WBD417 Audio Transcription
How Bitcoin Helps Palestinians with Alex Gladstein & Fadi Elsalameen
Interview date: Sunday 31st October
Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Alex Gladstein & Fadi Elsalameen. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.
In this interview, I talk to Alex Gladstein and Fadi Elsalameen. We discuss declining economic conditions in Palestine, the underlying monetary problems, and how Bitcoin can help.
“The only sign of hope when I’m looking at this is actually looking at something like bitcoin because you are able to circumvent all these different levels of restrictions, whether it’s the Israelis or the Palestinian Authority, or even Hamas.”
— Fadi Elsalameen
Interview Transcription
Peter McCormack: Right, hello, good morning. Alex, how are you, man?
Alex Gladstein: I'm great, I'm really excited about this conversation. Thank you so much for making the space for us to talk to you about Palestine, Peter.
Peter McCormack: Not a problem, you always have a permanent and open invite on my podcast. You know how much I love your work. I was listening to you this morning in the gym with Lex Fridman, which people should go and listen to. I think it's probably your best podcast you've ever done. So, yeah, people should go and listen to that. Good morning, Fadi, good to see you again. The last time I saw you was in Oslo a couple of years ago at the Human Rights Freedom Forum.
Fadi Elsalameen: Good morning, Peter, good morning, Alex, it's great to be with both of you. Yes, I remember we had a great conversation in Oslo at the Oslo Freedom Forum about Bitcoin and its usage in Palestine, and that was almost two, three years ago.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, well Alex has written an incredible piece. Just a funny little back story to that, my brother read the article and texted me and said, "Have you read this article from Alex Gladstein; do you know him, he's amazing?" and at that moment, me and Alex were sat in a car together in El Salvador! So, yeah, it's a great piece of work. That will also be in the show notes. People should go and read it, it's epic work.
This is a subject I'm particularly interested in. When I was in my 20s, I attempted to read a book, called The Fateful Triangle, by Noam Chomsky, which was about the relationship between Israel, Palestine and the US. I did struggle with it, but the plight of the Palestinians is always something I've been interested in, but found it difficult, because whenever I publicly express any empathy for what's happening to people, especially in Gaza, I seem to draw in the hate of people who accuse me of being anti-Semitic, when I really just talk about the plight of the people living in Palestine with no support for any political power there.
So, it is a subject I'm interested in and I do want to talk about it but, Alex, do you want to just give a background to why you wrote this article?
Alex Gladstein: Yeah. And, look, I've said very little on Palestine over the last decade, partly because (a) I didn't know a lot, (b) it is such a difficult topic to get into; no matter what you say, you get attacked by one side of the other, and (c) there's such a preponderance of groups trying to make an impact, or at least that's what I thought. Then, through the lens of Bitcoin, I've just been down this rabbit hole and I've been looking at the money, and I've been looking at the power relationship between states and individuals through the prism of money; and when I started pulling the paper back a little bit on the Palestine piece through the lens of money, I just got completely drawn in and I was like, "Oh, my God, there's a story here that nobody's telling".
We need to just be pretty objective about the facts and then let the audience determine their conclusions here, and I love the fact that we have Fadi here, because Fadi is focused on exposing corruption in the Palestinian Authority, and in Hamas, and in the authoritarian, corrupt rulers that rule over the Palestinian people today. A lot of what we're going to go through is sort of an examination of how the Israeli Government works with the Palestinian Government as kind of a client state, to achieve whatever they want to achieve. The two governments work together at the expense of the Palestinian people, and I think that's what I've learned about this, looking through it via an economic prism.
Peter McCormack: So, Fadi, the people who listen to this show will know Alex very well. It's probably his tenth appearance on the show, they know the work he does and where his focus is. But people listening may not know you, so do you just want to introduce yourself, let people know your background and the work you do.
Fadi Elsalameen: Sure. For the past ten years, I've been focused on exposing corruption within the Palestinian Authority. I've seen it as an enabler to the dire situation that we Palestinians have found ourselves into. Without a transparent government, without an anti-corruption movement within the Palestinian society, I don't think we could ever achieve the democracy that we want for ourselves. And so, I found myself fighting, along with a whole network of people, or Palestinians inside the Palestinian Territories, using social media, like Facebook and Twitter, and slowly exposing the different schemes that the current Palestinian President has been employing to maintain his stronghold, economically and politically, on the country.
