The Jerusalem Post has rather unintentionally amusing article regarding the European Union whining about picking up the dole tab for the Palestinians and claiming the ‘EU taxpayers bear settlement burden’. Oy vey – insert me rolling my eyes.
Israel’s settlement policy helps strangle the Palestinian economy and makes the Palestinian government more dependent on foreign aid, the European Commission said Monday. In an unusually harsh statement, the commission said that “it is the European taxpayers who pay most of the price of this dependence.”
The commission said expropriation of fertile land for Israeli settlements, roads that serve settlers only and West Bank checkpoints helped constrain Palestinian economic growth and made the Palestinian government more dependent on aid. The European Union is one of the largest donors to the Palestinian Authority. The commission said that in 2009 alone, it had paid more than 200 million euros ($280 million) to help cover the Palestinian budget deficit.
I know it’s fashionable to characterize “Jew Only” roads in the disputed territories but it’s not accurate. All Israeli citizens, be they Druze, Arab, Christian or Jew can drive on the so-called settler roads which Palestinian nationals are restricted from using. It wasn’t always this way, but there are only so many sniper attacks, ambushes, stoning and gasoline bombs thrown into Israeli licensed cars before someone in the IDF says – enough. Of course, there are roads in the disputed territories which restricted to only Arabs….as in no Israeli-Jews but Israeli-Arabs are allowed – brownie points to be the first who can figure out who is in charge of those ‘roads’.
The EU really has two choices – tell the Palestinians the buck has stopped or suck it up and pay out. The EU whiners don’t really comprehend how much worse the tab could be – especially if the Netanyahu Administration bows to international pressure and institutes a building settlement freeze:
The Jerusalem Post:
The last thing that Abu Mohammed al-Najjar wants is for Israel to succumb to US and European pressure and halt construction in the West Bank settlements. As far as the 58-year-old laborer is concerned, freezing the construction would be a disaster not only for him and his family, but for thousands of other Palestinians working in various settlements in the West Bank.
(…)”I don’t care what the leaders say and do,” al-Najjar told The Jerusalem Post at one of the new construction sites in Ma’aleh Adumim. “I need to feed my seven children, and that’s all I care about for now.” The phenomenon of Palestinians building new homes for Jewish settlers is not new. In fact, Palestinian laborers have been working in the construction business from the first day the settlements began in the West Bank.
Today, Palestinian Authority officials estimate, more than 12,000 Palestinians are employed by both Jewish and Arab contractors building new homes in the settlements. In some cases, Palestinians have found jobs in settlements that are located near their villages and towns.
Jamal Abu Sharikheh, 27, of the village of Bet Ur al-Tahta, has been working as a construction laborer in Givat Ze’ev for the past three years. Asked if he had any problem building homes in the settlements at a time when the international community was demanding that Israel freeze the construction work, the father of four also said he was trying to support his family “in a dignified manner.” (…)”If they want us to leave our work, they should offer us an alternative,” Abu Sharikheh said. “We don’t come to work in the settlements for ideological reasons or because we support the settlement movement. We come here because our Palestinian and Arab governments haven’t done anything to provide us with better jobs.”
Back in Ma’aleh Adumim, most of the Palestinian laborers said they had no problem revealing their identities. “We’re not doing anything wrong,” explained Ibrahim Abu Tair, a 42-year-old father of eight from the village of Um Tuba, southwest of Jerusalem. “We’re not collaborators and we’re not terrorists. We just want to work.”
(…)”We can’t tell the workers to stay at home without providing them with solutions,” admitted a Palestinian official in Ramallah. “We’re talking about thousands of families in the West Bank that rely on this work as their sole source of income.” Some of the laborers said that boycotting work in the settlements would be ineffective and pointless because their employers would have no difficulty replacing them with Chinese or other foreign workers. “Look how many foreign workers there are inside Israel today,” complained Jawdat Uwaisat, 44, of the village of Sawahreh in the Bethlehem area. “There are about 150,000 workers from different countries who have taken our places of work inside Israel. They are even bringing workers from Thailand and Turkey.”
He said that he and his colleagues working for Israelis earn almost three times what they would receive doing the same work for Palestinian construction companies. “The Palestinian employers pay us NIS 100 to NIS 150 a day,” Uwaisat said. “The Israeli companies, by contrast, pay NIS 350 to NIS 450 a day. That’s why many of us prefer to work for Israeli companies, even if the construction is in the settlements.”
(…)”If you see how big some of these settlements are, you will understand why the talk about a two-state solution is kalam fadi [nonsense],” commented Iyad Mansour, 55, of the Kalandia refugee camp, who has been working in Ma’aleh Adumim for the past three years.
Sure, by all means, go institute your settlement building freeze and cut off the legal productive livelihood of 12,000 plus Palestinian families but just don’t ever ask me for a nickel to finance their dole tab.