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?????????????????????????????????????????????????Friday, June 2, 2017
Why does PayPal discriminate against Palestinians?
Palestinian entrepreneurs at the
University College of Applied Sciences Technology Incubator in Gaza
City, in October 2016. Palestinian tech startups and freelancers face a
major disadvantage because PayPal refuses to serve them.Ibraheem Abu MustafaReuters/Newscom
Dalia Shurrab, a content writer and translator based in Gaza, receives
payment for her work through online money transfer platforms, like many
freelancers around the world.
But she can’t use PayPal. Despite serving nearly 200 million users in
203 countries, PayPal denies its service to Palestinians – though not
Israeli settlers – in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
“PayPal’s restrictions majorly disadvantage Palestinian startup and tech
companies,” Shurrab told The Electronic Intifada, “essentially rigging
the game in favor of their competitors in the rest of the Middle East
and North Africa.”
The company cites regulatory concerns as
the reason it denies service to Palestinians, although this ignores an
established working relationship between the US Treasury and the
Palestine Monetary Authority.
It also works in jurisdictions far less stable than Palestine, including Somalia and Yemen.
PayPal’s policy involves discrimination. Israelis living in settlements
in the West Bank can use PayPal, while Palestinians are unable to. All
of Israel’s settlements are illegal under international law.
The company did not respond to The Electronic Intifada’s repeated requests for comment.
Shurrab, who lives in Beit Hanoun in
the northern Gaza Strip, is – like Gaza’s two million other residents –
subject to Israel’s 10-year blockade of the territory. This makes it
almost impossible for her to leave Gaza through any Israeli-controlled
checkpoint.
With draconian restrictions on freedom of movement and the import and
export of goods and basic materials, Gaza’s economy has tanked, leaving
the coastal strip on the brink of collapse.
According to the World Bank, Gaza’s general unemployment rate was 42 percent in 2016 and soared to 58 percent among youth.
To Shurrab, this stark reality also presents an opportunity.
“Entrepreneurship in the Gaza Strip, and generally in Palestine, is
growing so fast,” Shurrab said. “It’s opening closed doors for these
youth to find new experiences and to live their passion and make their
dreams come true and be their own bosses without contributions from
other governments or the private sector.”
Shurrab got her first break at Gaza Sky Geeks, an incubator for startups, tech innovation and education.
Half of the startup founders supported by Gaza Sky Geeks are female, a proportion the company aims to increase to 80 percent.
Shurrab considered one day launching her own startup, but was forced to abandon the plan given lack of access to payment.
“Because PayPal does not operate in Gaza,” Shurrab said, she rarely receives payment for her freelance work.
Heavy international anti-terrorism and anti-money laundering restrictions imposed on Hamas-governed Gaza make regular bank-to-bank transfers expensive and cumbersome, as they are subject to monitoring by Israel and the United States.
Other money transfer platforms such as Western Union or MasterCard’s Payoneer are accessible to Gazans, but high transaction fees discourage their use.
Despondent
Despite the surge of Gaza’s startup industry, PayPal’s refusal of
service inhibits the potential of so many like Shurrab. The freelancer,
once chosen to represent Palestine at the sixth annual Global
Entrepreneurship Summit in Kenya, told The Electronic Intifada that she
is despondent.
“Unfortunately, my business has stopped.”
Since 2015, Palestinian business representatives have insisted that PayPal provide services to the West Bank and Gaza.
Americans for a Vibrant Palestinian Economy, an organization that advocates for investment in Palestine, penned a letter in
August 2016 to PayPal CEO Dan Schulman urging the company to extend its
services to Palestinians, thereby “removing a major limitation on the
Palestinian technology sector.”
It noted that tech is “one of the only sectors with the potential to
grow under status quo conditions of the Israeli occupation.”
The letter was signed by 43 Palestinian companies, primarily from the startup and tech field.
Today, Gaza Sky Geeks manages 27 startups, although the total number of Gaza-based tech companies is presumably higher.
Fadi Saba, a California-based organizer of the PayPal for Palestine
campaign, likened PayPal’s refusal to onerous Israeli restrictions on
the Palestinian economy.
Palestinians need permission from countless Israeli authorities just to transport produce a few miles, a lengthy customs procedure that has caused exports to spoil.