Ten years later, millions of followers on Facebook, and also serious death threats as recent as March, the Palestinian President was very explicit about wanting me dead. The military arm of his movement, Fatah, issued a very explicit death threat saying that, "We would like Fadi Elsalameen dead. If we cannot catch him and kill him ourselves, anybody that can catch him is authorised to kill him, and no repercussions whatsoever".
So, you could tell from their reaction that I've really, by focusing on exposing the corruption, have agitated the Palestinian Authority and in particular, the President. And I say the President, because with all the pressure that was put back on him to condemn the death threat, to call it off, he refused to do so, which was very surprising, given his usually, especially towards the international community, his reconciliatory tone and tone that talks about peace and wanting peace. It was very obviously the complete opposite.
So, that's what I've been doing for the past ten years, focusing on exposing corruption within the Palestinian Authority.
Peter McCormack: And can you just, so people listening understand what the current political climate is, both in Gaza and in the West Bank, and then just explain a little bit about the corruption that you've been exposing, so people understand what's happening?
Fadi Elsalameen: So, we have a President who's been in power for 16 years. He was elected for one term, which is a four-year term. He refuses to hold elections, parliamentary or presidential. He dismembered the parliament, cancelled it; he cancelled the legislative body, the judicial body, created his own judicial court, which allows him to rule by decree. So essentially, he is a monarch with a title, President. But that's not the worst part.
The worst part comes, and Alex will explain this, where he controls, through his various enterprises, he basically controls almost every sector of business, or every sector that relates to the economy. We have now about 84% of Palestinians, both in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, that believe that the Palestinian Authority is corrupt. 79% of the Palestinian population is calling for the President to step down and resign and again, he's refusing to do all of these things.
But I want Alex to jump in, because here's the fascinating part. I used to also do, in my conversations with news outlets or with different gatherings, talk more about the politics until I started doing this exercise with Alex, and I realised the economics show the situation so much better than any conversation about the politics, because you just have to show what an average Palestinian would have to go through just to receive a wire transfer. You sort of go through three or four different layers. And by the time you're at the other end, you see who has the control and who has the final say of how much money you get, or whether you get the money or not, and why.
Peter McCormack: Alex, can I ask, just before you get into the financial side of things, can you just explain a little bit about the current situation in Gaza, because I saw a film recently which was explaining the situation with regards to the economy within Gaza, the issues with power, the average wage, essentially the humanitarian crisis; can you explain that first?
Alex Gladstein: Yeah, and we'll work through the history of the region in this conversation, and we're going to be tying a lot of different threads together. But I think one of the most important links to make is to link Fadi's career, exposing corruption in the Palestinian Authority, in the leadership of Palestine, as an outcome of Israeli policy.
The TLDR is that in 1967, the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian Territories began. The general call was economically to make the Palestinian people more dependent on the Israeli economy and less sovereign. So, even though you had population growth in Gaza and the West Bank over these decades, you had less and less farming and less and less manufacturing, and more and more labourers coming from Palestine to work in the Israeli economy.
In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, you saw a rise in the standard of living of Palestinians; there's no arguing that. But the real backdrop and the foundation of what was happening was that they were becoming less independent for themselves, less sovereign, and more dependent on the Israeli economy. Despite an increase, of course, in population, you had a smaller and smaller manufacturing base, you had a smaller and smaller capital stock, you had a smaller and smaller agricultural basically ecosystem, and more and more Palestinians would go to Israel to work.
This was the desired outcome of the Israeli Government. They wanted Palestinians to be dependent on them. Eventually, by the end of the 1980s, the Palestinians, their economic situation became much more severe. Again, it had been okay through the 1960s and 1970s. There was even this idea that Jimmy Carter's Administration pushed that, "If the Palestinians are happy and content, they'll be fine, they won't want any political independence". That was the idea literally pushed by the Carter Administration. And the idea was that, as long as their standards of living were gradually going up, maybe they wouldn't fight for their freedom.
