Time Magazine: “The People Are Suffocating”: West Bank Economy Struggles Under Pressure From U.S. Congress

"In a donor economy – which Palestine emphatically is – tides and waves are governed by the whims of distant overlords as much as by global finance. Since 2007, Washington has sent some $4 billion to the West Bank, intent on encouraging the moderate governance of PA President Mahmoud Abbas, whose secular Fatah party the militants of Islamist Hamas had just chucked out of Gaza. While Israel enforced a siege on the coastal strip in hopes of making Hamas less popular, the international community gushed dollars into Ramallah. Thus did the city just north of Jerusalem take on the look of a boom town, its hills stippled with construction cranes and flashy new restaurants, especially on the north end, where aid agencies and “non-governmental organizations” set up shop.

Most of the U.S. money was funneled through NGOs, groups dedicated to “build the capacity” of, say, the Palestinian legal system, or to encourage equality or empowerment for women. And if, as in any aid economy, the demonstrated success of any program was open to debate, the effort put money in the pockets of the educated, Western-oriented locals who worked there. Those are the people being laid off now.

Next to go will be government employees, whose salaries form the backbone of the economy. It’s a peculiar situation. Palestinians are so good at business that they dominate economic life in countries where they began as refugees, like Jordan and, no kidding, El Salvador. But the West Bank is not an ideal business setting: Israeli troops control the borders, Israeli civil servants the ports, Israeli settlements block access to some 40 percent of the land, and on several occasions, Israeli politicians have held back the tax and custom revenues they are obliged by treaty to collect on behalf of the Palestinians."

“The People Are Suffocating”: West Bank Economy Struggles Under Pressure From U.S. Congress http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2012/01/30/the-people-are-suffocating-west-bank-economy-struggles-under-pressure-from-u-s-congress/
[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine]