Palestinians Feel Pain of No Pay

Naseer Rimawi’s anxieties rise with each bill he tosses into the candy bowl that has become a bin of bitter morsels.

On a recent afternoon, Rimawi, who works for the Palestinians’ Education Ministry, set the bowl on his living room coffee table and extracted some of the contents: unpaid telephone bills adding up to about $100 and an electricity notice that will cost $250 more. He also pulled out a personal check for $130 written to a local store. To his embarrassment, it bounced last month.

“My account is zero,” said Rimawi, 49, who lives with his wife and four teenage children in this village in the northern West Bank.

Rimawi is among about 165,000 employees of the Palestinian Authority who have gone without pay for two months since the militant group Hamas assumed control of parliament in February after winning elections.

The new government is strapped for cash and unable to meet its payroll of $116 million a month. A freeze in direct aid to the Palestinian Authority from the European Union and the United States, which consider Hamas a terrorist group, and Israel’s decision to halt monthly transfers of about $50 million in tax revenue have exacerbated severe financial problems left by the previous government.

The paycheck freeze by the government, which is by far the largest Palestinian employer, has yet to produce a humanitarian catastrophe. But public employees, for whom the lack of pay so far has been more inconvenience than crisis, fret about how they will cope if much more time passes without salaries.

“We are like a boat in a tempest,” Rimawi said.

Government salaries support one in four Palestinians. Business leaders say the sudden lack of spending money has hurt an economy already weakened by combat and border closures during more than five years of conflict with Israel. The United Nations warned in a recent report that a continued failure to pay salaries, especially to an estimated 70,000 members of the security forces, could create an explosive climate in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The Palestinian Authority this week missed the monthly payday for the second time, adding to the uncertainties of employees such as Rimawi, who has worked in the Education Ministry offices in the city of Ramallah for nine years. He ran the press branch before being named the ministry’s liaison to the Cabinet, but the new government halted the promotion along with the paychecks.

Rimawi’s wife, Basima, 48, is a teacher employed by the Palestinian Authority. Having two government salaries once meant security for the Rimawis, who live a middle-class existence in a house they built five years ago amid olive groves and steep, stony ridges about an hour’s drive north of Ramallah.

However, the Hamas government’s problems have dealt a double blow to the couple, whose salaries add up to about $1,300 a month. The Rimawis have cut back on more expensive goods, such as meat, and discontinued tutoring for their oldest son, Majd, a high school senior with college plans.

Although broke, the family has bought groceries and other essentials on credit extended by storekeepers in the village, where most residents belong to the same extended clan. But Naseer Rimawi said one store owner warned a few days earlier that he could no longer afford to provide goods without being paid.

Rimawi said he had begun to contemplate when he might have to look for other work -- in the private sector, of course. And he wonders whether the Palestinian Authority can survive.

There is little sign that Hamas officials have found a way out of their financial bind. Leaders this week asserted that they were close to solving the salary crisis, then backed off.

One idea under consideration was for the Cairo-based Arab League to deposit funds donated by Arab countries and others directly into the bank accounts of Palestinian employees to avoid sending funds via the Hamas-led government. The Arab League said it had more than $70 million in hand, but Palestinian officials said fear of U.S. sanctions aimed at preventing money from reaching Hamas was deterring Arab banks from carrying out the transfers.

“The money is there ... but we have a problem, which is the problem of bringing the money in,” Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh told reporters Wednesday in Gaza City.

French President Jacques Chirac has proposed creating a World Bank fund to facilitate payment of Palestinian salaries.

The Rimawis voted for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah faction over Hamas in January’s parliamentary elections, and they disagree with many of the Islamist group’s stances. But they blame mainly the U.S., not Hamas, for their financial predicament.

Western nations have said direct assistance to the Palestinian Authority will remain frozen unless Hamas, whose charter calls for Israel’s destruction, moderates its stand by recognizing the Jewish state, renouncing violence and honoring past agreements between the Palestinians and Israel. Those donors and Israel have said they will work to ensure the continued flow of humanitarian aid -- just not through Hamas.

To Naseer and Basima Rimawi, though, conditions imposed by the U.S. and European governments for help appear heavy-handed and biased in favor of Israel.

“Why should they punish the people here because they elected who they wanted?” Naseer Rimawi asked. “This is blackmail.”

He favors a unity government including Fatah, which supports a negotiated peace with Israel, and an end to the aid cutoff. Meanwhile, he is trimming household expenses by catching rides to Ramallah with a relative to avoid paying the $1.50 taxi fare each way. The children go without pocket change.

Despite the belt-tightening, the Rimawis greeted a pair of visitors with a heaping lunch of roasted chicken and potatoes, beans and soft drinks. Basima Rimawi did the shopping; her husband had not mentioned that she was no longer supposed to buy on credit.

“Today we have food,” he said, scooping from a platter of rice. “We let God worry about tomorrow.”

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Times special correspondent Fayed abu Shammaleh in Gaza City contributed to this report.