Now, that changed, because in the 1980s, there were collapses in the Palestinian economy. Number one, the Israeli economy collapsed; there was massive hyperinflation in the Israeli currency actually. And at the same time, oil collapsed in price, so a lot of Palestinian workers who worked in the Gulf, those remittances, those income streams sort of decreased. So, you had a really dark economic time at the end of the 1980s, and this is when the Palestinians rose up, in what's known as the intifada. The intifada was really a strategy to claim back sovereignty through peaceful means, at first at least, through agricultural sovereignty and through boycotting the Israeli economic state.
The resolution of the intifada ultimately was the Oslo Accords and the crowning of Yasser Arafat as the new ruler of the Palestinian Territories. And that's where we come back to the corruption, because essentially what the Israeli's did is they made a tiny concession, but they held the real power. They basically said, "Okay, Arafat, you can be the ruler of this area, but you're going to follow our rules; and all of the rules about money, we're going to decide. And you're essentially going to work for us". That's really what the Oslo Accords laid down, was a trade-off of any possible economic future sovereignty for a surface-level political sovereignty. That happened in the early 1980s.
Now, you ask about Gaza. Gaza, since then, has really suffered much more dramatically than Palestinians in the West Bank, who it's not like they've had a great time, and I'll get into that. But let me just try and paint you a picture for the listener of what it's like in Gaza. It's a strip of territory, about 5 miles wide and 28 miles long, so you can think of a city like Austin, Texas, but twice as densely populated. It's one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Maybe you want to think Hong Kong in terms of how densely packed it is, but besieged in the desert with crumbling infrastructure. That's really what Gaza is.
Over the last three or four decades, the two million people who live in Gaza have suffered from what I would call civilisational collapse, and half of these people are under the age of 18. Really, the back story is that after the establishment of the PA, tensions continued to rise and to fester between Palestinians and their rulers and the Israelis, and there was a second intifada in the late-1990s, around the turn of the century. As a reaction, the Israeli Government basically turned off a lot of the ability for Gazans to enter the labour market in Israel.
So, what ends up happening is you force the Gazans and the broader Palestinian population to be dependent on your labour market, and then you close it off, so it wrecked the economy in Gaza. Then, in 2007, after Hamas won this election, which was disputed by everybody in the world, this terrorist group won an election in Gaza, the Israeli and the Egyptian Governments closed off Gaza. So, not only were they raised to be dependent on the outside world, but then the outside world was cut off from them. As a result, basically the socioeconomic statistics are unfathomable. I'll just give a couple, just to give you some more context.
So, a 15-year-old living in Gaza today is the survivor of four major wars between their government and the Israeli Government, the most recent taking place this spring. There's about 800,000 Gazans that don't have access to clean drinking water. They can only exit to the outside world through two checkpoints. In 2012, the UN published a paper about Gaza saying that it would be unliveable by 2020; that was their prediction. Well, I mean here we are.
The unemployment rate is about 50% in Gaza, and for under the age of 30, it's 64%. One out of every two Gazans live in poverty. 80% are dependent on food handouts, or some sort of social assistance. As far as the capital stock, what we really call the productive part of the economy in Gaza, the war between Israel and Hamas at the end of 2008 destroyed 60% of whatever capital stock remained, and the bombings in 2014 destroyed 85% of whatever was left after that.
So, the big picture is that in the 25 years between 1994, when Palestinians got "independence", and 2018, Gazans suffered a 44% decline in real GDP per capita. And this is again much worse off than their West Bank cousins. Basically, Gazans went from having about the same average income to someone in the West Bank to having just 30%, and this is despite the fact that birth rates in Gaza were dramatically high. At one point, the average Gazan had nearly seven children per family.
Peter McCormack: Is it fair to consider Gaza is essentially now a large refugee camp?
Alex Gladstein: Well, it was born as a refugee camp from the initial Arab-Israeli War, in a way. And you can think of it like that today, in a way. I just would also underline that more than 90% of the Strip's factories are closed. There's no outside investment. It dropped from 11% of the total Palestinian GDP in 1994, when they got independence, to just 2.7% now. The place has one power plant, which barely operates, because it can't get what it needs from the outside world, because Israel controls what comes in and out so closely. These people don't have drinking water; there's no clean drinking water in Gaza.
