The Covid-19 Shock in Palestine: Global public health crisis, local impacts and responses, national socio-economic recovery Raja Khalidi

The white man will never understand the ancient words
here in spirits roaming free
between sky and trees.
Let Columbus scour the seas to find India,
it’s his right!
He can call our ghosts the names of spices,
he can call us Red Indians,
he can fiddle with his compass to correct his course,
twist all the errors of the North wind,
but outside the narrow world to his map
he can’t believe that all men are born equal
the same as air and water,
the same as people in Barcelona,
except that they happen to worship Nature’s God in everything
and not gold.
Mahmoud Darwish – Speech of the Red Indian

The year 2020 has delivered a series of blows to Palestine with dire, apparently existential consequences. Twenty-five years ago, the Oslo-Washington Interim agreements established the Palestinian National Authority’s governance, security and economic regimes, which today are reeling from the impact of rolling shocks and an emerging socio-economic crisis unlike any experienced since then. Coming on the heels of several years of an increasingly hostile political climate and feeble economic growth, with persistent social crises affecting marginal populations, vulnerable social groups and the poor, the Covid-19 pandemic hit Palestine at its weakest.

While for once, Palestine is confronting a crisis common to all peoples and countries of the world, it is unique in having to do so as a non-sovereign state, under a prolonged Israeli military occupation that empowers a creeping settler colonial enterprise. The governance record of the PNA over this quarter century has been mixed, stunted by the inherent contradiction of the last decade’s effort to fashion statehood under colonial rule and to build a national macroeconomy while remaining structurally dependent upon the powerful Israeli economy. Its fledgling institutions are constrained by the limits of self-government arrangements, relentless Israeli colonization of East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank and the (imposed) separation and (chosen) political division of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

These fissures have been laid bare by the pandemic and the associated lockdowns since March 2020 of various sectors of the economy. These have had both across-the-board macroeconomic impacts on consumption, output and investment, as well as sectorally or geographically focused shocks to Palestinian society and the economy. Small producers and self-employed, daily wage workers (both those dependent on jobs in the private sector or in Israel), working mothers, young graduates and the most destitute of the poor have been disproportionately battered by the burgeoning crisis. Public sector employees, who by May began to feel the pinch of vastly reduced public expenditure capacity, have now joined the ranks of those whose livelihoods are increasingly at risk. And, with the further deterioration in the political climate provoked by the current Israeli Government’s intention to annex as much as 30% of the occupied West Bank, the very purpose and existence of the PNA is now at stake, threatening a much wider collapse.

Despite its limited jurisdiction the Palestinian Government has tried to manage from the centre its public health response to a pandemic with multiple geographic sources of infection and transmission. Government bodies, such as the Ministry of Health and security agencies, have been able to play the central coordinating and enforcement role needed to combat the pandemic and ensure civil compliance with preventive measures. But this has been hindered by the fragmentation of the occupied Palestinian territory and the prerogatives enjoyed by the Israeli authorities in regulating movement and access between the territory and Israel and within the West Bank itself. Hence, the effectiveness of day-to-day decision-making and management of the crisis and containment efforts have ultimately depended on the role of communal efforts (social capital) at the regional (Governorates) and local (cities, camps, villages) levels.

Surveying the political, economic and social landscape in mid-2020, two major paths of action appear both necessary and feasible to avert the worst.

First it should be acknowledged that neither the pandemic, nor the recession are going to be alleviated in the absence of a concerted public health and socio-economic mobilization response. Many people will not voluntarily comply with the needed preventive and q           uarantine measures required, and markets will not bounce back on their own accord. Indeed, the critical first wave of mass infections experienced in July 2020 only presages a possibly more extensive contagion in the coming winter into 2021. Any hopes earlier in 2020 for a V-shaped recession have been replaced by more sober expectations of an L-shaped, or even Y-shaped depression. That means that the public health system must gear up, and be enabled, to fight the spread of disease with the adequate resources and public-civil engagement. But no less crucial is that the economic and social fallout somehow be mitigated, if not by relief measures, then through re-organizing the manner in which society copes and spreads the burden so that households can adapt to a prolonged crisis, something in which the Palestinian people are well-versed. In a nutshell, there can be no recovery without a continuing response to the immediate impacts of the health and economic pressures on the most vulnerable social groups and the most vital economic sectors.

Secondly, if (hopefully) by 2021 the Covid-19 threat has been diminished by medical and/or public health measures, the pace, direction and scale of recovery will be largely dependent on how well targeted relief and response programs are in ensuring two major objectives: that the most vulnerable segments of society do not fall through the social protection net and that the strategic productive sectors of the economy are not irreversibly damaged. These two broad planks of a socio-economic response cannot perhaps cater to all sectors and strata of the economy struggling with the current crisis, especially with reduced public revenues, international aid and income from work in Israel all draining resource availability. So, priorities for interventions must be identified that bring relief to the hardest-hit, while being catalytic in stimulating other sectors and rely on human- and social-capital intensive inputs. In the coming phase, good Palestinian governance will call for good management, versatile coordination and effective communication, and above all, an emphasis on local markets, local production, local jobs and local demand.

Designing and executing a feasible and sustainable strategy for socio-economic recovery in a continuing uncertain, if not hostile, political environment is not an assured matter, even if the contours and content of such a strategy may be evident. This challenge is compounded by the reduced resources, effectiveness and reach of central governing institutions, hobbled by age, limited jurisdiction and paralysis or absence of mechanisms for democratic, popular, or even expert accountability. At a moment when nothing less than sovereignty is needed to fully enable Palestine to weather the crisis and emerge having further demonstrated its legitimate place among the nations of the world, perhaps the substance of the Palestinian statehood under occupation concept needs to be re-considered.

If de-jure sovereignty is still a distant prospect, then instead can we conceive a path that builds on the de-facto social, economic and administrative autonomous practices of the different levels of the State, and which materially sets the scene for sovereignty and development? This implies reinforcing the capacity of the network of Palestinian state institutions, especially at the regional and local levels, both in their mobilization to respond to covid-19 and in their collective resistance to Israeli colonial unilateralism. This in turn implies pursuing greater decentralization in the structure, authorities and functions of national governance – a form of “municipal activism” or “thinking locally and acting nationally”. When the State of Palestine is understood to function as the sum total of all the systems and institutions currently in place – civil and governmental, market and regulatory, legal and informal, democratic and pluralist, social and economic, family and corporate, rural and urban, regional and local – then its reality and inevitability become more tangible. And Palestine’s potential as a collective force to halt, or even reverse the advance of settler colonialism acquires greater potency, while a path to recovery, growth and sovereign governance may be seriously envisaged.

(Raja Khalidi is Director General at Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS) www.mas.ps)