There's a construction boom right now in downtown Tel Aviv, fuelled by an unusually buoyant Israeli economy. And around Jerusalem, the hills are alive to the sound of building as the creation and extension of Jewish settlements reaches new levels under the aggressive stewardship of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.
Only a few years ago, such busy scenes would have spelled halcyon times for the labourers from Palestinian areas, particularly those in the poverty-blighted Gaza Strip. As legals or illegals, Israeli companies were happy to engage the Palestinians, not least because they could get away with paying them less than Israeli workers would demand as of right - and also avoid paying taxes and social security. (The Palestinians, desperate for any income, could not afford to dwell on the irony that theirs were the hands building the very "facts-on-the-ground" settlements which would inevitably be used against Palestinian interests in any "peace process" negotiations.)
When the building work began to accelerate, the Gaza workers could not in any case take advantage of it initially. The Strip had been closed by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) for security reasons. Hemmed in between the Mediterranean, Egypt and the IDF, Gazans have only one point of exit: the Eretz crossing, controlled effectively by the Israelis and nominally on their side by Palestinian Authority (PA) officials.
Inside Gaza, per capita earnings have been shrinking under Palestinian Authority rule. Many commodities are still sourced in Israel, but now Gazans pay PA surcharges on top of the cost in shekels. PA-controlled monopolies, coupled to endemic corruption, add further to inflation.
But when the most recent Eretz closure ended, Palestinians took up only some of the available permits to work in Israel. By last June, only 21,000 Gazans were taking advantage of the new ceiling of 58,000 permits. A new labouring underclass, more than half of which works illegally, had emerged. Israeli unions and other labour organisations estimate that there are now 80,000 Romanians, 40,000 Thais and 20,000 Filipinos working in their country. Under Israeli labour law, a 186-hour month should attract a minimum wage of New Israeli Shekels (NIS) 2,350 ($690); costs to an employer of hiring a Palestinian are estimated at NIS 1,800, and a "foreign" worker can cost as little as NIS 1,360.
Up the road in Lebanon, times are harder, if anything, for the Palestinian refugees (Palrefs) in that country. Technically speaking, they are not allowed to work at all, yet necessity drives many of them to find illegal employment, mainly in construction and agriculture. But nowadays Lebanon has also imported its own cheap labour pool, and the poor Lebanese and Palrefs who could once have scratched out some miserable sort of living are now destitute.
Lebanon is home to an estimated 1.5 million dirt-poor Syrians. In Beirut, around the northern city of Tripoli and in the lush Bek'a Valley, new shanty towns of tin, wooden scraps and plastic sheeting have sprung up to house this new underclass, members of which count themselves blessed to leave the poverty stricken drudgery of Syria behind them. Local estimates reckon that they are being paid as little as 50 to 60 per cent of the rates Palestinian refugees illegals used to earn.
The Gulf War had already struck Lebanese Palrefs hard: when the PLO's Yasser Arafat supported Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, outraged Gulf states cut off financial support to the PLO; average family income in the Palestinian refugee camps quickly plunged below even that of impoverished Gaza. Palestinians working in Kuwait, whose remittances were a critical source of income for their families in Lebanon, suffered mass expulsion after the Iraqi defeat. In Beirut, the government - with little fondness for the Palestinian refugees whom many Lebanese blame for much of their country's travails of recent decades - decided in 1995 to demand visas from all Palestinians living or studying abroad. Lebanese embassies then refused to issue any, and it is believed that Lebanon's Palref population of 350,000 may have dropped by as much as 100,000 since 1995.
In the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and in the Syrian Arab Republic (SAR), members of the Palestinian diaspora scarcely live in comfort, but there is an equilibrium of sorts to their lives. Although oppressive mukhabarats (secret police) keep a steely grip on all and sundry in the SAR, UNRWA maintains decent levels of basic services. The 1.3 million Palestinian refugees in Jordan, who know that like their counterparts in SAR and Lebanon they will never benefit from any gains won through the stuttering "peace process", at least achieved Jordanian citizenship over the years since their exile. And in SAR and Jordan, the refugees are also legally entitled to seek work.
At a time when Palestinian refugees living in Gaza, the Occupied Territories and the countries of their diaspora might presume they could more than ever depend on the UN agency charged with their welfare, they have found to their considerable dismay that UNRWA has plunged into a trough of organisational and financial uncertainty as deep as any in its 49-year history.
The 1990s have not been kind to UNRWA, (the UN Relief and Works Agency), which has been delivering emergency relief, health and education services to Palestinian refugees in its five fields of operation with marked success since its establishment in the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
Within the UN family, it has always been regarded as one of the most efficient and effective of agencies, and donor loyalty down the years was correspondingly generous and dependable. A sequence of good "officer corps", led by some inspired Commissioners General (ComGen) and a dependable but flexible organisational structure took the agency through successive wars in 1967, 1973 and 1982, through years of unrest in Lebanon and through the Palestinian intifada, as well as the Gulf conflict.