I mean, you can't underline how devastating it is to be there enough. So, I just wanted to give some overall context on Gaza. Again, this is very different from the West Bank. It's not like things are great there either, but this is just on a complete other level, and I can't imagine very many places in the world where someone would say, "I'd trade my life to go to Gaza". You talk about North Korea, China, the Uyghurs, I mean it's about at that level, sadly.
Fadi Elsalameen: I'll just put in perspective what Alex said. I remember in the 2014, 2015 War, during that period, when I would talk with some of my friends in Gaza and say, "What is your message to the world?" and I remember even talking about this on CNN. At the time they said, "We just want to live. We want to have a good life, we want to have a future".
But sadly now, when I ask my friends, "What do you want from the world?" they almost unanimously say, "We just want to get out, we don't want to be here anymore". There's no electricity, no clean water, no future, no horizon, and it just gives you an idea of how bad it is, that the number one demand, and this is across the board, regardless of whether you're talking to an older man or a young girl, they just want to leave, they don't want to be there anymore.
Alex Gladstein: And, Peter, there's actually a term to describe what happened. Again, first you have a forced reliance on the Israeli economy and a discouragement of sovereign industrial development under Israeli military occupation; that's what was happening from 1967 to 1987. And then, a closure of that economic lifeline, as Gazans were eventually, over time, prohibited from working in Israel, and then eventually just getting cut off completely from the outside world and then destroyed by war.
So, that journey is why Palestinians in Gaza today, they see the present is better than the future, they have very little hope. And the term used to describe what has happened in Gaza and to a lesser extent, the West Bank, is something called "de-development". This was a term developed by a Harvard Scholar in 1987, named Sara Roy, and after years of fieldwork that she did in 1987. So, she was there in 1987 and looking at, "What is the impact of 20 years of Israeli military occupation?" and she could already see what would happen later.
Again, living standards might be going up a little bit, but it's very consumerist and it was not investing in the actual base of the society, and they were becoming more dependent and more dependent. The Israeli Government even saw this. In 1991, the Israeli Government put together something called The Sudan Committee, to actually look at the economic performance of Gaza and say, "Why is it so poor?" The conclusion was that -- by the Israeli Government, by the way; this is an official Israeli Government report.
The conclusion was that, "No priority was given to the promotion of local entrepreneurship in the business sector in the Gaza Strip. Moreover, the authorities discouraged such initiatives whenever they threatened to compete in the Israeli market with existing Israeli firms". So again, the outcome of today is not just because of war, it's not just because of the embargo and the sanctions, it goes back decades and it's the outcome of Israeli policy, which sought to make Gaza and the West Bank dependent on Israel and later, through foreign aid, dependent on the outside world.
Peter McCormack: It feels like, and I'll choose my words carefully, but it feels like the life of Gaza's being squeezed out of it. And if we're at the point now where people want to leave, it feels like this -- I'll probably get some reaction to me saying this, but this is a tactic to squeeze the life out of what remains of Palestine.
Fadi Elsalameen: I think there's some truth to that. But if you zoom out a little bit and put, again, what Alex said into perspective, from 2007 to today, Gaza has been targeted to create a collapse in the political system there, to push out Hamas. This targeting has been done by the Palestinian Authority who lost, mainly because of their corruption in Gaza, to Hamas, not because Hamas was any better. But by then, Fatah was so bad that any alternative would have been better; so, people did end up electing Hamas.
So, the Palestinian Authority has employed a number of measures, including not wanting to pay for fuel to generate electricity, not paying for salaries. Basically, they want Hamas to collapse. And they work closely with the Egyptian Government, the Israeli Government, to a certain extent, to do this. So, on top of the decades-old policies to suffocate Gaza and cause de-development, like Sara Roy said in her report, on top of that, there was a political campaign to also collapse the current --
Alex Gladstein: Fadi, we've got to also obviously talk about Hamas. I mean, it's enough that these Gazans have to deal with de-development policy and war and economic strangulation, but they have to deal with a dictatorship, a really brutal religious dictatorship. Why don't you fill us in a little bit on what it's like to live under Hamas?
