Israeli Restrictions and the Palestinian Economy
Israel’s occupation places massive and constant restrictions on the daily lives of ordinary people in the occupied territories. As a result, the Palestinian economy is in major depression, and the people in the midst of an ongoing humanitarian crisis. According to the World Bank, since 2000 “average Palestinian incomes have declined by more than one third ... More than 600,000 people (16 percent of the population) cannot afford even the basic necessities for subsistence.”
The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) calculates that the occupied territories have “lost at least one fifth of [their] economic base over the past four years as a consequence of war and occupation,” and that “72% of Palestinian households” now live below the poverty line.
Levels of malnutrition and anaemia among “children under five years of age, women, expectant mothers and especially mothers practising breastfeeding,” the World Health Organisation concluded, are “tragic by any international or humanitarian standard.”
In March 2004, the House of Commons’ Select Committee on International Development compared Palestinian malnutrition with that “anywhere one would find in sub-Saharan Africa.” It concluded: “The Palestinian economy has all but collapsed.”
This dire situation is the direct result of the daily realities of Israeli occupation. Curfews, roadblocks and checkpoints severely restrict the movement of goods and people to schools, hospitals, and places of work. Villages are cut off from each other; crops and farmland have been destroyed to make way for settlements and settler roads; and large areas of agricultural land are appropriated and razed.
Closure and siege
“Closure” and “siege”, respectively, refer to the common Israeli practices of sealing off the occupied territories to movement into Israel, and the sealing of areas within the occupied territories to movement between one another, via an extensive system of roadblocks, curfews and checkpoints.
Closures of international borders lead, the World Health Organisation reports, to “declining levels of imports from Jordan and Egypt,” and access is cut off to Israeli ports, which “constitute the major transit points for Palestinian imports from outside Israel.”
The policies, which severely restrict the movement of people to schools, hospitals, and places of work, were recently described by the World Bank as the “precipitator of today’s economic crisis,” as these closures “fragment the Palestinian economic space, raising the cost of doing business and disrupting the predictability needed for orderly economic life.”
According to War On Want’s report, the extent of this fragmentation has intensified recently, with “over 120 checkpoints dissecting the West Bank into 300 enclaves and the Gaza Strip into three separate sections.”
Christian Aid reported in 2003 that at these checkpoints, erected “at the entrances of every Palestinian community…Israeli soldiers regularly humiliate, even terrorise, Palestinians.” Access roads to most villages “have been cut off, either by deep trenches gouged by bulldozers, or by two-metre high banks of earth, or concrete blocks. This means villagers must often walk or (where possible) drive cross-country to get to a road, but at the risk of being turned back. Trips which once took 25 minutes now take 12-14 hours.”
The most extreme restriction of movement imposed by Israel is the curfew, during which residents are completely unable to leave their homes. These can last for weeks, even months at a time, and are enforced, say Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, “by means of live fire aimed at Palestinians, at times without warning.”
These conditions have a devastating effect on everyday life in the occupied territories, making normal economic processes nigh on impossible. The World Bank identifies them as the “proximate cause of four years of Palestinian economic distress.”
The Wall
If Israel’s wall is completed, a significant proportion of the West Bank, along with East Jerusalem, will be on the Israeli side, cut off from the rest of the West Bank. This, the World Bank predicts, will “further tighten closure,” as West Bank ID holders on both sides of the barrier face serious difficulties in reaching jobs and services in East Jerusalem, and vice versa.
The first stages of building the wall have “involved extensive land requisition and clearing”: owners of agricultural land have suffered a major “economic loss” as a result, and are likely to suffer further as a result of being cut off from their land.
The UN estimates that 280,000 Palestinians in 122 towns and villages will be adversely affected through the loss of their farmland and orchards, and through the further strangulation of local economies.
Destruction and appropriation of agricultural land
In addition to the continuous expropriation of land Palestinians have suffered due to the expansion of settlement building, the construction of by-pass roads between settlements involves the confiscation of what is often fertile agricultural land. “Approximately 350km of by-pass roads have so far been constructed,” Christian Aid noted in 2003, “with a land loss to Palestinians of more than 8,000 acres.”
Olive trees, which are a huge part of Palestinian agriculture, constituting 80% of all cultivated fruit trees in the occupied territories, have come under “systematic attack,” according to the Catholic relief and development group Caritas, with 1 million trees destroyed since 1967 (400,000 of them since 2000).
Israeli control of PA tax revenues
Palestinian Authority tax revenues and custom duties are controlled by Israel, which can freely impose freezes and prevent civil servants’ wages being paid. During the recent freeze, the World Health Organisation notes, “but for the assistance provided” to the PA by friendly countries, “no wages whatsoever would have been paid.”
“Security”
Many of these policies are justified by recourse to “security” concerns, but their consequences are evidently deeply harmful to Israel’s security. As Nigel Roberts, World Bank Country Director for the West Bank and Gaza, has noted, “it is clear that steep economic decline helps foster an environment” in which “violent doctrines can resonate.”
One Israeli settler quoted in a major Israeli newspaper (self-professedly “very right-wing”) called Israel’s wall “an economic death sentence for the Palestinians. There are people here who want to make a living and it’s creating more hatred.”
http://www.waronwant.org/?lid=4207