At the cutting edge throughout were the international staff, some of them funded through UN HQ in New York. Hired for expertise gained working in governments, defence forces, other institutions and large companies, the internationals complemented the work of thousands of area (local) staff. They also provided the moral and sometimes the physical backbone to stand up to local regimes. Finally, and often crucially, long-serving internationals held the agency's "institutional memory", a hard core of experience which was priceless in emergencies.
The first backward development in recent decades was probably the relocation of UNRWA's headquarters to Austria after civil war hostilities forced it to abandon Beirut in the late 1970s. It is generally accepted in UN circles that Kurt Waldheim, then UN secretary general, "greymailed" UNRWA and other agencies to move into the Vienna International City, a white-elephant complex of buildings on the banks of the Danube which the then Austrian government was desperate to fill.
At a stroke, UNRWA HQ was moved more than 2,500 kilometers from its field of operations. Agency veterans reckon the move also effected a change in institutional mind-set that was anything but beneficial. Employees in the five fields soon formed a less than complimentary view of the distant HQ as being aloof and populated by remote types living in expatriate luxury.
When Ilter Turkmen became ComGen in the early 1990s, a generalised UN cash shortage had taken on crisis proportions (member states owe the UN more than $3 billion). UNRWA was not exempted from its effects: swingeing cutbacks in agency services were implemented in the Turkish ComGen's abrupt and autocratic style. Recruitment was frozen, area staff salaries were capped. Schools became overcrowded, teacher numbers fell at a time when the Palestinian refugee population continued to grow, and health services began to suffer. Refugees, political groupings and staff unions complained bitterly. The cuts continued.
The annual budget crisis began to worsen at UNRWA as working capital could no longer be utilised to cover annual deficits. Donor priorities had begun to shift, psychologically and practically, on foot of the Oslo peace accords, away from the diaspora fields and towards West Bank and Gaza. Then donors quickly became wary of the PA's early lurch into corrupt and inefficient practices; donations were increasingly directed towards specific plans, even specified bricks-and-mortar projects.
Under Turkmen, a small HQ management coterie soon developed into a powerful clique, and decisions by diktat became commonplace. Consultation with senior staff became the exception rather than the norm, and an element of autocratic spite appeared to enter staff relations, culminating in the effective dismissal on nebulous grounds of the field director in Jordan.
By then, UN HQ in New York had become restive. Donor unease was burgeoning, poor management controls and supervision became increasingly evident, staff unrest was doing damage to morale and performance. Late in 1995 the under-secretary-general for Internal Oversight Services, Karl Paschke, descended on UNRWA with his team from New York. His January 1996 report, by polite UN standards, was savagely critical of Turkmen's regime.
It found, inter alia, that:
"[some] organisational changes introduced were punitive in nature, and certainly not motivated by any desire to streamline the work and to improve efficiency"
"it is difficult . . . to find solid enough ground to justify the action [Jordan sacking] taken by the management"
"management style in administering personnel [was] `personalised, unprofessional, erratic, authority oriented, unco-operative and uninformative'."
"The Team did not find any policy rationale behind staff movements and could not escape the conclusion that many of these moves were taken to either penalise or reward the staff concerned"
"[mechanisms to consult senior staff] have been marginalised to the point of rendering them ineffective as a tool of collective advice"
"As it stands now, UNRWA is being run by decree," stated Paschke's summary. "Decisions are shaped behind closed doors by a small group of individuals trusted by the commissioner general."
The centre could not hold after that. Turkmen returned to Turkey. The senior cabal, bizarrely, survived to become even more powerful under his Danish successor, Peter Hansen, an academic with negligible operational experience outside sitting on UN committees.
An ill-advised move of HQ to Gaza rather than Amman (as Paschke had recommended), enforced from New York, was undertaken in 1996. In the two years since then, between 60 to 80 internationals have left agency service. Many of those remaining, under-motivated and disillusioned, are seeking other work or planning early retirement and the once-vaunted institutional memory is now a tattered thing.
Later this summer, UNRWA will face a funding shortfall of between $60 million and $70 million and will be both technically and practically bankrupt. Worse, from the point of view of those in charge, the UN comptroller and Karl Paschke will descend on the agency later this month. This time around, with few of Paschke's recommended reforms implemented, it is difficult to see any solution that does not involve root-and-branch pruning of UNRWA's unsuccessful HQ team.
To the poor Palestinian refugee queuing in a dismal Lebanese camp for his ration of EU donation-in-kind flour or ghee, the upheaval will all mean very little. And it is difficult, with the best will in the world, to see any early relief for the Palestinian refugee child straining to hear her teacher in some overcrowded West Bank classroom.
Niall Kiely is news editor of The Irish Times, and researched this article last month in Beirut, Damascus, Amman, West Bank and Gaza. From 1987 to 1990 he served as a Beirut-based public information officer for UNRWA, working in all of the agency's five fields.