The two-storey Ali Baba restaurant, where business is down by 90%, the owner, Wassif Frahat, said, in Jenin, West Bank. — ©2024 The New York Times Company
LESS than three years ago, Wassif Frahat spent US$3mil to open a lavish, two-storey restaurant, the Ali Baba. With an impressive, pillared entryway, polished stone floors, glittering chandeliers and colourful frescoes on the high ceilings, the restaurant was his commitment to a better future.
The Ali Baba, in Jenin, is just a few minutes’ drive from the Jalameh checkpoint, which in normal times allows Israeli Arab citizens entry to the West Bank.
The atmosphere is Palestinian, and the shops, restaurants and services are significantly cheaper than in Israel. The crossing also allows Palestinians with valid entry permits to go to jobs in Israel.
Children working as cart pushers sit among the debris of a vegetable market that was burnt after an Israeli raid in Ramallah, West Bank.
But after Hamas invaded Israel from the Gaza Strip on Oct 7 last year, the checkpoint was closed.
Israel withheld most tax revenue from authorities in the West Bank, in an effort to weaken them and clamp down more broadly on Palestinians.
The economy in the territory’s north collapsed, and the better future that Frahat expected now seems further away than ever.
The war that followed the invasion is devastating Gaza, but it is also impoverishing the West Bank, which has become a kind of second front in Israel’s battle against Palestinian militancy.
The Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the West Bank but does not run Gaza, has been paying only about 50% of the salaries it owes its estimated 140,000 employees.
A map of the West Bank.
In the West Bank as a whole, which has a population of about three million, 144,000 jobs have disappeared since October last year, and 148,000 Palestinians who were working in Israel have lost their jobs, according to the World Bank.
Before that, unemployment in the West Bank was about 13%, compared with 45% in Gaza.
Frahat, 51, once had 53 employees at his restaurant and an older one in the city centre.
“Now I only have 18 because business is down by 90%,” he said.
Israeli Arabs are not his only lost customers; local Palestinians have stopped coming, too.
They lack money, he said, and fear continued incursions by Israel’s military, which is trying to tamp down increasing militancy among young armed Palestinians who largely run the sprawling refugee camps in Jenin and the cities of Tulkarem and Nablus.
“People are afraid to leave their homes,” Frahat said.
A man covering a wall of a house damaged after an Israeli raid in Jenin. — ©2024 The New York Times Company.
In large parts of Jenin, and especially near its refugee camp, Israeli troops using tanks and armoured bulldozers have ripped up roads, cut water and sewage pipes, broken power lines and smashed many storefronts and UN offices, including a recently renovated medical clinic.
The scene is similar in Tulkarem, with its two refugee camps.
Shlomo Brom, a retired Israeli brigadier-general and senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, said the army was engaged in “preventive actions” to head off a new wave of suicide bombings carried out by “armed groups producing explosives”.
Jenin and some of the camps are bastions of armed resistance to the occupation.
Israel has conducted frequent raids over the years, but they have become more common since October last year.
Israeli says its raids are part of counterterrorism operations against Hamas and an extension of the war. Hundreds of Palestinians have been detained.
A nearly empty shopping mall in Ramallah, West Bank on June 15, 2024. With the closure of checkpoints, Israeli Arabs cannot come to Jenin and Tulkarem to shop, and West Bank Palestinians cannot leave to work in Israel, cutting incomes and building militancy. — ©2024 The New York Times Company
The raids have piled only more misery on a failing economy.
Amar Abu Beker, 49, the chair of the Jenin Chamber of Commerce, which represents 5,000 businesses, said that 70% of them were struggling to stay afloat.
The chamber is working to repair the key roads that Israeli forces have wrecked because the Palestinian Authority has little money for such work, Abu Beker said.
In addition to the damage done by the checkpoint closure, the economy had been constricted by months-long general strikes in 2022 and 2023 in sympathy with Palestinians killed in Israeli raids.
“The Palestinian Authority is holding on by its fingernails,” Abu Beker said. “Without money, you can’t operate.”
In a recent report, the World Bank said the authority’s financial health “has dramatically worsened, significantly raising the risk of a fiscal collapse.”
It cited the “drastic reduction” in tax transfers from Israel and “a massive drop in economic activity.”
The measures to starve the Palestinian Authority of funds, pushed by far-right members of the Israeli government who want to annex the West Bank and resettle Gaza, have alarmed the Biden administration.
US officials want the authority to play a role in running post-war Gaza and worry that an economic crash in the West Bank could lead to more violence.
US officials have pressured the Israeli government to release withheld taxes, which make up about 70% of the authority’s income. On July 3, Israel agreed to release US$116mil, but the Palestinian Authority said it was owed nearly US$1.6bil.
At the entrance to a refugee camp, in the hot sun, Mahmoud Jalmaneh, 56, described how his life had changed as he tried to sell cheap tobacco from a dusty glass cabinet on wheels – 20 cigarettes for 4 shekels (about US$1), compared to more than US$8 for Marlboros, which he does not sell.
Born and raised here, he has seven children, and last July, Israeli troops were caught in a firefight in front of his house and blew it up, he said.
“I was a homeowner and now I’m renting, and I have no more money to pay when the landlord comes,” he said.
“The checkpoints are closed; we can’t work in Israel or leave the country,” Jalmaneh said. “There’s no money, no salaries.
“We are lonely. We are a people isolated and under occupation. We are fighting the whole world.” — ©2024 The New York Times Company