Fadi Elsalameen: So, if you talk to the Palestinians who live in Gaza now, and they've been living under Hamas rule again since 2007, it's very similar feelings to how they felt about Fatah back in 2007: corruption, authoritarianism, no freedoms whatsoever, and corruption very explicit among the elite, among the ruling individuals within Hamas. So, again, it's replacing one evil with another.
Alex Gladstein: And, Peter, I think what we're getting at here, now we can shift to money, but what we're getting at here with this opening and why I'm really glad you asked me to talk a little bit about Gaza, is that none of these governments are looking out for the people. There is no good guy when it comes to the average Palestinian. The Israelis, the Egyptians, Hamas, the PA, they're all harming the Palestinian people through their actions; there is no good side here.
Now, I think what's really important is to address the fact that money and currency has been completely left out of the story of Palestinians. For example, there was an exhaustive report put out by Human Rights Watch, which is a credible organisation that does a lot of work on this topic, in April of this year, hundreds of pages, on all the political dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the issue of things like currency, remittances, trade, monetary policy completely missing from this report. They're just not mentioned, as if they don't exist.
That's where we can shed new light in this conversation today for your listeners, because a lot of them are probably aware, "Yeah, Gaza sounds like a terrible place. Yeah, the Palestinians have been screwed by their government, by the Israelis, by the world". We knew all of that, people probably know all these things, so what's new? What's new is to look at this through an economic lens, and there we've got to start --
Peter McCormack: Can I just jump in and ask a question first?
Alex Gladstein: Yeah, go ahead, Peter.
Peter McCormack: What trade exists within Gaza right now? What money or monies are being used? I was aware when I was in Venezuela, there were five currencies being used: the petro, Bitcoin, the Columbian peso, the bolívar and the dollar. What currencies are being used within Gaza?
Alex Gladstein: The dominant currency for day-to-day stuff is still the Israeli shekel, in both West Bank and Palestinian Territories, and in Gaza, both bank deposits and paper money itself. The Jordanian currency is also used, as is the dollar in some places, and then Bitcoin and Tether. Bitcoin, Tether, Jordanian currency, Israeli currency, the dollar. These are currencies that are found in the West Bank and in Gaza.
Peter McCormack: And just one final question before we move on to the next bit. Even if we were able, or there is an ability to get money into Gaza to support people and support business, what is the reality of imports and exports, the ability to export products out of Gaza and the ability to import what is required to run a business within Gaza?
Alex Gladstein: That's a great question and I interviewed a Gazan and I told his story in my essay for Bitcoin Magazine: Can Bitcoin be Palestine's Currency of Freedom? And, he told me that essentially, there is no way to really start a productive business in Gaza, because the things that you need from the outside world, you can never get on time, if at all; they're hugely expensive, there's massive price inflation. People are seeking going to Bitcoin as a way out really.
Basically, nobody wants to stay in Gaza permanently. People will always want to go to their homeland. I mean, you talk to North Koreans, North Koreans want to go home; they don't want to be in South Korea largely, they don't want to be in America, they want to go home to their ancestral homeland, to their family. And I'm sure Gazans are the same way but right now, they don't want to be there. They want to come back later when it's fixed, but they want to get out.
So, this guy told me that people are basically selling everything, some people obviously, are selling everything for Bitcoin in Gaza, in the hopes that it can essentially buy them a way out, to get smuggled out, to get to a different country to build a better future for their family. It's pretty bleak. It's very hard to see. I think there's a lot we can talk about, about building a resistance economy and building a society in the West Bank that could stand on its own, I firmly believe that's possible. I don't think that's possible in Gaza. I think it's just so destroyed that the best hope is that people leave.
That's what people are doing with Bitcoin. And I'll just note that when I talked to this guy, Bitcoin was around $30,000 and now it's $66,000, or whatever it is, and this is helping people; this is absolutely helping people.
