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Palestinians Say US Economic Push No Substitute for Peace

A youth descends Israel's controversial separation barrier into East Jerusalem Ahmad GHARABLI AFP
A youth descends Israel's controversial separation barrier into East Jerusalem Ahmad GHARABLI AFP
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Palestinians Say US Economic Push No Substitute for Peace

A youth descends Israel's controversial separation barrier into East Jerusalem Ahmad GHARABLI AFP
A youth descends Israel's controversial separation barrier into East Jerusalem Ahmad GHARABLI AFP

Ahead of Joe Biden's first visit to Jerusalem as US president, Washington's ambassador said his team will "pound tables" to press Israeli officials into making concessions to the Palestinians.

But ambassador Thomas Nides was talking about ensuring Palestinians have access to economic benefits such as 4G internet, not throwing American diplomatic muscle into reviving a peace process moribund since 2014, according to AFP.

Biden's first Middle East tour since entering the White House last year begins in Israel on Wednesday, and he is expected to meet Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas on Friday in Bethlehem, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Along with the prospect of faster internet, the visit may also see the US restore funding to hospitals in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, which have historically served Palestinians.

But some Palestinians said they are weary of US diplomacy which, they claim, emphasizes economic benefits above core issues of the seven-decade conflict.

"It would be nice to have the 4G," said Mohammed Mostafa, a former Palestinian Authority deputy prime minister and ex-chief executive of Paltel, the largest telecoms operator in the Palestinian territories.

"But it's obviously not a substitute for solving the bigger issues like Jerusalem, like sovereignty or like freedom," he told AFP.

"Israel thinks people will forget about the bigger picture," he added.

The 4G pledge, which ambassador Nides highlighted in an interview with the Times of Israel, would offer an immediate boost to Palestinian businesses, Mostafa said.

Palestinians are currently forced to either buy Israeli SIM cards or struggle with slower 3G connections.

"Israeli operators have a significant part of the Palestinian telecoms and broadband market," Mostafa said. "This would be a chance to bring that back to Palestinian companies."

But "the Israelis think 'we're going to give you 4G so you'll keep quiet on the other things," Mostafa added. "We are interested, but we also want bigger things."

Until July 1, Israel was led by prime minister Naftali Bennett, a right-winger who opposed the Palestinians' over-arching demand -- the establishment of their own state.

Bennett embraced an approach known as "shrinking the conflict," seeking to defuse tensions by improving economic opportunities in the West Bank and the blockaded Gaza Strip, which is controlled by the Islamist group Hamas.

One such key policy was to increase permits for Palestinians, including from Gaza, to seek relatively lucrative work in Israel.

Asked about the expectations from Biden's visit, Hamas official Basem Naim said: "Nothing."

Yair Lapid, Bennett's replacement as Israeli premier and a centrist, supports a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict.

But he is only serving as a caretaker leader ahead of elections in November, and is therefore seen as having little space to launch bold peace initiatives.

When Lapid visited Paris last week, French President Emmanuel Macron said there was "no alternative to a resumption of political dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians."

Senior Israeli officials have told AFP that Lapid was "open" to meeting Abbas, but not to launching a new peace initiative for the moment.

In an opinion piece for the Washington Post at the weekend, Biden asserted that his administration has restored approximately $500 million in support for Palestinians, after Trump slashed funding.

But while Israeli authorities have promised to raise a sea of flags to welcome Biden in Jerusalem, there are few signs of ceremonial anticipation across the West Bank.

For Sam Bahour, a prominent Palestinian-American businessman in the West Bank, apathy about Biden's visit transcends the latest fluctuations in Israeli governance.

"The Biden administration has fallen into the Israeli trap –- that trap is fragmenting all of the Palestinian rights under international law, and then using them as playing cards as if they were giving concessions back to the Palestinians," he said.

Backing Israeli initiatives in the West Bank is simply "throwing money at the occupation".

Bahour said Palestinians can manage with slower internet, but not without statehood.

"We don't need 4G," he said. "We need the fourth generation of Palestinians not to live under military occupation."

