In the Reuters article I wrote about previously, there is this little gem at the end:
The only thing staving off a major economic crisis was cash earned by the over 100,000 Palestinians who work in Israel, and remittances from Palestinians working abroad.
Reuters is understating the numbers by a large amount.
According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, there were 131,000 Palestinians working in Israel in the fourth quarter last year, and an additional 28,000 working in Jewish towns in Judea and Samaria.
Compare that with the 125,000 who worked in Israel and 20,000 who worked in the settlements in the first half of 2018. It is more than double the number of such workers five years previously.
That is nearly 160,000 Palestinians who are getting about 2.4x the average daily wage of those who work in the areas controlled by the PA and Hamas.
Which means that the PA economy, today, gets about 37% of its worker wages from Israel.
This is the basis for the “economic peace” that is being disparaged by the media. One cannot help but notice that the number of terror attacks have decreased from the West Bank as the number of Palestinians who work in Israel have increased. When Palestinians have something to lose, they are more likely to stay away from doing things that would cause them to lose their highest-paying jobs. If a safe way could be found to allow Gazans unaffiliated with terror groups to work in Israel, it would pressure Gaza terror groups to tamp down rocket and incendiary balloon attacks as well.
This is besides the fact that the only possible way for the PA economy to survive is by encouraging real work as opposed to do-nothing government and NGO positions that take up the bulk of the jobs that Palestinians have today.
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| V’hameyvin, yavin. |
Yes, a better economy brings peace. When the PA says that they refuse money from the US and Israel, they are using that same calculus – they are threatening Israel with new terror attacks that would come from a collapsing economy that they are encouraging. They are threatening economic suicide unless they get the money they want without strings attached.
For people who haven’t followed the PLO over the years, the willingness to screw their own people for the principle of paying terrorists and their families would be astonishing.
Keep in mind also that if the supposedly “Palestinian led” BDS had its way, those 160,000 people who work in Israel would be unemployed.
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