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CALCALIST

Gaza Rebuilding And Jobs In Israel Fuel Palestinian Economic Recovery

Delivering bags of cement in the east of Gaza
Delivering bags of cement in the east of Gaza
Danny Rubinstein

TEL AVIV — Despite its ongoing problems, the Palestinian economy has recently shown significant signs of recovery.

It's particularly evident after a period of deep recession, economist Yitzhak Gal notes in an article published by a Tel Aviv University journal. The Palestinian Authority has faced the threat of collapse and, with it, the destruction of the economic and social fabric in Gaza and the West Bank. The peak of the downturn came during the second half of 2014 and the beginning of 2015, fueled by the war in Gaza and the Israeli government's withholding of Palestinian tax money.

The Palestinian Authority's debts to suppliers skyrocketed to $700 million by the end of 2014, compared to $260 million in 2012, and its debts to civil servants' pension funds stood at nearly $2 billion.

The transfer of taxpayer money from Israel to the Palestinian Authority resumed following Israel's parliamentary elections in March 2015, but it wasn't enough to address the acute distress.

Recovery has been evident in recent weeks as Gaza reconstruction has pushed forward at a faster pace. Before last summer's war, the Kerem Shalom checkpoint saw about 140 trucks of food and goods entering the Gaza Strip every day, but in recent months the number has more than doubled to about 300.

Many of these trucks have brought Gaza goods and construction materials from abroad. Palestinian merchants paid tax and customs for them to Israeli government coffers, and these were in turn transferred to the government in Ramallah.

Another reason for the economic recovery is a continued increase in the number of Palestinian laborers working in Israel and in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. There are various reasons for the growing demand, among them a number of road, railway and housing projects.

Whereas about 50,000 Palestinians were employed in Israel four or five years ago, the number today is twice that, which means that Palestinians represent about 15% of Israel's workforce. Income growth is also an optimistic sign.

Israel has aided the growth of Palestinian workers in Israel by introducing measures to facilitate crossing checkpoints, and Israeli officials say more measures soon will be introduced. Israel will also issue licenses to the thousands of illegal Palestinian workers in Israel and might even find a way to allow a few Gazans to enter and work in Israel.

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Ideas

Purebreds To "Rasse" Theory: A German Critique Of Dog Breeding

Just like ideas about racial theory, the notion of seeking purebred dogs is a relatively recent human invention. This animal eugenics project came from a fantasy of recreating a glorious past and has done irreparable harm to canines. A German

Photo of a four dogs, including two dalmatians, on leashes

No one flinches when we refer to dogs, horses or cows as purebreds, and if a friend’s new dog is a rescue, we see no problem in calling it a mongrel or crossbreed.

Wieland Freund

BERLIN — Some words always seem to find a way to sneak through. We have created a whole raft of embargoes and decrees about the term race: We prefer to say ethnicity, although that isn’t always much better. In Germany, we sometimes use the English word race rather than our mother tongue’s Rasse.

But Rasse crops up in places where English native speakers might not expect to find it. If, on a walk through the woods, the park or around town, a German meets a dog that doesn’t clearly fit into a neat category of Labrador, dachshund or Dalmatian, they forget all their misgivings about the term and may well ask the person holding the lead what race of dog it is.

Although we have turned our back on the shameful racial theories of the 19th and 20th centuries, the idea of an “encyclopedia of purebred dogs” or a dog handler who promises an overview of almost “all breeds” (in German, “all races”) has somehow remained inoffensive.

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