Peter McCormack: In terms of people wanting to leave, a question for you Fadi, I think there's probably going to be two answers for this. Ideally, you would want to build up the economy within Palestine, because you want people to stay, to stay in their homeland; but at the same time, if the best option is for them to leave, you would also want to support that. How do you feel about that kind of paradox?
Fadi Elsalameen: It's a very good question. Normally, you want people to stay, you want people to be part of the social, economic elevator and rise up and feel like they're working towards a bright future. But let me just give you an idea of how the corruption works to actually drive people out. So, we had, for example, something called the Palestine Investment Fund. The Palestine Investment Fund had almost $1 billion in it 15, 16 years ago, when the current President took it over. It should be now at least double in value, if not more.
But if you look at the recent reports, it's actually gone down in value. And the way the Palestine Investment Fund works is that most of the people on the board of the fund are corrupt individuals, who are related to the President, economically or familywise. So, I'll give you an example. The President's associates, or family, might be on the board of a company and the company is doing really badly. It's not prospering, it's not moving up economically. So, they don't want to take the loss.
What they do is, because they're sitting on the board of the Investment Fund, they tell the fund to buy the company that is doing badly, at a profit, so the money that belongs to the people, which is the Palestine Investment Fund, is systematically going down; meanwhile, the private investment of these individuals is continually going up. So, that's just one example.
Another example, the Palestinian Authority has helped certain businessmen, who pay bribes to government officials, to acquire public land under the banner of "building affordable housing projects for young people". So, they confiscate the land and they take it, because this is going to be public use and public benefit, therefore it justifies acquiring the land. So, people are bought out of the land.
Then, money is allocated for these types of projects, and money by donors, like the Government of Qatar, other governments, who guarantee up to $600 million, $700 million in value to build affordable housing and apartments for young couples in the range of $40,000 to $50,000. Then, fast-forward to today, none of these apartments are affordable. They're sold at $120,000, $150,000, up to $500,000. Meanwhile, salaries are still at a very -- have not changed, and the ones benefitting are the government officials, who are in partnership with the businessmen. So, if you're starting your life, you can't stay in the middle of this kind of Mafia; you want to get out. They're not giving you any incentive to stay, or even a glimpse of hope that you can actually make it.
Let's go to the government sector. If you are going to get a government job, if you are not the son of someone who is already in government, good luck. You could be a Harvard graduate, and they'll find a way to make you feel bad about yourself. Meanwhile, somebody who's failed high school could be a prosecutor, a judge, or head of the police, or whatever. So, it's a really, really corrupt system. It's so corrupt that the Foreign Minister of Sweden -- Sweden is one of the most pro-Palestinian countries, and they were the first to recognise the State of Palestine in Europe. The Foreign Minister yesterday made a statement saying, "The corruption in the Palestinian Authority is getting so bad that it's preventing us, Sweden, from offering aid to the Palestinian people".
So, the system is built to actually drive people out.
Alex Gladstein: And it's important to note again that that is an outcome of Israeli policy; they want this to be like this. And again, just to get back to the money piece here, for why we're here today, these are the big questions: why is the Palestinian economy so dependent on Israel? Why is there so much corruption in the PA? Why do the Palestinians use the shekel and not their own currency? Why can't Palestinians easily order goods on Amazon or receive money from abroad? So again, we want to dive into this.
Fadi Elsalameen: And the Paris Agreement, Alex.
Alex Gladstein: That's what I'm getting to. A friend of mine, a Palestinian economist, told me that basically, again, we talk about Hamas, we talk about the PA. But he said the dominance of the Israeli actor over the Palestinian actor is entrenched in everything from the use of the shekel to the way that the Israeli Government collects our income abroad to how we have no central bank. So, there's this driving theme that's decades old, that pre-dates all the wars that we've seen in the last 20 years, that's like a designed plan that, again, incentivised Palestinians to work in Israel and prevented them from developing a manufacturing base, and increased dependency on Israeli imports, right.
So, to give you some more numbers here, I think this is very important. From 1968 to 1987, again the first two decades of occupation, the industrial part of the Palestine economy declined from 9% to 7%. So again, the economy's getting bigger, there are more people being born, and yet the manufacturing basis is shrinking; same thing with agriculture. In 1970, there were 59,000 agricultural workers in the Palestinian Territories, about 5% of the population. That actually declined to the mid-1990s to 2% of the population.
