A visit to the West Bank: economic apartheid – part one
Israel’s tightening restrictions are deepening the West Bank’s economic crisis. In part one of a four-part series, Jeremy Webb’s first-hand account examines unemployment, movement controls and mounting Palestinian economic hardship.
If you are one of the very few visitors to the West Bank in recent months, you will be struck, as I was, by the extent to which the Israeli government since 7 October is taking steps to further degrade the West Bank economy and aggressively increase restrictions on Palestinians’ daily life. It’s a combustible mix and one which indicates a rapid intensification of what is being called apartheid. Among Israelis, there is what amounts to an evident siege mentality. That global opinion is turning against their actions in the West Bank and Gaza is rarely acknowledged: any suggestion of apartheid being practised is most often seen as offensive and rejected outright.
For visitors to the West Bank, evidence of what is seen as apartheid is, however, ubiquitous. But it is being less well chronicled given Gaza has been sucking the oxygen out of coverage of the West Bank.
A traveller to Bethlehem will pass long stretches of walls, fences and numerous checkpoints. On arrival, what is striking is its third-world look, contrasting with the first-world feel of much of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. In discussing the obviously dilapidated state of much of the city’s infrastructure with a Bethlehem municipal official, he pointed to the clusters of water tanks on building roofs. The water supply, he explained, was meeting only half of the demand. The underlying problem, he said, was that since the mid-1990s the Israeli government had been holding back annually around $US1 billion of tax revenue collected on behalf of the Palestinian Authority. Since 7 October 2023, this amount had risen to around $US2.5 billion, meaning some 60 per cent of the Authority’s budget for the West Bank was being withheld.
But it becomes clear to visitors that this is by no means the only or the most important way in which the West Bank economy is being progressively crippled. In Hebron, unemployed youths were ubiquitously visible in the streets. My young, part-time guide had recently become one of them, having to drop out of the final year of his engineering degree. He is one of the 30 per cent of Palestinians who are unemployed. In comparison, Israel’s unemployment rate is at a near-full-employment level of 3 per cent.
Israel’s wider role in holding back the Palestinian economy’s growth was explained to me by the student’s father, who was in business making small household goods and tourist souvenirs. Israel’s control of borders and internal checkpoints separating the West Bank’s differing administrative areas was stifling his business. Constant random closures of the complex array of permanent checkpoints, temporary flying checkpoints, road closures, restricted roads and separation barriers (in all, over 900 in the West Bank) meant his employees and goods were continually being held up, diverted or not arriving. Restrictive and changing permit requirements for goods were an added, expensive and constantly changing challenge.
My student guide was to reveal a further major impediment to the West Bank’s economy. Driving by one of what he called the apartheid walls surrounding the West Bank’s Jewish settlements, he noted that several weeks ago a Palestinian worker had been shot there trying to enter, one of 65 shot trying to avoid the ban imposed after 7 October on Palestinians working in Jewish settlements. There was huge resentment, my guide said, not simply at the ban but because Palestinian workers were being replaced by Asian guest workers.
The International Labour Organisation puts the loss of jobs at some 150,000–200,000 workers and finds that the loss of employment has had a major impact on Palestinians’ household income. Currently, West Bank workers earn only 25 per cent of the income of Jewish Israelis.
Assessments of the overall effect of restrictions on movement, loss of budgetary funding and loss of job opportunities show that the effect on growth has been heavy. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) finds that movement restrictions imposed over decades have seriously impeded the growth of major enterprises. It estimates that between 2000 and 2024 the West Bank lost around $US200 billion in cumulative GDP. Such losses are currently estimated to reduce the West Bank’s GDP by around 25 per cent, and cumulatively the West Bank’s economic growth could, by now, be 66 per cent larger. In contrast, over the past decade Israel’s economic growth has been at least double that of the West Bank.
The longer-term strategy of the Israeli government in imposing such harsh restrictions on the West Bank’s growth was nowhere convincingly explained to me. When discussed with Israelis, the restraints were almost always justified as being a product of an ongoing and increasing security threat. An academic study on the way in which Israel had deliberately hampered the growth of the West Bank economy in the aftermath of the first intifada in 1987 found the effects were in the end harmful to Israeli interests. There appeared to be no policy rationale other than a punitive one, leading to a reheating of Palestinians’ resentment towards Israel which, over time, would fuel the second intifada. The obvious question is: is history now repeating itself?
Read Parts two - four of this series:
The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.
