Out of Money but Not Resources

With Aid Cut Off, Palestinians Turn to Each Other to Get By

Palestinian taxi drivers in Nablus stand by cars idled by a lack of fuel. With the government unable to make payroll, many drivers refuse fares. (By Nasser Ishtayeh -- Associated Press)

BEIT IKSA, West Bank -- At the end of last month, a crowd gathered in the town hall here to take part in an unusual act. About 75 people, all employees of the Palestinian Authority, were getting paid.

Like the rest of the 150,000 Palestinian civil servants, the teachers, bureaucrats and policemen here had not received a paycheck for nearly two months, the result of a freeze in international aid following Hamas's victory in January legislative elections.

But this village has a patron, a native son who prospered in the United Arab Emirates. Although he has returned to his birthplace only a handful of times since leaving with his family following the 1967 Middle East war, over the years Zuhair Jubran has remembered his village in trying times, few more so than now.

With the government unable to make payroll, Jubran decided he would. Each public employee, including teachers from neighboring villages who work in Beit Iksa's boys and girls schools, has started receiving a monthly salary of $325 from Jubran's private accounts.

As their government withers without international aid, Palestinians are tailoring modest lives to desperate times. Bartering, borrowing and doing without, thousands of people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are improvising their way through a deepening financial crisis with help from native sons, virtual strangers and each other.

Government salaries directly or indirectly sustain roughly 1 million people in the occupied territories, and in places such as this one the money serves as the economic lifeblood of the community. Town officials say a majority of the village's roughly 2,000 people rely on Palestinian Authority salaries as their chief source of income.

"We'd reached a critical period when some people had nothing at all," said Anan Zayyed, 36, who teaches math and science at the Beit Iksa Girls Primary School, a small hillside campus with a view of the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway.

So the families who live here in old stone homes along one-lane streets are paring back spending, selling off assets and heirlooms, running up large tabs at corner markets and worrying about the weeks ahead. Construction sites sit abandoned, vegetable markets are empty.

But now, the people here say, a new set of social rules is taking hold.

A family with enough money to prepare a large dinner one night will share a dish or two with neighbors. Taxi drivers decline to collect fares. Civil servants with other sources of income -- grown children, usually, in other parts of the world -- ask that their monthly payments from Jubran be given to those who need it more.

"We're like a role model, an example for nearby villages," said Bages Muhesen, 70, the bespectacled head of the town council. "But we have someone to help, and the others do not."

In this village set among terraced hillsides a few miles north of Jerusalem, there is a palpable anger toward Israel and the United States, which they blame most for their impoverishment.