A 2-week-old ban on allowing Palestinians from the administered territories to enter Israel proper will be extended indefinitely, Israel’s Cabinet decided Sunday.
The closure of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, ordered by the government in an effort to end a wave of violence that claimed 15 Israeli lives last month, will be reviewed on a weekly basis, the Cabinet resolved.
Since the closure, the Israeli economy has tried to cope with the loss of about 120,000 Palestinians who crossed into Israel daily to fill mostly low-paying manual labor.
Labor Minister Ora Namir said after Sunday’s lengthy Cabinet session that when the closure is eventually lifted, the number of Palestinians employed inside Israel proper will not exceed 70,000.
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said he wants to use the crisis created by the closure to help solve the high employment among Israelis by transferring jobs formerly held by Palestinians to Jews.
However, the past two weeks have shown that the vast majority of the 150,000 Israelis registered as unemployed are still unwilling to take on jobs that Palestinians from the territories regularly hold.
Many Israeli employers, who are used to hiring Palestinians at salaries below the national minimum wage, have demanded that the closure be eased.
Under pressure by Israeli employers, the closure has been relaxed slightly in the past week, allowing a few thousand workers each day to reach jobs in Israel.
Government sources said policy will be directed toward replacing Palestinians in the construction industry as rapidly as possible, while adopting a more lenient attitude toward agricultural work.
In parallel efforts to create more jobs for Palestinians inside the territories themselves, the government resolved to encourage investment, local and foreign, in the industrial infrastructure there.
RABIN’S POPULARITY REBOUNDS
But Cabinet ministers caution that a major change in the economic situation inside the territories, with its chronic shortage of jobs, will not occur overnight.
For years, the Israeli government did little to encourage investment in the territories.
Meanwhile, military and security experts reportedly gave conflicting assessments to the Cabinet over when to lift the closure.
The continued closure of the territories means the loss of critical income to many Palestinian families and is creating a tense and dangerous situation in the territories, some senior army officers warned.
But Rabin made clear, even before the Cabinet met, that he would not favor an early lifting of the closure. Rabin’s position appears to be in sync with the broad swathe of public opinion.
The fact that the wave of killings has stopped since the closure was imposed has served to strengthen a mood in the country that the “separation,” as Rabin calls it, is the only effective way of combatting terror.
The wave of killings sapped public confidence in the Labor-led government, but the current mood favoring “separation” appears to have shored up support for Rabin.
If translated into long-term political positions, “separation” poses an awkward problem for the Likud, the main opposition party, which is ideologically committed to a Greater Israel with continued control of the territories.
By contrast, Labor and its coalition allies favor an eventual territorial compromise on the West Bank and total withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
While the closure has continued, the security forces have stepped up efforts to capture wanted Palestinian gunmen from the territories.
Four gunmen were captured over the weekend, while a gang of 18 others was arrested last week. The group reportedly had planned to set off a bomb beneath a crowded shopping center in Tel Aviv.
Several weapons caches have also been found since the closure two weeks ago.
At the same time, police are investigating a series of incidents in Hebron involving an extremist Jewish youth group that organized a self-described self-defense course for about 60 youths from around the country.
Over the weekend, the group allegedly threw stones at Arab homes and cars, damaged stores in the Arab market and beat store owners.
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