So, when you talk about parts of your country that can grow and drive economic progress, they're being shrunk, not just standstill, but they're actively being shrunk in Palestine by Israeli policies. Again, totally before the Oslo Accords, before the war with Gaza, before Hamas, this was all happening. And basically, dependence got near total in terms of Palestinians on Israel. Basically, 90% of the Palestinian imports, by the late-1980s, were from Israel. Palestinians were the second largest buyer of Israeli goods after Americans. So psychologically, not only are they forcing you to use their currency, but you have to buy all your stuff from them. That leaves a massive psychological impact.
So again, by the late-1980s, there was that economic depression, Palestine people decided to rise up, you had the intifada. It did not succeed in giving real freedom, that's for sure, but it did make the occupation very expensive for the Israelis, so that was one part of it that actually was interesting. After the intifada, the occupation has actually cost the Israelis a lot. Before the first intifada, the occupation was profitable for the Israelis. They could take advantage of natural resources, basically below market rates, they could hire cheap labour; it was good for them. Afterwards, it's been a struggle.
Now, my government, the United States, has basically financed the occupation since then. But the reality, again getting back to this Paris Protocol, is that the intifada pushed the two actors, Israel and Palestine, together to the point where something had to happen, and the world wanted to see something happen. So, through this process, there was statehood "given" to the Palestinians, and the President, Yasser Arafat, and the two Israeli leaders that were involved, they won the Nobel Peace Prize. People were really excited about this. The Oslo Accords were hailed around the world as something really hopeful.
But underneath was something quite sinister, and that's what's called The Protocol on Economic Relations, or The Paris Protocol. Now, what this did is this basically was a document that was supposed to only last five years; it was supposed to expire in 1999 and be replaced with something else. But it remains in effect 28 years later. It's a document basically saying that Palestinians won't have their own central bank, they won't get their own currency. Instead, they get something called The Palestinian Monetary Authority, which I think is darkly funny, because it doesn't have any authority over pretty much anything.
They control the banks, and Israeli new shekel was mandatory legal tender in West Bank and Gaza, all the loans and deposits are denominated in shekels. And, it's not just the banking sector and the currency; that would be a lot on its own. It's just that anything coming into Palestinian Territories is monitored and inspected by the Israelis, and they charge a fee, what's called a Clearance Fee. So, 3% of any monies coming in, they take a cut of, and that helps finance the Israeli State.
There's an ability that the Israelis have to obviously control trade, policy, they get to limit what goes in, they get to -- the crazy thing is they collect all the income of all these Palestinian workers who live in Israel and work in Israel, they collect that. And then every month, they send that as a cheque, kind of, to the PA. And sometimes they withhold that cheque and they're like, "We're not going to pay you unless you do X", so they use this power as a weapon against their opponent. And, even Palestinian workers, which I find this to be really crazy, the Palestinian workers who work in Israel, they have to pay social security taxes, union fees, security taxes, and they don't get the benefits. So, they're definitely treated as these second-class citizens; and, they're not Israeli, so it is what it is.
But the collective impact of this over decades can be summed up in one statistic, that between 1994, which again was hopeful, "Independence; we're going to have this new, beautiful country"; between 1994 and 2011, the Palestinian manufacturing sector declined from 19% to 10%. So again, it did not address the structural damage that was being done during the occupation of a shrinking sovereignty, in fact it expedited it, and then it got even worse in the 2000s, with wars and with corruption.
So, I think that it's quite important to understand that Palestinians don't have monetary freedom, they have no kind of fiscal freedom at all. And, even if they did have fiscal freedom, like let's say tomorrow the UN comes in and says, "We're going to make a central bank digital currency", which has been discussed, for the Palestinians, are we so sure, Fadi, that the PA would be a responsible central bank; is that something that we can trust?
Fadi Elsalameen: Not at all. As long as we don't have a democratic government that's elected, there's no guarantee that the corruption would not move from paper money to digital currency. But to add onto what you were saying, Alex, I think the best investment that the Israeli occupation made in the West Bank and Gaza is that they've bound a banker, which is the Palestinian Authority, that can work both as a banker and also as a security officer.
