Hardly a day passes without one of the power-brokers in Ramallah passionately assuring us of what every Palestinian child, wherever they are, now knows: the coffers are empty, the authority is materially bankrupt, the debts are tightening the noose, and the pressure grows from day to day. And they paint us hellish scenarios that would frighten Antar ibn Shaddad, to deter employees, teachers and doctors in the hospitals from demanding their wages, and to pacify the people, whose backbone has been broken by the blatant price hikes, so that the only concern of the ordinary Palestinian is nothing more than feeding his children!
Not one of these gentlemen tells us at length – not even briefly and clearly – why we have come to this miserable situation! And if they are forced for a moment to make a statement, almost all the gentlemen agree and content themselves with pointing to the occupation and its deeds and to the donor countries not keeping their promises! Not one of them dares to point to the economic policy of an authority that has been worth next to nothing for over twenty years! No one dares to mention the corruption and what the parliamentary investigative committees have uncovered: the wanton handling of public money by those responsible. No one dares to inform the people of the number of productive jobs the authority has created since its founding.
Not one of these political parrots has the courage to tell us why they turned us from a people with a dignity solid as the stone of Hebron into beggars!
I do not want to point now to the gross waste present in the authority – villas, cars and the purposeless employment of family and factional clientelism, nor to the coffee directors and the tretmines and the pointless economic projects that generate losses anyway, nor to huge governments with a fantastic number of ministers that not even India with a billion citizens could afford, nor to strange, bizarre security apparatuses bloated with weapons and money to terrorize and torture the citizen ... None of that is my topic now. With this modest article I do not want to burden you with scientific terms that only a handful of experts understand. I write for the children of my people, all of them, and what concerns me now is the division and the money! What concerns me is something every Palestinian in the Gaza Strip sees and follows, and everyone who has visited the Strip. I want to cast light on a topic that has been deliberately forgotten: the topic of those thousands of employees forced into retirement and compelled to stay at home for six years.
After the coup, the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah instructed all its employees – experts, directors, specialists, teachers and ordinary employees – not to work under Hamas rule and to boycott it completely. And the authority promised these employees, estimated at 40,000 to 60,000, that it would continue paying their salaries as before the coup. And the authority in Ramallah has kept its promise for six years without interruption. Yes, the authority pays salaries to the employees while they sit at home. And if we assume a modest salary of $1,500 per employee covering all expenses, we arrive at annual expenses for the authority of $720 million. To simplify and not exaggerate, I have taken the minimum number of employees into account.
Hundreds of millions are scattered for nothing – only because Fatah wants to combat and fight Hamas with the money of the Palestinian people. And if we believe the gentleman brothers in the authority in Ramallah that Palestine's debts amount to $4.5 billion, then in the end two-thirds of that amount was spent in the past six years as a result of the criminal division that both Hamas and Fatah have recorded in the history of the Palestinian people, and both bear direct responsibility for this miserable situation. And whoever acts as if public affairs and public money were his own preserve is further from democracy than the earth is from the sun, and he has no right but to step aside and leave the people alone to heal the wounds of the past and arrange the future.
