The Palestinian Authority's Money

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

If someone were to poll the Palestinian street about how often the word “salary” comes up against the word “Palestine,” what would he find? Everyone already knows the answer. A national cause such as that of the prisoners may temporarily edge its way into people’s attention, but national concerns remain marginal beside the concerns of daily livelihood and consumption, except among a small minority who find it hard to secure any place for themselves in decision-making. A consumer culture dominates over a national culture, and the cause of Palestine has retreated very greatly in the face of the Zionist advance and settlement construction.

To begin, let me recall what I wrote and lectured to people about, again and again, from the very first days after the signing of the Oslo Accord. I told everyone that Israel would have no need to deploy its army to seal off the cities and villages of the land occupied in ‘67 — a pile of dirt would suffice to confine people within their own population centers — and that Palestinians would come to practice the occupation by proxy; that Israel would find relief from chasing children through the alleys of Nablus and Hebron and from the daily burdens of administering the population’s affairs. I said that Israel and the West would buy the Palestinian will with money, that people would turn away from their national concerns in favor of secondary ones, that money would flow in as the price of Palestine, and that the militant who spent years in the prisons of the sons of Zion would become a security collaborator with Israel’s security agencies, arresting Palestinian militants himself.

The conclusion was an easy one, requiring no genius or brilliance — only a little reflection on the terms of the Oslo Accord to see in them the darkness of the Palestinian days to come.

Strikes and Economic Peace

Zionist settlement continues, as do the arrests and the various traditional Zionist policies, while we move from one strike to another, demanding more money, demanding that salaries be paid on schedule. Today the teachers, tomorrow the nurses, the day after the drivers, and university professors the day after that, and so on — and all the while Israel stays perfectly relaxed, listening to us talk in our public and private gatherings about salaries, tax revenues, and American aid.

This is the “economic peace” that the devils of the West, America chief among them, spoke of. The people of the West judged Israel to have been foolish, failing to exploit the psychological and tribal cracks that Arab societies suffer from, and concluded that it ought instead to distract people with money so that the homeland would come apart. The people of the West made use of a great many Palestinian intellectuals and academics to produce a variety of studies on Palestinian society, so as to gain access into it, and to invert the slogan “hunger rather than submission” into its opposite, and the slogan “death rather than humiliation” into “humiliation rather than death.” And they succeeded splendidly in establishing Palestinian leaderships and figures ready to pay the national price in exchange for the privileges and comforts they receive.

Put simply, the people of the West, working through the Palestinian leaderships, struck at Palestinian producers — farmers, cobblers, weavers, carpenters, blacksmiths, tailors — while increasing the numbers of government employees. The reason is to reduce the number of people who are materially self-reliant, and to increase the number of people who depend on others for their daily bread. They put roughly 250,000 Palestinians out of productive work, and raised the number of government employees to around 180,000 — not counting retirees, hangers-on, and others. And when a person depends on his enemy to secure his daily bread, peace is achieved.

Dr. Salam Fayyad and the Salaries

Many guns are now aimed at Dr. Salam Fayyad, laying the full responsibility for the situation at his feet. He does bear a share of the responsibility, but the greater responsibility belongs to whoever signed the Oslo Accord, the Paris Protocol, and the Taba Agreement, and worked to implement them. Whoever signed the agreements and worked to put them into effect bears the greater responsibility, and it is he who first entangled the Palestinian people in this trap. It is not the right of one who recognized Israel, coordinated security with it, and normalized relations with it to now come out and lecture us on patriotism.

The issue has nothing to do with national positions and everything to do with money. I remember quite well how those who saw the Palestinian cause as a struggle between themselves and Dr. Salam used to praise him and extol his professional abilities, and I see how they behave now. Yesterday, there was enough money to be sprinkled here and there; today the money has grown scarce. And Fayyad has no bearing on this matter, either yesterday or today, because the Palestinian Authority in this regard is nothing more than a cashier receiving money from hostile parties to distribute as it sees fit — some of it going to salaries, some to services, and some to corruption.

For these people, Fayyad is good when money is available, and no good when it is not, and what is demanded of him is that he develop his skills at begging.

The Thief and the Beggar

…opens the door of his own house to those who wish to violate his honor. The beggar is base, and his psyche is always primed for reproach, contempt, and humiliation.

