Hardship in the territories
By Danny Rubinstein
Almost five months have passed since Operation Defensive Shield, and the change in daily life in the West Bank is clearly evident. Though life before then was difficult in the territories due to restrictions on movement, the closures and encirclements since the operation, which to a certain extent renewed the military occupation of the West Bank, have made the distress much worse.
How long can this go on? It is hard to tell.
Ghassan Al-Khatib, the labor minister in Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat’s new cabinet, draws attention to the unemployment level. He says that while five months ago unemployment in the PA areas had reached 40 percent of the work force, recent surveys of the situation put the current figure at 80 percent. This means that unemployment has doubled in this short time. As in the past, the main reason for the unemployment is the restrictions on movement.
The closures and the encirclements, which have become tougher in recent months, have been joined by continuous days of curfew in the various towns that the Israel Defense Forces have entered. The situation in the towns changes all the time. Most days last week, for example, there was a curfew in Nablus and life was paralyzed.
In Tul Karm, Qalqilyah and Jenin, there was a partial curfew, usually for most of the nighttime hours, which was extended to other towns and villages. In Ramallah, on the other hand, there has been no curfew for a month now and anyone wandering around the center of town can see that life is more or less normal.
No one can predict where the IDF will invade next and when the next curfew will be, and this uncertainty basically brings economic life to a standstill. The Al-Ayam newspaper, based in Ramallah, recently published interviews with workers from quarries in Samaria who had stopped working because the quarries’ owners had closed them, and with workers who had been laid off from their jobs in sewing workshops in Nablus.
The quarries were closed down because it was impossible to remove the quarried building stones from them. Those who buy from quarries in Samaria are contractors from the territories, and from Israel and the Arab world – and if there is a curfew in the Samarian towns and restrictions on movement on the roads between towns, the quarries are paralyzed.
The situation is similar in the sewing workshops in Nablus. The workshops manufacture clothing for stores in Israel, and apart from the problems with the curfew and the road blocks, the demand for clothing has dropped sharply, reflecting the economic crisis in Israel and the effect of cheap imports from China.
The Palestinian media have lately been reporting harsh descriptions of life on the threshold of hunger in a list of places in the territories. Schools in the Gaza Strip reported a clear increase in dropouts in the second half of the last school year. Children as young as 10 are leaving the classroom and going out to the streets to try to earn a little money. Some stand at street corners trying to sell bottles of water, pencils, dusters and cigarette lighters to passing drivers, while others wash car windows when the drivers stop at traffic lights, in the hope of receiving some payment.
The Palestinian law allows children to work only from age 14, but no one takes any notice. Dozens of small workplaces in the territories currently employ children for only a few shekels a day. Many Palestinian children manage to slip past IDF checkpoints and work in Israel, usually in Arab villages. A harsh description of children from the Jenin refugee camp who work in Nazareth, was recently published by the Palestinian press. A 16-year-old boy named Firas led a group of children aged 10-15 across the Green Line near Umm al Fahm and reached Nazareth. They wandered around the streets looking for casual work. Many people take pity on them and helped. The children sleep on the roof of an abandoned building in the city.
“We are not beggars asking for handouts,” said Shadi, 14, to the journalist who interviewed him. “We have come here because there is no food in Jenin, no money and no classes.” Then he rolled up his sleeve to show the reporter the Hamas symbol he had scratched onto his arm and added, “After I get a little money, I will go back to Jenin and join the fighters.”
Such youngsters can also be seen in Jerusalem, where they have come from the Hebron region. Until a short time ago, they had also succeeded in reaching the Jewish neighborhoods of western Jerusalem.
Now policemen and security personnel keep them away and they wander around only in the Arab neighborhoods. Sa’id Al-Mudallah, who heads the employment department at the PA Labor Ministry, says that data collected by his office in the West Bank and Gaza shows that there are about 30,000 Palestinian children under the age of 14 who are not going to school and are in the streets, looking for work.
“Child labor on this scale affects the whole society,” says Al-Mudallah, “because these children grow up exposed to physical and emotional harm.”
A report by Palestinian educators, based on similar cases throughout the world, indicates that these children who grow up in the streets and adopt street language and behavior will lead lives of misery.
How indeed do people in the West Bank and Gaza manage to make a living in spite of everything? The Palestinian work force in the territories numbers about 850,000 (of a population of 3 million). Some 150,000 people are employed by the PA and public institutions, such as local authorities. The PA continues to pay low government wages. Most ministries are late in paying salaries. For example, a few ministries paid May’s salaries just last week. The PA receives money for salaries mainly from the assistance fund financed by the Arab states and from loans and grants from Europe.
The PA also has revenues from government companies (such as the fuel, cement and cigarette monopolies). In recent weeks Israel has begun to pay the Palestinian treasury some of the tax monies that Israel mainly collected from customs duties for it. At the beginning of the intifada the Israeli government halted the transfer of these payments.
Arafat has ordered that 10 percent be deducted from the salaries of all PA employees and that the money be transferred to a fund to support the unemployed. Support payments are made via the offices of the workers’ unions, headed by Shaher Saad of Nablus and Rasim Biari in Gaza. Every unemployed person is supposed to receive NIS 500 per month, but the fuss surrounding these payments is tremendous. The workers’ unions have no precise lists of those eligible to receive payments and there is not enough money to pay everyone so payments are made only once every two or three months.
A short time ago a Palestinian reporter from Nablus described how people crammed into the workers’ unions’ offices to get those unemployment payments when the curfew was lifted in that city, but only a few were lucky.
There are several charitable organizations in the territories that distribute monetary allocations or basic foodstuffs. These are Muslim organizations, both local and foreign (from the Gulf States), Christian organizations from the West and humanitarian organizations from around the world. The United Nations’ welfare and employment agencies has renewed distribution of food packages, an activity that had been cut back drastically in previous years. Lately the International Red Cross has also begun distributing food vouchers.
The needy families who receive these vouchers take them to their local grocery stores to buy food. The storekeepers then redeem the vouchers for cash from the Red Cross. The vouchers are for up to NIS 300 of food and cannot be used to purchase cigarettes or alcoholic beverages.
Many families, particularly in the West Bank, receive financial assistance from their relatives overseas. Over 20 years ago economists determined that about 25 percent of the revenues in the West Bank and Gaza came from money sent by family members working in Arab oil states. After the expulsion of the Palestinians from Kuwait (in 1991, after the Gulf War), revenues from these sources dropped sharply.
The economic picture is therefore of a Palestinian population barely getting by on donations and handouts, with even the government salaries considered a gift because most offices are not even operating. What is saving this population is its traditional way of life, with its high level of mutual family assistance. When one (extended) family member is earning something, he shares it with the whole family, so the family manages to survive.
The source: Haaretz (www.haaretz.co.il).