Thread by @Marianhouk

Abbas suspended monthly regular salaries, govt allowances to 5,043 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip at the beginning of February, Palestinian media outlets and human rights organizations have said: report by Amira Hass haaretz.com/middle-east-ne…

"The Gazans affected by the withholding.. are affiliated with either Islamic Jihad, Hamas or with supporters of Mohammed Dahlan...
Some 900 of the more than 5,000 people affected are recipients of prison allowances..sources said, and 133 of them are..currently in Israeli prisons"

"Families receiving allowances b/c they have children who were killed or wounded by the Israeli army account for 1,700 of the affected. The remaining individuals..are either salaried public sector employees or retired public sector workers for whom the funds are pension benefits"

"Over the past 2 or 3 years, the Finance Ministry in Ramallah has gradually cut
public sector salary payments in the Gaza Strip on Abbas’ orders. About 30,000 public sector employees have either been forced to take early retirement or have had their pension payments reduced..."

"...They include 17,000 members of the security forces and 13,000 other public sector employees"...

"In addition, the wages of about 40,000 salaried employees have been reduced by
30-50%"
[If I understand, this affects mainly Fatah loyalists who were old to stay home + did, after Hamas' 2007 "military coup*, but also low-wage earners who continued to work from mid-June 2007]

And "Last year, the PA suspended wage payments for a few months to tens of thousands of salaried employees in Gaza, including supporters of the PA + the Fatah movement. Now the PA has resumed paying those salaries but is only making partial payment"...

[Needless to say, this is not good governance...]

[And, worse there has been little-to-no c;lear information given to the public or, more critically, to those affected...]

The report could be read together with this other interesting report, published yesterday in Haaretz: "Israel currently holds between 3 + 30 billion shekels in social benefits belonging to 125,000 Palestinian who worked in Israel since 1970"... haaretz.com/middle-east-ne…

"...That pile of money was supposed to fund the social security net.
It is not clear what the exact figure is, or why Israel won't disclose it.
The Paris Protocol of 1994, signed between the PLO + Israel, agreed to transfer this sum to a Palestinian Social Security fund, which

"...in turn was supposed to compensate Palestinian workers, wherever they may be.
If the [Palestinian Social Security] law had actually gone into effect, then Israel would have had to transfer the money"...

"But since its announcement in 2016, protests have erupted regularly against the law in major West Bank cities. Some have joined the protests because employers + employees alike cannot afford the contributions required by the Law from both employees (7%) or employers (9%)...

"But the more unanimous query, which has functioned as a protest slogan, is: 'Who will secure our social security?'..."
haaretz.com/middle-east-ne…

"A social security fund is a long-term project, a pillar of modern statehood. The Palestinian Authority is a tumultuous and fragile non-state. It operates in a model in which structures + laws can be overridden"...
[as the salaries, pensions, and allowances in Gaza have been]..

"It also has a bad habit of covert dealings, signing all kinds of monumental agreements, usually with Israel, on matters related to energy, electricity, water, and communications without consultation with the public and without transparency and accountability"..
[Still no mail]

[Yes, there's still no mail service in the West Bank, incl East Jerusalem! We have to use FEDEX or DHL for everything, it's now 200 Israeli shekels for a single-page letter or birthday card + I was recently charged 134 shekels EXTRA *for Israeli inspection* for 1 piece of mail]

Haaretz: "For the Palestinian people, this means living day to day, in survival mode, and trusting no one with any of their meager earnings. For the Palestinian Authority, as well, these are emergency times. Any figure between 3 to 30 billion shekels would be a golden lifeline"..

+ "There is another peculiar but telling piece of information. In 2009, Israeli MK Dov Henin submitted a query to the finance ministry about the status of Palestinian workers’ benefits. The finance minister, Yuval Steinitz at the time, answered, very briefly, that...

"...in the years 1994-2009, 1.2 billion shekels were collected, and 1.1 billion of those had already been transferred for implementation. In actuality, no official transfer had been reported, and no workers have been compensated"... <-- This has to be investigated.

"That nearly decade-old question reflects the long game of smoke + mirrors surrounding this huge sum of money, money that belongs not to the USA, not to Qatar, not even to Israel or the PA, but to the Palestinian people + to them only"...

"It proves that the Palestinian street instinct is right.
There is no one to secure their social security, just as there is no one to guarantee the security of their land, their homes, their olive trees, their cars, or their physical bodies, for that matter": Yasmin Zaher

"The issue is not merely one of economics or of internal Palestinian politics. The reality of the occupation is that all of us are living in one state where Israel governs all land, taxes all goods, and holds the keys to all borders"...

"In a society with deepening inequality, where there is no minimum wagem yet [govt] employees can earn more than $10,000 a month, it is working-class people who pay"...

Yes, it's these men, but not only these men: "It's Palestinian construction workers who, for decades, woke up at 4am to cross zoo-like checkpoints into Israel, to labor in squalid conditions w/ poor safety standards, who at the end of the day may never see money they worked for"

--> "Realizing that there is no one to protect their rights, many workers have taken matters into their own hands. Over the years, Palestinian workers have relinquished as much as 20% of their savings to lawyers in Israel who would claim their benefits for them"...

+ "As the Palestinian Social Security Law was approaching, and before it was nixed, employers in Israel even witnessed a sudden frenzy of workers wanting to quit their jobs if it meant a chance at salvaging their savings before they got transferred to the PA"...

--> "The right to social security was a historic victory for workers and social movements around the world. In a responsible and conscientious society, it would
be accepted with open arms".

But "as long as Israel continues to suffocate Gaza + delegate certain West Bank tasks to a nepotistic operational arm which has one hand tied behind its back, then it is ordinary people who will pay the price" = haaretz.com/middle-east-ne…