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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Economic chaos -- and a looming humanitarian crisis -- undermine both the Palestinian Authority and the intifada.
Jul 19, 2002 | A white-haired and white-robed elderly man stalks into the makeshift tent in the poverty-stricken Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in Gaza City. Trembling with rage, he throws a bag of weeds onto the mats that cover the sandy ground. "Is this what I should bring home?" he demands. "Is this what I should feed my sons?" The other men in the tent try to calm him down; they are all in the same situation, unemployed since the beginning of the intifada almost two years ago and by now on the verge of starving. Over the last couple of weeks, they have started gathering in tents all across the Gaza Strip to protest their situation and to make the Palestinian Authority sit up and take notice.
Hassan Khaled Hassanein, a 37-year-old father of 11, is the unofficial spokesman of the unemployed laborers, as they refer to themselves, in Sheikh Radwan. He explains that the protest is not political, that the laborers make every effort not to identify with any particular political faction. Much of the anger is nevertheless aimed at the P.A., the Fatah movement that is its main component, and its leader, Yasser Arafat. Sometimes, though, the protesters cannot hide a growing cynicism about the achievements of the intifada.
P.A. officials downplay the political significance of the protest, but many are clearly worried. So, too, are other Palestinian leaders, even those in hard-line groups like Hamas. With the economy in disarray and Israeli troops continuing the lockdown designed to prevent more suicide attacks, few here can be sure how the laborers' anger will play out. Perhaps it will further deepen the resentment against Israel and win more support for the Islamic militants. Among many, however, there's a growing concern that the protest will provoke people to abandon their support for the intifada in hopes of restoring economic stability and getting enough to eat.
Some 200,000 Palestinians from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip work mostly in construction, agriculture and services. They lost their jobs in Israel after the start of the intifada because they are not allowed into the country anymore. The income they took home was a pillar of the local economy, especially in Gaza. Compounding the crisis, Israel controls -- and frequently interrupts -- the flow of goods and raw materials into and out of the strip. The result is the total collapse of the economy. Some Palestinian reports place the poverty level at over 80 percent. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the U.N. Security Council this week that 2 million Palestinians need food and medical assistance. More than half of all Palestinian children show evidence of chronic or acute malnutrition, he said.
While foreign governments and the United Nations regularly speak of the need to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian territories, little has been achieved in Sheikh Radwan or other communities. At this week's meeting in New York, the so-called Quartet of international mediators in the conflict -- the United States, the European Union, Russia and the U.N. -- agreed that a decision by Israel to allow full access to humanitarian groups "would be the fastest way to begin improving the plight of the Palestinians though it is not a substitute for all the other steps that the international community has been urging."
The protesters in the tents in Gaza have very little faith, though, that humanitarian aid will be enough and that the situation will allow an unrestricted flow of aid. They can point to the two attacks on Israelis this week. The government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had been considering steps to ease restrictions in the Palestinian areas, but after a double suicide-bombing in Tel Aviv Wednesday night, defense minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer froze those efforts. "Israel is striving to ease the conditions as much as possible for the broader Palestinian population," said a statement issued by his office, "but the Palestinian terror is continuing to perpetuate the suffering."
In Gaza, Hassanein looks at these developments pragmatically. "We expect the Israelis to make life difficult for us. They are the enemy, after all, and that is what an enemy does," he says. "But from the Palestinian Authority, we expect something different -- we expect help. They have a responsibility toward us, but all we get from them is encouraging words but no help on the ground."
The P.A. does not yet have a functioning social-benefits system. Some aid is distributed through the P.A.-affiliated Trades Union Federation -- mostly one-time payments of $100 -- that are financed through a 5 percent tax on government workers who do still get a salary. The U.N. refugee agency for the Palestinians also tries to help, but Hassanein says that most families receive one food coupon every six or seven months. Most of the aid that gets distributed comes from Islamic charities that have ties to the militant Hamas movement.
It has taken almost two years for the situation to get this bad for most people, says Hassanein, because most had saved some money from work in Israel or other sources. But as time has passed, people have gone through their savings. Some men sold their wives' gold. "I sold everything we had," Hassanein says. Eventually he took out a loan to survive, the repayment of which now makes life even harder. His situation is worse than most others' because he has been banned from entering Israel, where he worked in construction, since 1995.
The P.A. comes in for most of the criticism from the laborers, not only because of its almost nonexistent benefits system, but also because its perceived corruption and inefficiency are believed to aggravate the crisis. One of the main complaints the protesters in the Gaza tents have is that P.A.-owned utility companies have started cutting off people who can no longer afford to pay their bills. "People who are unemployed should not be forced to pay their electricity and water bills," says Hassanein. "Also, if a son or wife gets ill, they should get help for medicine and the hospital."
