Israel weaponizes Palestinian tax revenue as punishment for political acts

Evidence

Israel has the power to unilaterally establish and change the taxes imposed on goods imported into Palestine. It collects import taxes and is supposed to transfer these clearance funds to the Palestinian Authority on a monthly basis. But for years Israel has been withholding them in part or in their entirety. This is no trifling sum of money: in 2022, Israel withheld 3.1 billion, which was 65 percent of the Palestinian government’s total annual revenue. Israel has withheld these funds to punish Palestinian acts of resistance, especially the attempt to seek international support for national autonomy. When the Palestinians sought UN and UNESCO membership in 2011, Israel withheld 100 million. Later, in response to Palestine’s acceptance as a nonmember state of the UN in 2012, clearance funds were withheld for three months. In the winter of 2015, Israel froze another $450 million after Palestine took steps to join the International Criminal Court. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 319

Categorization

• XREF: This is the Palestine case for Mattei’s central thesis that austerity is a deliberate instrument of class discipline rather than an economic error.