Summary
The arrangement, worked on since 2018 by the Israeli Civil Administration, USAID, and the Quartet alongside several Palestinian large-scale producers, enabling Israeli trucks to enter Area A and load goods directly from the doors of Palestinian factories for Israeli markets, in Walid Habbas’s account (Shrinking the Conflict: Debunking Israel’s New Strategy, line 185).
Details
- Micah Goodman calls for the creation of “safe” logistic routes within the West Bank to ease transferring Palestinian goods to Israeli markets, thus incentivizing more Palestinian merchants to strive to enter into economic agreements with the Israeli regime (lines 149, 181).
- Its security requirements for Palestinian factories: cement barriers and wire fences, supported by an alarm system connected directly to an Israeli military office at the nearest commercial gate; Palestinian employees, trained by the Israeli military, must load the cargo and report daily to their Israeli military supervisors; and every freight truck must install a GPS tracking system that allows Israeli military agents to surveil shipments on the road through the West Bank (line 185).
- Participation and scale, as Habbas presents them: as of September 2022, 21 Palestinian companies in al-Khalil (Hebron), Ramallah, and Nablus had entered into the arrangement; total shipments using this method amounted to 61,880 between March 2018 and September 2022, reducing logistical costs by approximately $8.6 million; entrants must exceed the volume of their trade with Israel by NIS 10 million annually. Footnote 3 notes that some Palestinian capitalists elected to enter into the arrangement (lines 185, 211).
- Habbas’s critique: it separates a portion of large-scale producers from the remainder of Palestinian exporters, worsens the Palestinian wage gap across a fragmented geography, and enables further Israeli encroachment upon Palestinian land and surveillance over their daily lives, including infiltration of production sites in Area A whenever the regime deems necessary (line 185).
Related pages
Shrinking the Conflict: Debunking Israel’s New Strategy, Shrinking the conflict, Economic peace, Israeli Civil Administration