“The lack of PayPal access to Palestinians is similar to the tactic of
stopping Palestinian produce exports,” Saba told The Electronic
Intifada, “or [like] those physical checkpoints.”
The United Nations has warned that by 2020, Gaza will be uninhabitable should the Israeli blockade continue.
“You will be tested”
In response to a query by The Electronic Intifada, Tura Winery – located in an Israeli settlement near the West Bank city of Nablus – confirmed that it accepts payment for its olive oil through PayPal.
In January 2016, Human Rights Watch warned companies that
doing any business in or with Israeli settlements would “unavoidably
contribute to Israeli policies that dispossess and harshly discriminate
against Palestinians, while profiting from Israel’s theft of Palestinian
land and other resources.”
“If [PayPal is] going to be in the same physical area they should make
the service available to all people,” Granate Sosnoff, a Jewish Voice
for Peace representative told The Electronic Intifada.
Dan Schulman, CEO of PayPal, is officially committed to “corporate social responsibility.”
But the language of corporate social responsibility has become so widespread that it can often read as unintentional parody.
A 2016 article by Schulman for Time magazine is a good example.
Schulman wrote that the “questions ‘why do we exist as a company?’ and
‘how do we make a difference?’ need to have the same answer.”
A company will need to turn a challenge into an opportunity: “The
opportunity to prove to the world that your values aren’t just something
written on a wall – that your mission is not opportunistic – it is the
North Star. You will be tested.”
“This is a company that very much wants to be seen as supporting human
rights,” Seth Leibson, a spokesperson for the South Bay chapter of
Jewish Voice for Peace, told The Electronic Intifada, but “they’re
clearly failing to do so” in Palestine.
While exact numbers are difficult to ascertain, the number of Gazan
freelancers increased from mere tens in 2014 to hundreds by 2015,
according to Taysir Shaqalaih from Mercy Corps, a US organization and
main backer of Gaza Sky Geeks.
The rapid growth of the Palestinian IT freelance sector has further
empowered the campaign demanding an end to PayPal’s discrimination.
Since the initial 2015 meeting between Palestinian businesses and
PayPal, a coalition of local and national Palestine solidarity
organizations has taken up the issue.
In 2016, the South Bay Palestine Organizing Coalition, the US Campaign
for Palestinian Rights, Jewish Voice for Peace and others began an online petition to “Tell PayPal to end its discrimination against Palestinians.”
In November, the coalition launched a social media campaign but the company still refused to make any specific comments.
Finally, two PayPal representatives – Richard Nash and Justin Higgs –
agreed to meet activists at the company’s San Jose headquarters earlier
this month.
The meeting proved unsuccessful.
Corporate apathy
According to Noam Perry, a campaigner who attended, the PayPal
representatives acknowledged that the situation had become a concern and
that they have a moral obligation to fight discrimination.
“However, they admitted that they have not made any meaningful progress
on this issue, and declined to make any commitments, even remote ones,”
Perry, who works for the American Friends Service Committee and is a
member of Jewish Voice for Peace, told The Electronic Intifada.
On 16 May dozens of activists held a rally outside the company’s San Jose headquarters.
They delivered 15 boxes representing more than 180,000 petition signatures collected online.
PayPal’s Higgs engaged with the protesters outside his office.
“It is a complex issue from a compliance and regulatory standpoint,”
Higgs told activists. “But that’s not to say that we’re not serious
about our business and democratizing financial services for the people
all around the world, not just Palestine.”
Although he accepted the petition on behalf of PayPal, Higgs gave no
commitments about when the company would take specific steps to change
its policy. Organizers vowed to keep up the pressure, including more
protests, until their demands are met.
Meanwhile, the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights attempted to deliver
the petition to PayPal’s Washington, DC, office but were turned away.
Despite the obstacles that Gaza and West Bank entrepreneurs face, “the
tech folks in San Jose are just like those in Palestine,” campaigner
Fadi Saba said.
“They want to depend on themselves, they want to be self-sufficient – they want a fishing pole to catch their own fish.”
Jesse Rubin is a freelance reporter and regular contributor to The Indypendent, a New York-based publication. Twitter: @JesseJDRubin.