes up. But even without the details, it’s clear that to implement the plan that Kerry and Blair are pirouetting around, Israel must abolish its restrictions on movement, construction and infrastructure and let trade resume between the West Bank and Gaza.

For 20 years the donor countries' representatives have been chanting the mantra that economic development and private-sector development are the backbone of the peace process. It’s common knowledge how distant the reality is from those chants. Will Kerry and Blair, accompanied by a procession of foreign investors eager to gamble in the casino owned by Israel's army and defense ministry, surprise us this time and force Israel to do the obvious — lift the restrictions? We'd be happy to be proved wrong and be surprised.