Economic Strangulation: From a Public Financial Crisis to an Existential Threat

About a year ago, the Israeli government stopped transferring all clearing revenues to the Palestinian Authority, which deprived the public treasury of about two-thirds of its due revenues, amounting to more than (10) billion shekels annually. The “zeroing out” of all clearing revenues came without any justification, not even within an Israeli Knesset law or an official government decision, but rather a decision by the extremist Finance Minister “Smotrich,” with the support of key figures in the Israeli government, and within the context of a clear and even declared Israeli strategy towards the economic strangulation of Palestinians, in order to undermine Palestinian entity, dry up the financial resources of the Palestinian Authority, and portray it as incapable of meeting basic services for citizens, especially the salaries of government employees, retirees, and other entities that depend on government salaries, leading to the irregular provision of public services to Palestinian citizens, most notably health, education, and social protection services, among others. Israeli measures were not limited to “zeroing out” clearing revenues and cutting off the most important public treasury resources, but also coincided with a series of other Israeli measures to strike at the joints of the national economy, such as the banking sector, the private sector, and even civil society organizations. Moreover, it went beyond that to preventing Palestinians from their most basic rights to employment opportunities. These measures included creating a shekel accumulation crisis, which now threatens the banking sector, the private sector, and citizens alike, closing the Israeli market to about (205) thousand Palestinian workers for two and a half years, the continuous threat of severing banking relations between Palestinian and Israeli banks, and the complete siege on all Palestinian villages and cities through the policy of gates and checkpoints, which numbered more than a thousand gates, checkpoints, and earth mounds, and obstacles to import and export movement, and raising costs on supply chains, in addition to the increasing tightening and strangulation of the work of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), as well as restricting the work of international institutions in the Palestinian territories, and creating restrictions on the work of civil society organizations in Palestine, in addition to settler violence in the West Bank, which has become a threat to the lives and livelihoods of Palestinian citizens. It is no coincidence that these escalating measures coincide with the report of the extremist settler organization “Regavim,” or the statements of Israeli leaders and officials, most notably Finance Minister “Smotrich” and the head of the Religious Zionist Party, and Economy Minister “Barkat” from the Likud Party, and even former Israeli Defense Minister “Lieberman” from the opposition and head of the Yisrael Beiteinu Party, all of which converged on the necessity of ending the Palestinian entity, especially in the West Bank, preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state, stripping Palestinian citizens of their national rights, and creating an environment hostile to life or investment in Palestine through both hard and soft power. The economy has become a primary strategy for achieving this vision, and creating a popular state – under economic pressure and systematic impoverishment – towards accepting any other solutions at the expense of the Palestinian entity and national rights, and through working to re-engineer Palestinian collective consciousness, and employing economic pressure tools to create structural and social collapses, and creating a state of “creative chaos,” which makes Palestinians search for individual solutions to their livelihood crises, panting after their daily needs, at the expense of their national issues. Through an analysis of the time series of Israeli measures, especially in terms of economic strangulation, they are constantly escalating, applied to the breath of Palestinians, and constitute an existential threat to the Palestinian people, which requires the solidarity and integration of all Palestinians to devise and formulate a national strategy to confront this existential threat, before it is too late. The crisis is not just a “salary” crisis, and it is not a technical issue in the shekel mass in the Palestinian economy, and minimizing the crisis to a public financial crisis is an escape from reality. The technical measures of the Ministry of Finance, despite all its efforts to adapt to the crisis, will not end the crisis because its root is political par excellence, and stems from a comprehensive Israeli strategy. Moreover, waiting for the date of the Israeli elections, or the US midterm congressional elections, in the hope of change, is relying on the unknown. Once again, there may still be time to remedy the situation, through a comprehensive Palestinian national strategy, but waiting for “Godot,” who will never come, in the hope of finding solutions in the future, will make the cost of any future solutions higher, especially since Israel is racing against time to effectively control the West Bank, create an environment hostile to life, and create facts on the ground that “Smotrich” described as changes similar to changing the DNA of the system, so that they are slow, sustainable, and irreversible.