by Sarah Irving
– Australia –
The past few weeks have brought confusion and uncertainty for many of the estimated 40-50,000 West Bank Palestinians who work in illegal Israeli settlements. Are they breaking the law by not giving up their jobs? And if they are, will they actually be punished for it?
In spring 2010, Palestinian Authority (PA) economic minister Hassan Abu Libdeh announced penalties of up to five years in jail or a $14,000 fine for anyone found working in settlements after the start of 2011. The ban was one of a range of economic boycott measures announced by the PA.
“Those who are working in settlements are beefing up settlements, contributing heavily to the lifeline of settlements, and therefore they deserve more punishment,” Abu Lidbeh told the Reuters news agency, adding that the PA would work on incentives for Palestinian companies to hire former settlement labor.
While all West Bank Palestinians are acutely aware of the threat posed by the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements – from the expropriation of land and water to the outright deadly violence used by Army-protected settlers against Palestinian farmers and schoolchildren in Hebron and Yanoun – serious questions have been asked about the wisdom of a labor ban.
No Palestinian wants to work in a settlement. Those who do encounter racism as well as suspicion from their fellow Palestinians. They face dangerous working conditions and are routinely denied sick leave and maternity pay. And although settlement pay is often higher than anything to be found in the Palestinian economy, it is well below the Israeli minimum wage. For many, though, there is very little choice.
Most of the Jordan Valley is classified as a Closed Military Zone by the Israeli authorities, and the vast majority of it has been taken over by large agricultural settlements that grow fruit, herbs, and vegetables, mainly for export to Europe. The few remaining villages are under tight control, and travel is difficult, making it hard to find jobs outside the area.
Many men work in agriculture or live away from home and work in the cities, but unemployment still runs well into double figures and there are few jobs for women. It is rarely deemed suitable for unmarried women to move away from their families to find work, and some employers are resistant to hiring women workers, seeing them as taking “men’s” jobs.
In 2009, during one of my regular research trips to Palestine, I interviewed women from several areas of the West Bank about their experiences working in Israeli settlements. Some were seasonal agricultural laborers, while others had year-round jobs in factories or as domestic cleaners. All reported pay as low as a $1.50 USD per hour, working days of up to 13 hours, and 6 or 7 day weeks. Some had been subjected to racial and sexual harassment by Israeli managers, and most had had to work while sick in order to keep their jobs.
“An accident happened to me while I was four months pregnant. A box fell on me. I had to stay home for a week, but the factory didn’t pay me,” says Abia,* a woman in her 30s from the Jordan Valley village of Jiftlik. “I carried on working until my ninth month. It’s not a big salary, but it helps.”
Abia’s colleagues from the Jordan Plains processing plant, which exports medjool dates to Europe and the U.S.A., added that the women of Jiftlik pray that they find themselves pregnant in January or February, so they will not have to work while pregnant during the date-packing season from September to December.
According to Abia and her friends, they work standing up for two or three hours at a time and, unlike non-Arab workers who have their own lounge to use during breaks, are only given the choice of high workplace stools or the ground outside to sit on in rest periods. Many reported suffering back pain. They also described Russian and Israeli overseers who routinely shouted at workers, threatening to fire anyone who argued or worked too slowly.
Despite the poor conditions in the date packing plants in the Jordan Valley, finding other work is not an option. Jiftlik itself is a very poor village; when I visited there were a few new houses, but most were old and repaired with sheets of corrugated iron.
Umm Raed*, a woman in her 50s from a small village in the center of the West Bank, faced different problems. Her husband, she said, had been ill for over 20 years and was unable to support her and their children. The strong family ties in Palestinian society mean that such problems are often taken care of by relatives, but Umm Raed did not have a family who could help.
Taking a job at the Royalife textile factory in Barkan industrial settlement was a last resort for Umm Raed, but when she joined a strike demanding legal minimum pay, she was fired. One of her daughters lost her job after her leg was broken in an industrial accident, for which she was given an unlawfully low compensation payout and no medical help. The other daughters, despite being the family’s only source of income, were considering quitting their jobs too, concerned that if they stayed working in a settlement they would be completely unmarriageable.
“In Palestinian society they didn’t accept women working in the settlements. There is always criticism: how are you working outside the village? Inside a settlement? Women who work inside settlements didn’t get married easily,” Umm Raed told me bitterly.
The situation for Abia, Umm Raed, and their colleagues is now unclear. In Ramallah, where U.S. and E.U. aid to the Palestinian Authority is pouring in, new cars are everywhere. New jobs are being created, especially in the service industries and construction. But in the villages away from the donor projects and PA headquarters, little has changed.
In areas like the Jordan Valley, where the PA has no control and cannot run job creation schemes, and where most village farmland has been taken by settlements, joining the sweatshop labor force for Israel’s settlements may be the only choice.
The word from the PA about whether it will enforce its ban on settlement labor remains ambiguous. In a January 2011 interview with the Media Line agency Abu Libdeh declared, “The law is still effective, and it will be implemented. … Those Palestinians who continue to work in the settlements will continue to face the consequences because it is the law. … I don’t think it is morally correct for any Palestinian to deal with these settlements because they are illegal and they are jeopardizing our national rights.”
To some commentators, however, Abu Libdeh’s threat to punish settlement workers is premature. It anticipates that Israelis will further lift movement restrictions, a move that is far from guaranteed, and on the Palestinian economy booming as a result. The left-wing Israeli Ha’aretz and the Palestinian Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspapers have both reported an unofficial easing of the regulations and a stress on creating new jobs for settlement workers, rather than punishing them. PA spokesman Ghassan Khatib was quoted in Al-Quds as saying that a “step by step” approach would be taken. It remains to be seen what that means for the economically marginalized residents of the West Bank’s villages.
* not their real names
About the Author:
Sarah Irving is a freelance writer specializing in social and environmental issues and the Middle East. Her features have been published in the Guardian Online, the New Internationalist, and Electronic Intifada, among others. Sarah is co-author of Gaza: Beneath the Bombs (Pluto, 2010) and her biography of Palestinian fighter Leila Khaled is due for publication in 2011.
The women interviewed in this article face double discrimination – discrimination in the sweatshop labor force and discrimination from family and peers for taking the only work available. If they are then punished by the Palestinian Authority, it will become triple discrimination. Thank you, Sarah, for this reporting. I was unaware of this new law. What is the likelihood of a “booming” Palestinian economy as the result of the further lifting of movement restrictions? That seems a little too hopeful, unfortunately.
This is yet another report about the unfair treatment of Palestinian women living under the PA authority, Hamas and the Israeli government. Poor living standards, gender inequality and sever economic restrictions are some of the factors driving these poor and helpless women to seek employment anywhere they can. Textile, farming, domestic labor and other low income/entry jobs is all what is offered to these struggling Palestinian women.
If the PA is serious about their labor pan they should be supplying their constituents with other means of income. Creating jobs was never the PA’s strong suit and most of their funding comes from Arabic and international donors. The PA is by no means economically self sufficient and will never be. To mandate a policy without funding it is not realistic and will never work in the long run.
It’s simple really, If the PA, Hamas and Israel keep on restricting work opportunities, more and more women will join the extremist in their “Jihad” against the state of Israel and against their fellow Palestinians citizens. It’s bad enough to be a Palestinian living inside the occupied territories; it’s twice as bad to be a female living under the same conditions.