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Arab World

As Flooding Becomes a Yearly Disaster in South Sudan, Thousands Survive on the Edge of a Canal

Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
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As Flooding Becomes a Yearly Disaster in South Sudan, Thousands Survive on the Edge of a Canal

Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)

Long-horned cattle wade through flooded lands and climb a slope along a canal that has become a refuge for displaced families in South Sudan. Smoke from burning dung rises near homes of mud and grass where thousands of people now live after floods swept away their village.
“Too much suffering,” said Bichiok Hoth Chuiny, a woman in her 70s. She supported herself with a stick as she walked in the newly established community of Pajiek in Jonglei state north of the capital, Juba, The Associated Press said.
For the first time in decades, the flooding had forced her to flee. Her efforts to protect her home by building dykes failed. Her former village of Gorwai is now a swamp.
“I had to be dragged in a canoe up to here,” Chuiny said. An AP journalist was the first to visit the community.
Such flooding is becoming a yearly disaster in South Sudan, which the World Bank has described as “the world’s most vulnerable country to climate change and also the one most lacking in coping capacity."
More than 379,000 people have been displaced by flooding this year, according to the UN humanitarian agency.
Seasonal flooding has long been part of the lifestyle of pastoral communities around the Sudd, the largest wetlands in Africa, in the Nile River floodplain. But since the 1960s the swamp has kept growing, submerging villages, ruining farmland and killing livestock.
“The Dinka, Nuer and Murle communities of Jonglei are losing the ability to keep cattle and do farming in that region the way they used to,” said Daniel Akech Thiong, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group.
South Sudan is poorly equipped to adjust. Independent since 2011, the country plunged into civil war in 2013. Despite a peace deal in 2018, the government has failed to address numerous crises. Some 2.4 million people remain internally displaced by conflict and flooding.
The latest overflowing of the Nile has been blamed on factors including the opening of dams upstream in Uganda after Lake Victoria rose to its highest levels in five years.
The century-old Jonglei Canal, which was never completed, has become a refuge for many.
“We don’t know up to where this flooding would have pushed us if the canal was not there,” said Peter Kuach Gatchang, the paramount chief of Pajiek. He was already raising a small garden of pumpkins and eggplants in his new home.
The 340-kilometer (211-mile) Jonglei Canal was first imagined in the early 1900s by Anglo-Egyptian colonial authorities to increase the Nile’s outflow towards Egypt in the north. But its development was interrupted by the long fight of southern Sudanese against the Sudanese regime in Khartoum that eventually led to the creation of a separate country.
Gatchang said the new community in Pajiek is neglected: "We have no school and no clinic here, and if you stay for a few days, you will see us carrying our patients on stretchers up to Ayod town.”
Ayod, the county headquarters, is reached by a six-hour walk through the waist-high water.
Pajiek also has no mobile network and no government presence. The area is under the control of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition, founded by President Salva Kiir’s rival turned Vice President Riek Machar.
Villagers rely on aid. On a recent day, hundreds of women lined up in a nearby field to receive some from the World Food Program.
Nyabuot Reat Kuor walked home with a 50-kilogram (110-pound) bag of sorghum balanced on her head.
“This flooding has destroyed our farm, killed our livestock and displaced us for good," the mother of eight said. “Our old village of Gorwai has become a river.”
When food assistance runs out, she said, they will survive on wild leaves and water lilies from the swamp. Already in recent years, food aid rations have been cut in half as international funding for such crises drops.
More than 69,000 people who have migrated to the Jonglei Canal in Ayod county are registered for food assistance, according to WFP.
“There are no passable roads at this time of the year, and the canal is too low to support boats carrying a lot of food,” said John Kimemia, a WFP airdrop coordinator.
In the neighboring Paguong village that is surrounded by flooded lands, the health center has few supplies. Medics haven’t been paid since June due to an economic crisis that has seen civil servants nationwide go unpaid for more than a year.
South Sudan’s economic woes have deepened with the disruption of oil exports after a major pipeline was damaged in Sudan during that country's ongoing civil war.
“The last time we got drugs was in September. We mobilized the women to carry them on foot from Ayod town,” said Juong Dok Tut, a clinical officer.
Patients, mostly women and children, sat on the ground as they waited to see the doctor. Panic rippled through the group when a thin green snake passed among them. It wasn't poisonous, but many others in the area are. People who venture into the water to fish or collect water lilies are at risk.
Four life-threatening snake bites cases occurred in October, Tut said. “We managed these cases with the antivenom treatments we had, but now they’re over, so we don’t know what to do if it happens again.”