THE PALESTINIAN government yesterday called for the creation of a $50 million (€40.46 million) fund to enable Palestinian workers to leave jobs in Israeli settlements by the end of the year.
Labor minister Ahmad Majdalani said the donations would swell the “Dignity Fund” to pay half the yearly salaries of 20,000 Palestinians employed in the settlements when they take jobs in the Palestinian territories.
There has been considerable popular resistance to the campaign against the settlements since January, when prime minister Salam Fayyad announced the employment ban and the boycott of settlement goods and services.
Workers argue that settlement jobs pay more than Palestinian employment, while consumers hold that Israeli goods and produce are of a higher standard than Palestinian products.
The goods boycott was originally a private effort launched in 2000 by Palestinian individuals.
One of the founders of the drive, Salah Haniyeh, told The Irish Times: "We were not connected with the Palestinian Authority [PA], and worked with the grass roots. While the PA did not stop us or support our campaign, we did not have the legitimacy to go to shops to ask them to stop stocking settlement products. This depended on the owners or factories." Their awareness campaign, focusing on students and women, did succeed in excluding soft drinks and bottled water.
The boycott took off once the government became involved.
Thousands of volunteers wearing T-shirts bearing the slogan "Don't let settlements into your home" fanned out in Palestinian towns and villages handing out an 88-page guide listing settlement goods, services and manufacturers included in the boycott, and asking Palestinians to sign the karamaor dignity pledge to replace settlement goods with Palestinian products.
On April 26th, President Mahmoud Abbas signed the boycott law and it was enforced immediately. Lorries carrying asphalt and cement from the settlements were turned back, and fruit and vegetables were burned.
At least one settlement-based factory closed. Among the beneficiaries of the boycott are the watermelon farmers of a Palestinian village in northern Israel and the date growers of Jericho.
In tandem with the boycott, a consumers’ protection society was established to oversee quality control and pricing of Palestinian products. “This is very important,” Mr Haniyeh said. “In 1987 during the first intifada, we boycotted Israeli products. Palestinian factories opened but after six months we saw that the products were not good quality, and prices were high. Now we have institutions for standards, and a hotline to the consumer protection society.”
Settler communities and factory owners have responded by calling on Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu to refuse to take part in US-brokered proximity talks, and threatened to wreak economic damage on the Palestinians.