Palestinian child beggars in Israel

West Bank poverty spawns child beggars:

NAZARETH, Israel – For 15-year-old Issa, days of summer start when the sun rises over a northern Israeli hill, shining on a garbage dump, a thorny field and then the dirty mattress that is his bed.

Issa is among hundreds of Palestinian child laborers who sneak into Israel from the West Bank, hawking or begging at traffic junctions.

Note that this story just barely mentions the occupation as a primary cause of poverty in the West Bank. Not surprising from AP, whose State Department correspondent (Barry Schweid) is a notorious Zionist and often tilts his coverage in favor of Israel.

0 thoughts on “Palestinian child beggars in Israel”

  1. Couldn’t the Palestinians use some of those millions of dollars that they collect in foreign (US) aid to help these kids. I’m not trying to blame the Palistinians for the problem, I just want to know why they aren’t spending the money to help their own people.

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  2. How much could aid help a 15 year old? Obviously the nations of the world have been generous to the Palestinians but there is only so much money could do to ease the occupation. As a Palestinian who has lived in the West Bank for 7 years, I would rather no foreign aid and no occupation, then foreign aid and occupation. The system in the PA is so corrupt (who can argue that it isnt?) and inefficent, that no amount of money could save it. Also I think the last batch of foreign aid monies from the US which has been the only one received since the elections is only being used for security.

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  3. Saeed above says it all — the paltry amounts of aid ($1.1 billion before it was cancelled in January 2006, since then there has been little aid) is nothing compared to the occupation, land theft, ethnic cleansing and other measures that have prevented a real Palestinian economy from emerging in the last 50 years. Israel gets much more aid every year from the US (in just military aid it will be receiving $30 billion over the next 10 years, that’s an average of $3 billion a year and it doesn’t include many other forms of aid and loan guarantees).

    By the way, do you call yourself “Digital Brownshirt” in admiration for the Nazi Sturmabteilung?

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  6. Good one tim!
    It gets annoying when people try and compare Palestinians living in the occupied territories to a normal nation. I wonder if knows that less fortunate people can be found at all corners of the world including the United States (if that is not where he is from, I am sure they exsist there too). Lets not mention the sex trade in Israel, how much of that 30 billion will goto helping those women?

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  8. Oooh, and I suppose the Arab occupation of formerly Jewish-owned land throughout the middle east is the cause of Jewish poverty in Israel today! Amazing! I never thought of that! Issandr, you are brilliant !

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  10. How many Palestinians does it take to change a light bulb?
    None. They sit in the dark and blame the Jews.

    My sympathy for the Palestinians has been almost completely eroded after years of watching them.

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  12. I just came back from my first trip to Israel and the West Bank, and I was amazed by how little many Israelis I’ve met knew about what real life looks like on the other side of the wall. Most of them had never been there (except sometimes for their military service). They thought they would be killed or attacked at the first street corner. Another recommended me to go to Ramallah on a tank rather than by bus, when I asked him for directions to the bus station. (By the way, he also thought Hebron was safer thanks to the IDF presence!). A security guy: “you went to Ramallah? Weren’t you scared?” Only a few seemed to know that Ramallah was a very westernized place, by Middle Eastern standards.

    In short, the less they knew, the more radicals they were towards the Arabs. It may sound natural if you think of extremists who by principle do not want to know, but I’m talking of secular, theoretically peace-oriented Israelis who honestly had no idea of anything.

    The same seems to be even more true as far as pro-Israel militants living abroad are concerned. Even several Israeli friends of mine, who are far from being naive leftist peaceniks by domestic standards, told me how sick they were of US-based self-appointed Israel’s “defensors” who don’t know what they are talking about when talking, for example, about security or insecurity.

    So, the only point I wanted to make is that a lot of irrelevant comments on this blog and in Isr-pal debates in general could be avoided with even an ounce of concrete knowledge to correct serious misrepresentations. Sorry if it sounds like naive preaching but I’m sometimes horrified by the level of the arguments.

    The same goes of course concerning the image of the Israelis on the other side (Israelis, like Palestinians, are normal people with feelings, they form a complex society, etc.), but that’s a somehow different question.

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  13. To tell the truth, I never really fully understood how complex the Israeli society really is till I read Occupied Minds by Arthur Neslen. I really interesting book that takes you deep inside the Israeli psyche.
    I lived in Ramallah for 7 years, and continue to visit every summer and most people are confused when I tell them that I goto the occupied territories for vacation. It is a wonderful city that anyone could enjoy.

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