Israeli Sweatshops For West Bank
Article published: Monday, May 19th 2008
Economic agreements between Israel, the USA and the EU will turn Palestine into a cheap labour zone for Israeli companies, Sarah Irving reports.
We lose millions of dollars in income because of the checkpoints, says architect Naseer Arafat from his office in the West Bank city of Nablus. Arafat was one of dozens of businessmen invited to meet Tony Blair during the former UK prime ministers tour of Palestine in January this year. Blair wanted to bring globalisation to the West Bank, but Arafat takes a dim view of his plan. Arafat foresees a Third Intifada, predicting that it will be a starving Intifada, bringing hunger to people without jobs or savings to fall back on. And that hunger, campaigners predict, will be a tool to coerce Palestinians to take poorly paid, dangerous jobs in a new wave of Israeli industrial zones built on stolen land. Activists like Daoud Hamoudi of the Stop the Wall campaign believe that recent negotiations at Annapolis in November 2007 will not herald a just peace for the Palestinian people, but a fate as cheap labour in Israeli factories. The European Union is forging ahead with economic links to Israel, giving Israeli companies preferential access to European markets. Consequently, Israeli exports to the EU have increased massively in recent years. But despite EU assurances that it prioritises human rights in its dealings with Israel, workers rights abuses are rife in export industries. Palestinians labouring in illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank are subjected to grim conditions, according to Israeli labour rights NGO Kav La Oved. Child labour is routine, pay is well below the Israeli minimum wage, and workers are often exposed to dangerous chemicals. Despite this, an estimated 18,000 Palestinians currently work in factories in illegal Israeli industrial settlements at Barkan, Mishor Adumim and Tulkarm, and in agricultural settlements in the Jordan Valley. Kav La Oved also accuses settlements of cherry-picking the best from an increasingly desperate workforce, leaving younger people with no opportunities to accumulate skills. The situation, says Daoud Hamoudi, is only set to get worse. Since the Annapolis conference plans for larger sweatshop zones on the edges of the West Bank have been revealed, built on stolen Palestinian land and funded by the German, US, Turkish and Japanese governments. They are likely to operate outside Israeli labour law, so workers will not have rights or access to benefits if they are injured or laid off. An estimated 500,000 Palestinians will be paid a standard wage rate of US$300 a month – a fraction of the Israeli minimum wage. The Israeli government has always justified measures such as the separation wall on Palestinian land, economic blockades and civilian deaths by the claim that it acts out of security concerns for Jewish Israelis. But the new drive towards construction of industrial zones belies this, revealing instead an economic interest in repression. The zones are explicitly seen by the Israeli state as a way of recouping the millions it spent building the Wall, according to World Bank reports. It will also exercise what right-wing economists call a disciplining effect on Israeli workers, who will see their jobs and benefits threatened by the proximity of cheap, well-educated labour only a few miles from home. Since Autumn 2007, existing checkpoints in the northern West Bank have grown from small shelters into big buildings with space for hundreds of vehicles to be delayed, and new checkpoints have been set up, according to human rights organisations Btselem and ARIJ. These regularly hold up medical and food aid and prevent students and workers from travelling. Checkpoints play a key role in crippling any independent Palestinian economy. They make thousands of workers desperate enough to take jobs in settlements and the planned sweatshop zones. Several incidents in early 2008 suggest that conditions at checkpoints on the Wall are also being used to deter international observers. Volunteers with Palestinian organisations report being accused of terrorism, placed in isolation rooms for periods of up to 11 hours and having equipment such as computers and phones dismantled and damaged. In addition to new checkpoints, construction inside illegal Israeli settlements has increased. In March 2008, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak announced that thousands of new homes will be built, including many in Ariel, a large northern settlement blamed for polluting Palestinian farmland with raw sewage. Local Palestinian farmers accuse other expanding settlements, including religious extremist colonies at Kedumim and Gilad, of armed attacks aimed at forcing them off their land. Abandoned land can be then be categorised as unused and claimed by settlers under Israeli law, causing further damage to the already fragile Palestinian economy. Were like a patient in intensive care, says Naseer Arafat. At the moment were on life support, but one day the USA will tell the EU to switch off the machine, and then the West Bank will die.
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