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BEIRUT: The world has promised to inject $7.4 billion into the decaying Palestinian economy, but money cannot stop the rot unless Israel lifts its chokehold on trade and travel in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, relief groups say.
The idea is to show Palestinians that a new peace effort brokered by Washington can improve their lives and reinforce a US policy of strengthening “moderates” against “extremists”.
In practice, that means helping Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who has ruled only the West Bank since Hamas Islamists seized Gaza in battles with his Fatah faction in June.
The West, which had halted most aid to the Palestinians after Hamas won a parliamentary election in January 2006, responded to the Gaza takeover by renewing assistance to Abbas.
The British-based aid agency Oxfam International has said the donors who met in Paris on Monday effectively agreed to pour money faster into a leaking bucket, instead of fixing it.
“You can’t solve it without money, but money alone doesn’t do the trick,” said Michael Bailey, an Oxfam spokesman.
“Without political will to apply pressure to resolve issues of access and movement, it seems dangerous to commit lots of money to growing an economy when the constraints aren’t about the ability of the Palestinians to be productive, but about their ability to turn their productivity into economic growth.”
Citing security concerns, Israel has refused to remove the more than 600 checkpoints and barriers that paralyse Palestinian movement in the West Bank. It has tightened a military and economic cordon around Gaza since the Hamas takeover there.
The US-hosted conference in Annapolis in November, which excluded Hamas because the group refuses to recognise Israel or renounce violence, re-launched peace talks to try to secure a deal by the end of 2008 on how to create a Palestinian state.
If the aim was to marginalise Hamas, it is not working, according to an opinion poll this week which showed 31 per cent support for the group, against 49 per cent for Fatah – numbers almost identical to those in a poll taken before Annapolis.
“The stabilisation of Hamas’s popularity reflects an almost total lack of confidence in the peace process unleashed by the Annapolis meeting,” concluded the survey by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research in Jerusalem.
Deprived of dignity
Palestinians are living what the International Committee of the Red Cross calls a deep human crisis denying them dignity.
“The situation is alarming in Gaza and it is worsening everywhere,” said Dorothea Krimitsas, the ICRC’s Middle East spokeswoman. “Political action needs to be taken immediately.”
Donors have already spent billions of dollars in the occupied territories, especially since the 1993 Oslo interim peace accords created the Palestinian Authority led by the late Yasser Arafat that many saw as the nucleus for a future state.
Israeli-Palestinian violence wrecked many foreign-funded projects after the last US-led peace talks collapsed in 2000.
Big sums were also lost to graft and mismanagement under Arafat.
But Western donors have voiced confidence in financial reforms undertaken in recent years by Salam Fayyad, the former Palestinian finance minister who is now Abbas’s prime minister.
Israeli analyst Barry Rubin, who heads the Global Research in International Affairs Center in Herzliya, insisted the aid pledged in Paris could not revive the Palestinian economy because of “corruption, incompetence, and unwillingness and inability to restore order on the Palestinian side”.
If these issues were untreated, he argued, the removal of Israeli measures would make little difference. “Let’s suppose Israel lifts movement restrictions, will international investors rush to invest in the Palestinian economy? No.”
Ali Jarbawi, of Bir Zeit University near Ramallah, dismissed as “empty talk” the idea that corruption and poor governance, not Israeli measures, were behind Palestinian economic woes.
“The generous donations underscore the international community’s trust in the current Palestinian leadership,” he said.
The $7.4 billion pledged exceeds the sum Fayyad had asked for in his three-year economic plan, but is less than the $8.4 billion that the World Bank reckons Israeli curbs on movement have cost Palestinians in lost income over the past five years.
“If the roadblocks and closures and travel restrictions remain, then the economic outlook will be mediocre and it won’t be enough to bring about a significant improvement in the living standards of the Palestinian people,” Fayyad said on Tuesday.He predicted economic growth of more than 10 per cent a year if Israel lifted its stranglehold on Palestinian mobility.—Reuters
