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Palestinian teachers gathered in Ramallah on Feb. 23, 2016 despite Palestinian security forces setting up checkpoints across the West Bank to prevent the demonstration.

Teachers stopped at a Palestinian security checkpoint near Bethlehem
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RAMALLAH (Ma’an) -- Palestinian security forces set up checkpoints outside major West Bank cities early on Tuesday to prevent public school teachers from attending a major demonstration in Ramallah.

Palestinian security checkpoints were installed on all roads outside the cities of Ramallah and al-Bireh. Officers at the checkpoints stopped all vehicles traveling to Ramallah for inspection and turned back buses carrying teachers to the city.

A large numbers of security officers were deployed around government buildings in Ramallah, where teachers were planning on protesting.

An estimated 20,000 Palestinian teachers demonstrated in Ramallah last week to call for the implementation of a 2013 agreement guaranteeing teachers' rights.

Near the southern West Bank city of Bethlehem, Palestinian security checkpoints near the Beit Jala junction and the town of Dar Salah on the main road towards Ramallah, turning back vehicles carrying several hundreds of teachers who were heading to the demonstration.

Palestinian security checkpoints were also erected outside Tulkarem in the northern West Bank for the same purpose.

“We are not opposing a policy or a regime; all we want is to be able to eat our bread in dignity,” a representative of Bethlehem-area teachers told Ma’an, adding that Palestinian security officers seized the driving licenses and identity documents of bus drivers.

Teachers in Bethlehem say that after security officers stopped their buses and ordered them to turn back, many teachers tried to travel in private vehicles, only to encounter more checkpoints further along the road.

In the northern West Bank city of Nablus, witnesses told Ma'an that Palestinian police officers threatened to revoke the licenses of taxi drivers who carried teachers to Ramallah.

Another source, who requested anonymity for safety reasons, told Ma'an that Palestinian security in Nablus also threatened to punish bus companies if they took teachers to Ramallah for the demonstration.

"The instructions the Palestinian government has given to its security services breach the basics of Palestinian law," Khalil Assaf, a member of a politically unaffiliated committee, told Ma'an.

Despite the checkpoints, scores of teachers nonetheless gathered in front of the council of ministers in Ramallah.

The heads of the Palestinian Teachers' Union submitted their resignation Monday after a deal they struck with the Palestinian Authority to end a national strike last week was widely rejected by teachers.

A 2013 agreement between the Palestinian teachers’ union and the government notably guaranteed a significant increase on teachers' basic salary.

However, three years after a lengthy teachers' strike over unpaid salaries, the Palestinian Authority has yet to make good on its promise to increase wages.
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by Amira Hass for Haaretz
Published 2/24/2016

“Where are you; don’t you know what’s going on?”

“I’m busy with demolitions.”

“Forget the demolitions; checkpoints are surrounding every town.”

“You mean the army still thinks that’s a deterrent?”

“Forget the Jews; all the Palestinian Authority security services set up checkpoints this morning at the exits from the cities and the entrance to Ramallah/El Bireh, to prevent the teachers from attending a demonstration against the failure to honor wage agreements signed with them back in 2013. What have we come to? What have we come to?”

Yesterday, the PA security services set up rings of checkpoints in the Area A enclaves, where Israel allows the Palestinian police to carry weapons. They removed teachers from buses and threatened to confiscate their identity cards. The buses hired to transport the teachers were told to go back home. Taxi drivers were told they would lose their licenses if they drove demonstrators.

Those who did manage to reach the enclave of Ramallah and El Bireh ran into additional checkpoints there and got stuck in long lines of cars that didn’t move. In Ramallah itself, security personnel blocked off the streets between the Palestinian Legislative Council building and the Prime Minister’s Office.

By 11 A.M. yesterday, about 1,000 teachers had already gathered in Mahmoud Darwish Square opposite the Prime Minister’s Office. Hundreds of others were coming by foot from the nearby streets in an unending stream. Slowly, the square filled up.

“We, who can overcome the Jews’ checkpoints, can’t manage to overcome the PA’s checkpoints?” said teachers who came from the Hebron area. “We haven’t seen them setting up checkpoints to prevent the occupation [the Israeli army] from breaking into our villages and houses,” an angry caller said on a local radio station.

The protests and partial strikes resumed about two weeks ago. Ever since the mid-1990s, public-sector teachers have been trying to explain to the PA that their humiliating wages and benefits harm the students and the future of Palestinian society as a whole. Last Tuesday, an estimated 20,000 people attended a teachers’ demonstration in Ramallah. The PA security services arrested about 20 teachers and two principals and released them two days later.

The PA’s claim that the demonstration was organized by Hamas was greeted with scorn by the teachers.

On Thursday, an agreement was reached with representatives of the teachers union, which is affiliated with the PLO and dependent on Fatah, the PA’s ruling party. But the teachers rejected the agreement, which wasn’t retroactive. On Saturday and Sunday, mosque loudspeakers broadcast orders to return to school, but the strike continued.

The teachers’ protest has brought more people into the streets than any protest against the Israeli occupation over the past five months, since the uprising of the individuals began. In the permanent temporary situation created by the Oslo Accords, Israel still dictates the dimensions of non-development in Palestinian territory through its control of the borders, of the vast expanse of the West Bank known as Area C and of Palestinian freedom of movement. But responsibility for coping with the impoverishment and unemployment falls on the shoulders of the PA, the buffer between the principal culprit and the people.

The demonstrators know this, but they also see the unfair distribution of the national income, regardless of how low it is due to Israeli restrictions. They see the excessive allocations to the security services, the waste and corruption, the preference given to cronies and the exorbitant salaries of senior officials. They have no expectations of the occupier. But they do have demands of the subcontractor that terms itself a government, a national authority and a liberation movement.

“The PA has gone crazy,” a teacher from Nablus who didn’t manage to get through the checkpoints said by phone. “It and its security services are acting as if the people were the enemy.”

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