The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine issued a statement on January 19, 2012 denouncing the PA’s economic policies, which are helping to spark inflation and skyrocketing food, water and electricity prices and rapidly deteriorating economic conditions for the vast majority of the Palestinian people in the West Bank. It demanded protection and support for Palestinian workers and the popular classes, not false visions of market economies under occupation.
The PFLP said that the Fayyad government’s policies, arrived at in consultation with international donors and monetary bodies, are responsible alongside the Zionist occupation for the wste of public money, rising unemployment, growing poverty and severe poverty. It noted that health care costs and those of other necessary services are rising rapidly.
The PFLP placed the blame for the economic crisis upon the policies of the Fayyad government, which have benefitted only the wealthiest, and the Palestinian Authority’s fundamental crisis – its basis in the Paris Economic Protocol and the Oslo Accords, that require the PA to act as a subservient arm of the occupation in both economic and political/security matters.
The PFLP warned against the ongoing adoption of imported economic policies with no link to the Palestinian economic reality – or its political reality under occupation. It is urgent, said the Front, to leave behind illusions of a market economy under occupation and instead develop a national economic policy based on development by popular protection; to support and protect natural resources like land and water and to provide a level of social protection and real eages, protecting the popular Palestinian classes against encroaching impoverishment. In order to make this happen, it is neessary to put an end to interference, blackmail and external political and economic pressure aimed at breaking down and undermining Palestinian national steadfastness and confrontation of the occupation, said the Front.
So long as the Oslo accords and the Paris Economic Protocol govern Palestinian economic policy, the Palestinian economy will never break from the status quo, which is fundamentally controlled by external political factors – first, the occupation, and second, Western financiers and international financial institutions – and will only decline further into instability and further attempts at political blackmail. The Authority serves only as a management under occupation, as it exists on the basis of the Oslo Accords, said the PFLP.
The Front demanded a full and comprehensive political, economic, security and social review of these policies, to bring a final end to the era of Oslo and defend Palestinian society from the clutches of these agreements that have imprisoned and killed Palestinians and undermined the Palestinian economy. It is time, said the Front, to build on the basis of national and social steadfastness and emulate Palestinian cultural values and national traditions rather than consumerism, greed, exploitation and capitalism that emulates the savage culture of neoliberalism and the occupation that exploits workers, crushes the poor, deepens poverty, marginalizes rural areas and refugee camps. Furthermore, said the PFLP, the PA must immediately stop wasting the resources of the Palestinian people to massively overfund security services that serve the interests of the occupation.
The Front emphasized that a new national strategy must include the Palestinian people everywhere they are – in Palestine, in the camps, and in exile and diaspora, that supports steadfastness, diverse resistance, national democracy, and organization and struggle at regional and international levels, urging that this is the clear alternative to the futile path of negotiations, in order to liberate occupied Arab lands and win the implementation of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people to return, self-determination and sovereignty.
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