Freezing Funds and the Palestinian Will

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

sattarkassem@hotmail.com

For the third time, Israel has decided to freeze funds belonging to the Palestinian Authority, aside from the many occasions on which it delayed their disbursement. Under the 1994 Paris Economic Protocol, Israel collects the customs duties owed on goods imported through its ports, and then remits them to the Palestinian Authority. These funds have formed part of the Authority’s budget, and have helped it cover a fair share of its expenditures. The Paris Protocol addresses a number of important economic matters, among them the liberalization of the economy of the territory occupied in ‘67, and the reduction of restrictions on import operations.

Israel withheld these funds from the Palestinian Authority after Hamas formed its government following its victory in the Legislative Council elections, and the donor states squeezed the Palestinians financially as one means of pressuring them into complying with the will of Israel and of the Western states generally. Israel also withheld them after the formation of the national unity government in 2007, because it did not like the internal Palestinian agreement, and neither did the Americans and the Europeans. And now Israel has decided to hold the funds back once again, following the reconciliation agreement reached between Hamas and Fatah. Israel has previously delayed disbursing the funds on several occasions, on the grounds — according to Israel’s justifications — that the Palestinian Authority was not properly fulfilling its security duties toward Israeli security, or against Palestinian “terrorism.”

A number of “unthinking” and “deviant” people, as some Palestinian Authority writers and some Western-affiliated governmental organizations would put it, warned time and again against the Paris Economic Protocol, and said plainly that this agreement would turn the Palestinians into wards of Israel and the Western states — hanging an economic noose around the Palestinians’ necks that would quickly tighten should the Palestinians stray from the wishes of those holding the purse strings. There should have been repeated, careful thought before signing any agreement with Israel, but unilateralism and improvisation stood in the way of sound methodology.

We should have weighed matters scientifically, but internal bickering took over, and the song “Where’s the Salary, Where?” appeared as incitement against Hamas’s election victory, after which Mahmoud Abbas stood up and said that bread was more important than democracy. What he meant by this was abandoning our free political will in exchange for the money that comes to us from abroad. Some of these positions struck like a thunderbolt on people’s heads, and the slogan “We shall starve, but we shall not kneel” turned into the slogan “We shall kneel, so we do not starve.” It was a true tragedy that part of an occupied people should insist on keeping its daily bread in the hand of its enemy, unconcerned with its free political will — which is supposed to be the very thing that will establish a Palestinian state.

Economic matters were subsequently made worse by the government now ruling in the West Bank, because it has taken to placing the West Bank’s economy in the custody of the World Bank and Palestinian capitalists, following the pattern of Egypt’s economic policy under Mubarak. The current government has opened the door to more imports, the value of the financial revenues controlled by Israel has risen, it has made bank borrowing easier so that people fall into debt, and it has begun privatizing some important services. And here I ask the world: who else on this earth, living under occupation, has begun thinking about economic privatization, financial markets, and banking facilities, other than the powers-that-be in Palestine?

Now, the media are speaking heavily about Israel’s arrogance and its mistreatment of the Palestinians, about its displeasure with internal Palestinian reconciliation, and its violation of agreements, and so on. It is true that the Zionists are degenerate, murderous, bloodthirsty, racist, exploitative, seditious, bloodsuckers — but this does not weigh for much, because the enemy works to exhaust its enemy by every means and method available. Whoever hands his own beard to his enemy bears the responsibility for it himself. Did anyone expect Israel to pat the Palestinians on the back because they reconciled? Or because they decided to resolve their internal problems in a respectable manner?

Will we learn the lesson this time, and decide that our free political will is more important than the money that comes to us from the West, and than the Paris Economic Protocol? Is it not time for us to know that with our free political will we can manage our own economic and financial affairs, and that the utter disgrace lies in depending on the enemy to finance our daily bread? And will we change the traditional, indignant question that insists on begging — “From where shall we feed our children?” — into the question: “What can we do so that our children are not left at the mercy of the enemy?”

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “حجز الأموال والإرادة الفلسطينية” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.