The Biden administration's recent decision to upgrade its relations with the Palestinian Authority (PA) is yet another sign of how the US is rewarding the Palestinians, as they are the Iranian regime, for their ongoing toxic incitement and terrorism against Israel.

It is the first time the US has created a position at the State Department that is solely responsible for Palestinian affairs.

The decision coincided with two bomb attacks in Jerusalem, in which a 16-year-old Jewish boy was killed and 14 other people wounded.

The Palestinian Authority, in fact, offers stipends to the terrorists and their families as part of its "Pay-for-Slay" program -- which serves as an incentive, especially in an area that is not wealthy, for its citizens to continue their violence.

Several Palestinian groups issued separate statements lauding the Jerusalem bombings as "heroic operations" and calling for the murder of more Jews.

Abbas has never called on the terror groups to halt their attacks.

One would have expected the Biden administration to demand that the Palestinian leadership dismantle the terror groups operating under its auspices in the West Bank.

One would have expected the Biden administration to demand that the Palestinian Authority halt the monthly payments for terrorism to the terrorists and their families.

One would have expected the Biden administration to pressure the Palestinians to return to the negotiating table with Israel and abandon their long-time policy of rejecting all offers without even proposing a counteroffer.

The Biden administration, which resumed financial aid to the Palestinians -- without any conditions attached -- has chosen to ignore the Palestinian leadership's role in encouraging violence, hate and efforts to eliminate Israel, and to erect, in its place, yet another Islamic state.

The payments to the terrorists and their families successfully encourage many Palestinians to carry out attacks against Israelis: they know that they or their families will be added to the Palestinian Authority's payroll.

The Biden administration is dead wrong if it thinks that upgrading its relations with the Palestinian Authority will have a moderating effect on the Palestinians or prompt them to improve their policies toward Israel. On the contrary, the move is likely to increase the Palestinian leaders' intransigence because now they feel that the US is on their side, notwithstanding their incitement and support for terrorism.

By upgrading US-Palestinian relations, the Biden administration is also sending a message to these Arab countries that it stands behind the Palestinians' rejection of normalization and peace between the Arabs and Israel.

The Biden administration has anyway done nothing to support the Abraham Accords or try to get more Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, on board. Instead, the Biden administration has done everything in its power to antagonize America's traditional allies in the Arab world, first and foremost Saudi Arabia. The Biden administration's policy of appeasement of the mullahs in Iran has already alienated some Arabs, especially the Gulf states.

This is what a slow-motion coup looks like.

The solution to patronage isn't professionalism, it's smaller government. Government is not a meritocracy and there's no point in keeping up the pretense that any part of it is merit-based. The most fundamental virtue of our constitutional government is that the public has supreme power over the government. The civil service system has effectively eliminated that power.

A smaller government begins with a much smaller bureaucracy.

Apologists for the bureaucracy claim that eliminating the permanent patronage of the civil service would erode "public trust in our government" and "undermine the role of civil servants as stewards of the public good".

The public has no trust in the government. The one thing most of the country, across political and racial lines, can agree on is not trusting the government. Currently only about 29% of Democrats and 9% of Republicans trust the government. How much more trust is there to lose?

Civil servants are not "stewards of the public good". The American people are. Monarchies and tyrannies have stewards of the public good. The only true constitutional and democratic virtue of a civil service is that it is easy to fire. A bureaucracy that can't be gotten rid of isn't serving the people, it's mastering them, and that is what the administrative state has long since become.

The only reason Democrats are panicking over permanent patronage reform is because the ranks and especially the senior management of the federal bureaucracy are full of their people. There's nothing democratic or merit-based about letting a corrupt partisan faction control the administrative state and the lives of hundreds of millions of people with no recourse.

The next president who isn't beholden to the administrative state should provide that recourse.