Emad Mekay

WASHINGTON, Sep 18 2006 (IPS) — The U.S.-Israeli embargo on Palestinians imposed in the aftermath of the electoral victory of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, in the occupied territories has lead to severe poverty and nonpayment of Palestinian workers, a new study by a U.S. pro-labour group says.

The report by the Global Policy Network finds that the financial embargo imposed on Palestinians to penalise them for electing some members of Hamas to power in January has resulted in a quarter of Palestinian workers not receiving their salaries for the past six months.

The Democratic Workers’ Rights Centre in Palestine, which authored the report for the Global Policy Network, says that the embargo became more chronic in this quarter, leading to the fall of gross domestic product by 1.7 percent compared to the previous quarter.

More than 154,000 public workers were unable to obtain their salaries.

The percentage of Palestinian families living under the poverty line reached 66 percent, 88 percent of whom are in the Gaza Strip. This is a total of 2.4 million individuals in the second quarter of 2006.

The study says that the percentage of workers whose monthly wages are below the poverty line rose from 50.4 percent in the first quarter to 51.1 percent in the second quarter. This means that the actual average wage plunged in the second quarter compared to the first one.

Other labour indicators studied by the two groups were also grim. The average monthly household income declined from 644 to 343 dollars. The report says these figures show that individual monthly allocations do not exceed 55 dollars, or less than 1.8 dollars per day, a very small amount compared to international standards.

The report found that severe poverty is on the rise in Palestine and that per capita income is less than eight percent of Israeli per capita income. Palestinian family income is severely skewed, with the top 20 percent receiving 48.5 percent of total family income and the bottom 20 percent receiving only 4.6 percent.

The U.S. and Israel have been the leading voices backing the boycott. Last week, the European Union said it was studying lifting the sanctions. Washington, however, cautioned the Europeans not to rush to their decision, which comes after the Palestinians said they will create a national unity government that would involve Palestinians more aligned to U.S. and Israeli policies.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is scheduled to meet later this week in New York with her counterparts from the so-called Quartet – the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations – to chart out how best to respond to the proposed Palestinian unity government.

Meanwhile, Palestinians’ suffering is reaching unprecedented levels. On Monday, Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh had to cancel a speech he was due to give before the Palestinian Parliament after government employees who didn’t receive their salaries besieged his motorcade.

Haniyeh’s bodyguards opened fire outside the building to disperse the protesters, who were angry at the government’s failure to end the economic crisis.

Palestinians have also blamed Washington and Israel for their plight and say that the elections were actually encouraged by Washington which had, reportedly, financially backed rival candidates. Israel, the occupation force, also allowed the elections, hoping they would bring in a friendlier government.

The September 2006 issue of the in-house magazine of the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre said of the situation: “Despite pro-democracy rhetoric, Western response to the internationally-validated Palestinian legislative elections in January 2006 has sparked a politically-induced crisis and crippled the Palestinian economy. Ordinary Palestinians are suffering as donors freeze funding required to maintain humanitarian assistance and development programmes.”

There has been little international attention paid to the economic situation in the occupied Palestinian territories, but this week a group of Arab American writers issued a statement condemning the economic embargo and what they said was the silence of the U.S. media.

“The effects of this blockade have been worsened by the fact that in its recent invasion of Gaza, which went largely unreported in American media, Israel destroyed whatever remained of Gaza’s infrastructure in addition to killing at least 146 civilians, many of them children,” said the statement by the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI).

“We condemn not only the poor timing and strategic foolishness of this economic blockade, but also its immorality. A reaction to the Palestinians’ selection of Hamas to a parliamentary majority in a free and fair election, the economic blockade appears to collectively punish innocent people for doing nothing more than exercising their democratic rights,” said the group.

The Arab American writers and scholars said that they want to let their U.S. compatriots know that “that the United States government is more dangerous to the Palestinians than the Palestinians’ government ever possibly could be to Americans.”