The most dangerous thing about the agreements with Israel is that they required taming the Palestinian people into the psychology of the beggar. And the leaderships that have made a profession of buying consciences find it easy to expose the Palestinian people to a policy of begging.

Salaries for Whom?

Palestinians pay taxes, and the begging is done in their name — but for whom is the money? The money is supposed to be spent on the taxpayers, but this does not happen fully in the land occupied in ‘67. About 97% of the members of the security services belong to the Fatah movement, and about 64% of the civil apparatus belongs to the movement as well. Government jobs are, for the most part, reserved for the ruling party, and it is the party that ought to be finding money in its own name, not the people’s — while it is the salary-holder who pays the taxes. Public services are provided to the Palestinian people, and taxes are supposed to correspond to the services the ordinary citizen receives. But it is also observed that members of the ruling party and their acquaintances and relatives obtain greater benefits from public services because they have connections, while whoever has no connections can only get his affairs done with great difficulty.

The overwhelming majority of retirees are children of the ruling party, as are those who receive money without real job titles, or with fictitious ones.

What does Dr. Salam think of splitting the budget into two: one budget for the ruling party, comprising the money obtained through begging, and another for the general public, comprising the taxes they pay? My conviction is that what the general public — outside the ruling party — pays in taxes covers the expenditures required for this segment of the people. These ordinary people have no need of 30 ministers, nor of security agencies beyond the police, nor of Palestinian factions sitting atop piles of money without providing any national service.

We Struggled, and We Have a Right

We keep hearing the refrain: “We struggled, and the credit for the achievements is ours.” First, there are no achievements — what has happened is a Palestinian retreat to meet Israeli demands. Second, the militant does not ask for wages. Third, there is no Palestinian who has not struggled in one way or another. Fourth, there is a great difference between one who confesses under interrogation, gets imprisoned, and comes out a leader, and one who does not confess, is not imprisoned, and never becomes a leader — states do not return their captured soldiers to the ranks of their armies. Fifth, the militant has no right to relinquish what he struggled for. And sixth, there is no struggle left in one who carries a rifle by permit of the occupation.

And it seems, from the repetition of this refrain, that the struggle was for the sake of obtaining personal comforts, not for the sake of Palestine.

You Want to Save Money?

It is very easy to save money and gradually rid ourselves of the yoke of hostile funding, through the following steps:

First: cut off funding to the Palestinian factions, because the mission of these factions is to liberate Palestine, not to live off the Palestinian people, and they must be made to return all the money they have taken since 1994. The Palestinian people are not responsible for financing factional offices or paying the salaries of their leaders and their entourages, and so on.

Second: stop paying salaries to roughly 400 former ministers, or those holding the rank of minister.

Third: impose strict oversight on the expenditures of the Palestinian presidency, about which we hear a great deal.

Fourth: demand that everyone who has taken money from the Authority without holding a genuine post return that money to the treasury.

Fifth: collect all government vehicles, including those of the presidency and the prime minister’s office, and sell them at public auction, without touching the vehicles of education, health, civil defense, and the police. The president of Palestine and every official should use their own feet or their own private cars, if they truly want to establish a Palestinian state.

Sixth: review the tax files, because there is administrative imprecision in many files, particularly those belonging to the wealthy and the influential.

Seventh: dismiss every employee who obtained his post through administrative corruption.

Eighth: revoke the pension of every person who obtained his pension through administrative corruption.

Ninth: stop paying salaries to employees who never show up at their workplaces, since most employees do not actually work, and their presence at the workplace costs the Authority electricity, water, and telephone service, and may well cost it social ills stemming from idle preoccupation with people instead of work. It is possible that the non-working employee could put his time to use in some productive activity instead, such as tilling land, growing crops, or raising livestock.

Tenth: redeploy employees into effective roles, such as transferring employees from the security services into education, to ease the burden on teaching staff, or into the police.

The National Economy

If we want to preserve our dignity and hold fast to the recovery of our rights, we must shift toward a productive economy and adopt a policy of self-reliance. We must overturn this entire economic condition we find ourselves in, and return to our priorities, which come down to our homeland and the recovery of the full, fixed national rights of the Palestinian people. What we are in now is error and delusion, a weakening of ourselves, and a comfort granted to Israel and its allies. We are betraying our homeland now, betraying the blood of our martyrs, the groans of our women, and the tears of our children. Shame on us.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “أموال السلطة الفلسطينية” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.