With Biden, Palestinians seeking freedom get permits instead

For more than two years, the Biden administration has said that Palestinians are entitled to the same measure of “freedom, security and prosperity” enjoyed by Israelis. Instead, they’ve gotten U.S. aid and permits to work inside Israel and its Jewish settlements.

The inconsistency is likely to come up when President Joe Biden visits Israel and the occupied West Bank this week for the first time since assuming office.

Israeli officials will likely point to the thousands of work permits issued to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, allowing them to make far higher wages and injecting much-needed cash into economies hobbled by Israeli restrictions. Biden will likely tout the tens of millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinians he restored after it was cut off during the Trump years.

Supporters say such economic measures improve the lives of Palestinians and help preserve the possibility of an eventual political solution.

But when Biden is driven past Israel’s towering separation barrier to meet with Palestinians in the West Bank town of Bethlehem, he will hear a very different story — about how Israel is cementing its decades-long military rule over millions of Palestinians, with no end in sight.

“Economic measures do have the potential to positively contribute to making peace, but that would require Israel and the U.S. having a plan to end this 55-year-old military occupation,” said Sam Bahour, a Palestinian-American business consultant based in the West Bank.

“They don’t, so any so-called economic ‘confidence-building measures’ are merely occupation-entrenching measures,” Bahour said,.

Israel’s short-lived coalition government issued 14,000 permits to Palestinians in Gaza, which has been under a crippling blockade since the Islamic militant group Hamas seized power 15 years ago. Israel says the blockade is needed to prevent Hamas from arming itself.

Israel also increased the number of permits issued in the West Bank, where well over 100,000 Palestinians work inside Israel and the settlements, mostly in construction, manufacturing and agriculture. It has even begun allowing small numbers of Palestinian professionals to work in higher-paying jobs in Israel’s booming high-tech sector.

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The government billed those and other economic measures as goodwill gestures, even as it approved the construction of thousands of additional settler homes in the occupied West Bank.

The Biden administration has adopted a similar strategy,…