Madison Rafah Journal

16 Mar 2007
By Alistair Lyon, Special Correspondent

JENIN, West Bank, March 16 (Reuters) – Hajj Khalid puts only a few gold ornaments in his shop window in the West Bank town of Jenin. He knows any customers will want to sell, not buy.

A harsh economic crisis in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory has reduced many people to penury so severe they are trading in their wedding jewellery to make ends meet.

“Now my business has gone down because people don’t have any gold left to sell,” said Khalid, sitting in his small store in this once bustling market town in the northern West Bank.

Jenin’s economy has collapsed since a Palestinian uprising began in 2000. Israeli troops assaulted the town’s refugee camp in 2002, saying it was a major source of suicide bombers.

Now Israeli barriers, steel gates and checkpoints hinder access to the rest of the West Bank and have cut Jenin off from Israeli towns where Palestinians once found work. The days when Israeli Arabs and Jews popped over the Green Line to shop for cheap goods and repair their cars in Jenin are a distant memory.

“Things have got worse every year since the intifada,” the 55-year-old jeweller said. “A few years ago, I had more than 20 kg (44 pounds) of gold in stock. Now I have 2 or 3.”

Hardship has intensified since Hamas won elections last year. International powers halted aid to the new government because the Islamist movement refused to recognise Israel, renounce violence and accept past peace agreements.

The boycott, combined with Palestinian infighting and Israeli military and economic pressure on the Hamas-led government, has ravaged an already fragile economy.

Even though donors have sought other ways to pump in funds, the 161,000 Palestinians on the public payroll — who support a million people — have not had their full salaries for a year.

SHOT-OUT CASH MACHINES

“I’m on less than half pay,” said Lina Badarneh, executive secretary working in a grimy Agriculture Ministry office in Jenin. “Last month I got 380 shekels ($90) instead of 1,600.”

She said her husband, a computer engineer, was unemployed and she was the breadwinner for her four young children.

Already deep in debt to grocery shops, pharmacies and relatives, Badarneh, 36, said she had sold her wedding jewellery when she had fallen sick and needed expensive medicine.

“Now I only have these rings, which aren’t gold or silver, but they are old and I like them,” she said, spreading her fingers and showing a silver-coloured bracelet on her wrist.

Badarneh said shopkeepers had stopped giving credit. Trips to see relatives outside Jenin were a thing of the past.

“I haven’t been out of Jenin since I visited my sister in Nablus five years ago. We have to think of the taxi fare — it’s more important to buy food and school stuff.

“I couldn’t even go to my cousin’s wedding here because we couldn’t afford a present,” she said, a rueful smile crossing her pale face, framed by a headscarf.

The United Nations, citing Palestinian statistics, says two thirds of the 4 million people in the West Bank and Gaza Strip live in poverty and nearly half suffer from food insecurity.

Most people simply tighten their belts until they have run through every “coping mechanism” they can think of.

But crime rates are rising, and gunmen belonging to political factions or security forces are a law unto themselves.

Metal panels are nailed over what is left of Jenin’s four cash machines. Fighters of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade riddled them with bullets recently because their salaries were not paid. Gunmen in black woollen masks, who residents said were from the Palestinian Authority’s National Security Forces, were guarding one bank in case the Martyrs Brigade struck again.

TWILIGHT EXISTENCE

The economic pain gripping the Palestinian territories affects every aspect of life, from salaries to power supplies.

The pleasant hillside village of Rummaneh, a few km (miles) from Jenin, has had no electricity for the past three weeks.

The three hours a night it had before was supplied by the local council’s generator. The council has run out of money for fuel and the villagers cannot pay their electricity bills.

For Mahmoud Ali, an accountant who made enough money during a spell in Saudi Arabia to build a family home in Rummaneh, the candle-lit evenings add to his sense of a straitened existence.

“I wish there was hope,” he said over coffee on his patio, adding he could no longer give his seven children any pocket money or cover their school supplies. “We used to eat meat or chicken four times a week. Now it’s once or not at all.”
With no power for the washing machine, his wife now washes the clothes of her nine-member household by hand.

Ali works for a local construction materials company.

“But nobody is building after the Israeli fence went up,” he said of the barrier which Israel says is a key defence against suicide attacks, but which has eaten up much Palestinian land.

“This year my firm said they can’t pay the full salary and told us ‘work one day and stay at home the next’,” he said, wearing a suit even though it was one of his non-work days.

“It’s like our hen. It only lays an egg one day and not the next,” the 48-year-old smiled. (Additional reporting by Wael al-Ahmed)

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