Palestinians keep on cutting off their noses to spite their faces

What do you do when your people suffer from an economic crisis?

You exacerbate it, of course!

When Vice President Pence visited Israel, Palestinian factions called for a general strike. Not only did they bully all shopkeepers to close their stores, depriving them of revenue as they often do when calling for these strikes, but they blockaded roads to stop their fellow Arabs from going to work in Israel, depriving them of a day of their salary.

What percentage of the Palestinian GDP is affected by these strikes that happen multiple times a year? Does the World Bank ever put that into their calculations when blaming Israel alone for Palestinian economic woes?

Today, UNRWA workers in Gaza went on strike to protest the US reduction in aid to the agency. All UNRWA offices and schools are closed today. Instead of working together to try to serve their population better, they are denying their own people services to accomplish - what, exactly?

Similarly, the Palestinian Youth Movement in the West Bank has demanded that UNRWA somehow get the money it wants to avoid reducing services, or they will start to picket UNRWA offices and stop them from doing their jobs as well.

Even more bizarre, the private companies that import goods to Gaza through Israel have decided to also go on strike - and to stop any imports tomorrow:

Private sector institutions in the Gaza Strip have decided to stop coordinating the entry of all types of goods into the Gaza Strip through the Kerem Shalom Crossing on Tuesday, February 6.
Maher al-Tabaa, director of public relations and information at the Chamber of Commerce, told Ma'an that the decision was due to the catastrophic situation in the Gaza Strip and that Gaza was in a state of clinical death, pointing out that the decision came in the wake of private sector meetings.
He pointed out that there are many steps that will be taken, including trade strikes, sit-ins and many events and press conferences.
He explained that all these steps come under the slogan "we want to live" and that Gaza has the right to live in dignity.
The private sector announced a one-day trade strike on Monday to warn against the deterioration of living conditions and the difficulty of continuing its work.

Is it more dignified to work together to serve the people with fewer resources, or to deny your own people access to basic services?

Can you imagine US women in World War II refusing to work in factories and going on strike to protest the war? Because that is the Palestinian mentality - we don't have to work through adversity, we just have to strike and whine and complain louder and eventually the world will provide us with what we want for free, anyway.

I mean, it's worked until now, hasn't it?

Meanwhile, a Gaza hospital has closed due to lack of fuel to keep the generators going. It isn't Israel that is blocking fuel deliveries - it is simply a shortage of cash. And this has nothing to do with UNRWA, meaning that the shortage of cash comes from the Palestinian Authority choosing to pay salaries of terrorists instead of fuel for hospitals. And NGOs aren't raising money for hospitals, because their money goes into demonizing Israel, not in helping Gazans.

And that works as well, since Palestinians simply cannot complain to the media and other Westerners for fear of appearing to break the unified position of blaming Israel (and now Trump) for all their problems.

It is a self-feeding crisis, but few are brave enough to point it out.

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