With Biden, Palestinians Seeking Freedom Get Permits Instead

Palestinian workers line up while waiting at the Palestinian side of Erez crossing to cross into Israel, in the town of Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza Strip, Sunday, March. 27, 2022. (AP)
Palestinian workers line up while waiting at the Palestinian side of Erez crossing to cross into Israel, in the town of Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza Strip, Sunday, March. 27, 2022. (AP)
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With Biden, Palestinians Seeking Freedom Get Permits Instead

Palestinian workers line up while waiting at the Palestinian side of Erez crossing to cross into Israel, in the town of Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza Strip, Sunday, March. 27, 2022. (AP)
Palestinian workers line up while waiting at the Palestinian side of Erez crossing to cross into Israel, in the town of Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza Strip, Sunday, March. 27, 2022. (AP)

For more than two years, the Biden administration has said that Palestinians are entitled to the same measure of "freedom, security and prosperity" enjoyed by Israelis. Instead, they've gotten US aid and permits to work inside Israel and its Jewish settlements.

The inconsistency is likely to come up when President Joe Biden visits Israel and the occupied West Bank this week for the first time since assuming office.

Israeli officials will likely point to the thousands of work permits issued to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, allowing them to make far higher wages and injecting much-needed cash into economies hobbled by Israeli restrictions. Biden will likely tout the tens of millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinians he restored after it was cut off during the Trump years.

Supporters say such economic measures improve the lives of Palestinians and help preserve the possibility of an eventual political solution.

But when Biden is driven past Israel's towering separation barrier to meet with Palestinians in the West Bank town of Bethlehem, he will hear a very different story - about how Israel is cementing its decades-long military rule over millions of Palestinians, with no end in sight.

"Economic measures do have the potential to positively contribute to making peace, but that would require Israel and the US having a plan to end this 55-year-old military occupation," said Sam Bahour, a Palestinian-American business consultant based in the West Bank.

"They don’t, so any so-called economic ‘confidence-building measures’ are merely occupation-entrenching measures," Bahour said.

Israel's short-lived coalition government issued 14,000 permits to Palestinians in Gaza, which has been under a crippling blockade since the Hamas movement seized power 15 years ago. Israel says the blockade is needed to prevent Hamas from arming itself.

Israel also increased the number of permits issued in the West Bank, where well over 100,000 Palestinians work inside Israel and the settlements, mostly in construction, manufacturing and agriculture. It has even begun allowing small numbers of Palestinian professionals to work in higher-paying jobs in Israel's booming high-tech sector.

The government billed those and other economic measures as goodwill gestures, even as it approved the construction of thousands of additional settler homes in the occupied West Bank.

The Biden administration has adopted a similar strategy, providing financial assistance to Palestinians but giving Israel no incentive to end the occupation or grant them equal rights. Even its relatively modest plan to reopen a US Consulate in Jerusalem serving Palestinians hit a wall of Israeli opposition.

Ines Abdel Razek, advocacy director at the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy, says both the United States and the European Union are "throwing money at the Palestinians" instead of owning up to their complicity in the occupation.

"All Biden is trying to do is maintain a certain quiet and calm, which for Palestinians means entrenched colonization and repression," she said.

Michael Milshtein, an Israeli analyst who used to advise the military body in charge of civilian affairs in the territories, says the theory of "economic peace" - or promoting economic development in the absence of peace negotiations - goes back decades.

He says it's making a resurgence because of the prolonged lack of any peace process and the political crisis within Israel, but at best will only bring temporary calm.

"This is the way to preserve stability," he said. "This is not a way to solve deep political problems."

For individual Palestinians, the permits are a godsend. Their average wage inside Israel is around $75 a day, twice the rate in the West Bank, according to the World Bank. In Gaza, where unemployment hovers around 50%, tens of thousands lined up for the permits last fall.

But critics say the permits - which Israel can revoke at any time - are yet another tool of control that undermines the development of an independent Palestinian economy.

"Every permit Israel issues to Palestinian workers goes to serve Israel’s economic development and hollows out Palestine’s workforce, so we in the private sector will remain unable to create a different economic reality," Bahour said.

Even as it issues work permits, Israel is tightening its grip on what's known as Area C - the 60% of the West Bank under full Israeli control according to interim peace agreements signed in the 1990s. The Palestinian Authority has limited autonomy in an archipelago of cities and towns.

Area C includes most of the West Bank's open space and natural resources. The World Bank estimates that lifting heavy restrictions on Palestinian access to the area would boost their economy by a third. Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war, and the Palestinians want it to form the main part of their future state.

That's not on the table.

Israel's political system is dominated by right-wing parties that view the West Bank as an integral part of Israel. Even if Lapid, who supports a two-state solution, manages to form a government after Nov. 1 elections - which recent polls suggest is unlikely - his coalition would almost certainly rely on some hard-line parties.

It's often argued that even if economic measures do not lead to a political solution, they still promote stability - but history hasn't borne that out.

