The half-salary state... when bureaucracy rules a people without sovereignty

In a small corner of this crowded world, the undisputed center of the universe, where its impact is felt in everything, in international politics, global trade, and financial markets, it is indeed a small corner, but it is large enough for generations to fight over it, the Arab and Islamic worlds on one side, and the Western world on the other, and between them, a Western colonial and settlement project weighs heavily on its chest, with boundless ambitions.

In one corner of this small corner, there is a Palestinian Authority, resembling a state in every way except sovereignty: a president and a vice president, ministers and general managers, pictures on the walls, strict protocols, luxurious offices, official seals, speeches and slogans. Almost everything is present, with only the essence missing: freedom and independence.

In this fragile "state," employees have been receiving half a salary or a little more for years. Half a salary for a full life; for waiting at checkpoints, eating a daily meal of humiliation, enduring the high cost of living, and remaining silent about monopoly, favoritism, and corruption. Intermittent and incomplete salaries, and we might be right to say that the banks are collecting what's left of them. We all know that this is due to the withholding of clearing funds. Nevertheless, administrative decrees have not stopped issuing new appointment decisions or inventing formal titles.

In this country, the national dream is summed up in a hymn sung by a tearful, barefoot child, and in an official news bulletin announcing to the people a new decree, or a visit from one official to another, and iron-armored convoys where they shake hands warmly as if they came from the two poles of the icy earth, amidst a crowded audience of cameras, everyone wants to document the historic moment, even though both may need secret permission to cross to the meeting place again, as no one moves freely, and even those who are preceded or surrounded by cars with tinted windows need coordination or permission to cross from one governorate to another. Nevertheless, this administrative system insists on displaying the manifestations of power, lavish conferences, solemn celebrations, resounding titles, promotions and medals... All of this takes place on a land suffocated by gates and barriers, and sealed off by a single settler who came from the ends of the earth, and above all, a people who are being slaughtered from vein to vein, killed with fire and iron, whether in the south or the north, settled in the plains or inhabited the mountains, some of them suffering from death and poverty, and all of them suffering from the absence of a horizon, The ambiguity of the future, which seems suspended between an occupation that will not go away and an authority that will not be liberated.

In this evolving spot, power is not measured by its ability to liberate the land or protect the people, but by the number of ministries, meetings, and length of processions. The state has become a skillfully staged theatrical spectacle. Officials gather around a table decorated with flowers, exchanging flowery phrases and fake smiles, then they all disperse to our shared misery, where there is a scene of “no sovereignty,” “no freedom,” and “no power.” The occupation continues, as if there is no state here. Settlements expand, as if there is no authority here. Checkpoints strangle the Palestinian’s day, as if there is no peaceful resistance here. All of this happens as if there are no people here.

Yet, in another corner of this absurd scene, protocol meetings are held, and enormous budgets are being spent. These should have been spent protecting a threatened village, supporting a farmer uprooted with his trees, or another displaced with his livestock. Previously, international institutions warned of an imminent economic collapse and repeatedly issued reports about a catastrophic situation. But there, not long ago, the Palestinian Authority continues to construct a paper illusion. This disconnect between the appearance of governance and the essence of reality is not merely an administrative flaw; it is a reproduction of the reality of the occupation, and a domestication of national liberation ambitions into petty administrative ambitions. Liberation has come to mean the unhindered movement of official convoys through checkpoints, not the removal of these checkpoints. In the "half-salary state," the dream no longer lies in independence, but in obtaining a full salary, a work permit within the settlements, a card that allows easy movement, or perhaps an opportunity to escape a life of double suffocation, without equality between its two sides: the suffocation of the occupation and the suffocation of a bureaucracy divorced from reality.

Thus, the nation's greatest issue is transformed into a salary crisis, the national project into an agenda, and resistance into written interventions in official reports. The state remains confined to paper, and the citizen a prisoner behind the bars of reality. In real states, authority is built to serve the people, but in the land of half a salary, the people are merely a silent backdrop for an authority that struggles with the appearance of a state without possessing its soul.

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In this fragile "state," employees have been receiving half a salary or a little more for years. Half a salary for a full life; for waiting at checkpoints, eating a daily meal of humiliation, enduring the high cost of living, and remaining silent about monopoly, favoritism, and corruption.