Media coverage
Palestine Today · 2010-07-28
The report portrays the severe deterioration of Gaza’s economy through examples of business owners, workers, and graduates who lost jobs or opportunities because of the Israeli blockade and restrictions on exports, fishing, and movement. It cites economist Omar Shaban as saying that Gaza now needs a “Marshall Plan,” amid rising unemployment, widespread dependence on aid, and stalled reconstruction despite Israel’s announcement of easing the blockade.
The report portrays the severe deterioration of Gaza’s economy through examples of business owners, workers, and graduates who lost jobs or opportunities because of the Israeli blockade and restrictions on exports, fishing, and movement. It cites economist Omar Shaban as saying that Gaza now needs…
## News of the economist Omar Shaban: Gaza now needs a Marshall Plan
The economist Omar Shaban: Gaza now needs a Marshall Plan
Wael Wadiya at one point employed 250 workers in his fast-food factories, but today, after Israel blocked his products from reaching the West Bank market, he employs only a few dozen workers.
Twenty people used to work on a fishing vessel owned by Jamal Basla, and today only four remain employed by him, after Israel imposed restrictions on its sailing. After his income had been $5,000 a month, he now depends on aid from relief agencies and is unable to pay his son’s university expenses.
As for civil engineer Mahmoud al-Hindi, he had dreamed of a successful future in a respected profession, but more than a year after graduating, the deteriorating economy has offered him no job opportunities. He says that “all roads are closed” before him, which has caused him to “lose hope.”
These three examples summarize the dire economic situation in the Gaza Strip, which the late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat once pledged to turn into the Singapore of the Mediterranean. But the Israeli blockade, which was tightened after Hamas took power in 2006, destroyed the economy, and with it the hope for a better future for the Strip’s 1.5 million residents.
Palestinian businessmen and economists estimate the losses caused by the blockade and the war at tens of thousands of lost jobs, in addition to the direct losses resulting from the destruction of the Strip’s economic infrastructure, particularly in the industrial sector. More difficult still is measuring the scale of shattered hopes among young Palestinians who want to leave the Strip if they can find any way to do so, and among businessmen who had believed that peace with Israel would bring returns and prosperity. Amr Hamad, Executive Director of the Palestinian Federation of Industries, says that Gaza is “losing the class of legitimate businessmen, and it is the last class that believes in peace.”
Although Israel has announced an easing of the blockade on Gaza, following pressure exerted particularly by European Union countries, observers doubt what Israel considers a “new policy” toward the Strip. The quantities that Israel has pledged to allow in fall far short of Gaza’s normal needs, without even taking into account the additional needs of an economy that requires reconstruction after the devastating Israeli war on the Strip in the winter of 2009.
Sari Bashi, director of the Israeli human rights organization Gisha, says: “What concerns us is that the right of Gaza’s residents is not limited to consuming (goods), but includes producing, exporting, and traveling,” noting that the “policy of economic warfare is still ongoing.” Bashi explains that in the week ending July 24, 979 trucks loaded with goods entered Gaza, an increase of 40 percent over the past, but still representing only 40 percent of the quantities that used to enter Gaza before Hamas took control of the Strip.
The Palestinian economist Omar Shaban believes that “Gaza now needs a Marshall Plan,” in reference to the American aid plan that helped the European economy recover after World War II, noting that the “term ‘economy’ no longer applies here.”
According to World Bank data, the unemployment rate in Gaza has risen to 40 percent, compared with 30 percent in 2007, while the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (“UNRWA”) indicates that 80 percent of the population now depend on food aid, an increase of nearly 40 percent compared with previous years.
What also hinders recovery is that the Israeli list of prohibited items includes construction materials that Israel claims could be used for military purposes, even though these materials, including cement and iron, are already available to Hamas or to anyone who can afford the cost of smugglers’ services through the tunnels on the border with Egypt.
As for fishermen, they are allowed to sail only three nautical miles from the shore, forcing them to abandon large fishing boats and use small ones.
The rise in unemployment in the Strip may well make many people ready to join the security services of the dismissed government. Dismissed Interior Minister Fathi Hammad announced that his ministry is preparing to declare voluntary recruitment, followed by compulsory recruitment, into its security services. Hammad said today at the opening ceremony of the General Directorate of Training in the northern Gaza Strip: “We are on the threshold of opening voluntary recruitment and then compulsory recruitment,” explaining that this is intended to “prepare all segments of the Palestinian people, including women, to confront any new Israeli aggression.”
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