In the 1980s, nearly half of Gaza's labor force was employed in Israel and workers could travel in and out with ease. Hamas, which opposes Israel's existence, burst onto the scene in 1987 with the outbreak of the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising against Israeli rule. The second Palestinian uprising, in 2000, also erupted during a period of relative prosperity.

The Gaza permits, the first to be issued since the Hamas takeover, appear to provide a powerful incentive for the group to maintain calm, as any rocket fire could cause thousands of people to lose good-paying jobs. Then again, conflict between Israel and Hamas has always come at a staggering cost to Palestinians.

In the West Bank, where far more Palestinians have the coveted permits, a recent wave of violence has brought deadly attacks inside Israel and near-daily military raids.

A recent poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 65% of Palestinians support the so-called confidence-building measures, including the issuing of permits. The survey included 1,270 Palestinians from across the West Bank and Gaza, with a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

But the same poll also found some striking measures of despair: Support for a two-state solution dropped from 40% to 28% in just three months, and 55% of those surveyed support "a return to confrontations and armed intifada."



Gazans’ Daily Struggle for Water After Deadly Israeli Strike

 Palestinians wait for donated food at a community kitchen in Gaza City, in the northern Gaza Strip, Monday, July 14, 2025. (AP)
Palestinians wait for donated food at a community kitchen in Gaza City, in the northern Gaza Strip, Monday, July 14, 2025. (AP)
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Gazans’ Daily Struggle for Water After Deadly Israeli Strike

 Palestinians wait for donated food at a community kitchen in Gaza City, in the northern Gaza Strip, Monday, July 14, 2025. (AP)
Palestinians wait for donated food at a community kitchen in Gaza City, in the northern Gaza Strip, Monday, July 14, 2025. (AP)

The al-Manasra family rarely get enough water for both drinking and washing after their daily trudge to a Gaza distribution point like the one where eight people were killed on Sunday in a strike that Israel's military said had missed its target.

Living in a tent camp by the ruins of a smashed concrete building in Gaza City, the family say their children are already suffering from diarrhea and skin maladies and from the lack of clean water, and they fear worse to come.

"There's no water, our children have been infected with scabies, there are no hospitals to go to and no medications," said Akram Manasra, 51.

He had set off on Monday for a local water tap with three of his daughters, each of them carrying two heavy plastic containers in Gaza's blazing summer heat, but they only managed to fill two - barely enough for the family of 10.

Gaza's lack of clean water after 21 months of war and four months of Israeli blockade is already having "devastating impacts on public health" the United Nations humanitarian agency OCHA said in a report this month.

For people queuing at a water distribution point on Sunday it was fatal. A missile that Israel said had targeted fighters but malfunctioned hit a queue of people waiting to collect water at the Nuseirat refugee camp.

Israel's blockade of fuel along with the difficulty in accessing wells and desalination plants in zones controlled by the Israeli military is severely constraining water, sanitation and hygiene services according to OCHA.

Fuel shortages have also hit waste and sewage services, risking more contamination of the tiny, crowded territory's dwindling water supply, and diseases causing diarrhea and jaundice are spreading among people crammed into shelters and weakened by hunger.

"If electricity was allowed to desalination plants the problem of a lethal lack of water, which is what's becoming the situation now in Gaza, would be changed within 24 hours," said James Elder, the spokesperson for the UN's children's agency UNICEF.

"What possible reason can there be for denying of a legitimate amount of water that a family needs?" he added.

COGAT, the Israeli military aid coordination agency, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Last week, an Israeli military official said that Israel was allowing sufficient fuel into Gaza but that its distribution around the enclave was not under Israel's purview.

THIRSTY AND DIRTY

For the Manasra family, like others in Gaza, the daily toil of finding water is exhausting and often fruitless.

Inside their tent the family tries to maintain hygiene by sweeping. But there is no water for proper cleaning and sometimes they are unable to wash dishes from their meager meals for several days at a time.

Manasra sat in the tent and showed how one of his young daughters had angry red marks across her back from what he said a doctor had told them was a skin infection caused by the lack of clean water.

They maintain a strict regimen of water use by priority.

After pouring their two containers of water from the distribution point into a broken plastic water butt by their tent, they use it to clean themselves from the tap, using their hands to spoon it over their heads and bodies.

Water that runs off into the basin underneath is then used for dishes and after that - now grey and dirty - for clothes.

"How is this going to be enough for 10 people? For the showering, washing, dish washing, and the washing of the covers. It's been three months; we haven't washed the covers, and the weather is hot," Manasra said.

His wife, Umm Khaled, sat washing clothes in a tiny puddle of water at the bottom of a bucket - all that was left after the more urgent requirements of drinking and cooking.

"My daughter was very sick from the heat rash and the scabies. I went to several doctors for her and they prescribed many medications. Two of my children yesterday, one had diarrhea and vomiting and the other had fever and infections from the dirty water," she said.