For people who don't know this, 66% of the Palestinian Authority's budget, 66%, goes to security forces. Meanwhile, health, education and everything else gets to split the other third. So you kind of have two-thirds go to security in an area that is militarily occupied by the Israelis, so you can imagine the level of corruption, you can imagine the level of misuse of funds.
Just to go back to your point about the Palestine Monetary Authority, that is the most corrupt place. Basically, what they do, it's not a central bank obviously; what they do is, it's a clique of people who are very closely related, and if you want to bring in $10 million, $100 million, into the Palestinian Territories, they'll help you by blinding the system where it's not raising flags if you pay at the right bribe, basically.
Meanwhile, they will be the same people who will flag you if you're trying to transfer $10,000 without paying the correct bribe to them. Why? Because, they're doing security favours and security services on the other end, and sometimes it's hard for the other security systems, like the Israelis or the Americans or the Jordanians, who are also plugged in with the Palestinian Authority, it's hard to pick up when they're actually reporting something genuine, or when they're actually reporting something because of corruption reasons.
Alex, we talked about this. For example, if you're a Palestinian who wants to get an Israeli permit to work inside Israel, unless you pay a financial bribe to the Minister of Interior and Social Affairs in the amount of about 2,500 Israeli shekels per month, your permit will be stopped. And the way they stop it is the PA will send a report in your name to the Israeli security services saying, "So-and-so is a security risk, and we recommend that his permit be stopped". Can you imagine the Palestinian Authority sending a false reference to the Israeli Authority, asking them to block a Palestinian from getting to work because they refused to pay a bribe?
So, the system is so, so corrupt, so stacked against the average citizen that to me, the only sign of hope, when I'm looking at this, is actually looking at something like Bitcoin, because you're able to circumvent all of these different levels of restriction, whether it's the Israelis or the Palestinian Authority or even Hamas.
Alex Gladstein: Yeah, and there's one more important element to get to before we discuss how Bitcoin can really be this currency of freedom for Palestinians, is the phenomenon of foreign aid. So again, I'd love this opportunity to get through some of the backdrop, the context that's so rarely talked about.
But again, we have historical trends plus the Paris Protocol and Oslo Accords making it more and more the reality that Palestinians were dependent on Israel. But then, as I mentioned before, after the second intifada, after 2000, Israel started restricting the number of Palestinians that could work in Israel. So, between 2000 and 2003, the number of West Bank Palestinians that were permitted, as Fadi was just discussing, to work in Israel dropped by 53%, and the permits for Gazans dropped by 86%.
So, as a result, Palestinian per capita, GDP, dropped by 40%. So, just to give context, this means that about 20 years ago, the Palestinians went through an economic collapse that was worse than the 2001 Financial Collapse in Argentina, and worse than the Great Depression in the US in the 1930s. So, that's what they went through after the promise of the Oslo Accords. That's what the Oslo Accords gave them.
What ended up happening is, before the Oslo Accords, countries like Canada, United States, Japan, they couldn't give foreign aid to the Palestinians, because they didn't want to give it to the occupying military power. So, once Arafat became "independent", the one thing that did change is that foreign aid started coming in, and it has come in a lot. There's been about $40 billion spent by outside foreign aid in the West Bank and Gaza since 1993, making Palestinians one of the highest per capita recipients of aid in the world.
But they live in what's called "an aid paradox". So, there's larger and larger amounts of aid coming in with a downward decline of socioeconomic and human development. In Gaza, of course, those declines have been dystopian. And I think what's important to note for Americans listening is that our country continues to supply Israel with about $3.8 billion of aid per year, by and large financing this structure, financing this occupation. And we remain Israel's primary market for exports and imports.
So, this makes for this really strange situation where we already know the Palestinians are completely reliant on aid. Basically, if the cheque doesn't come in from the outside donor, the PA can't pay its people; the aid is that important. But the Israelis receive more aid per capita than Palestinians; I think that's an interesting thing to note. So, the US Government and its people, we have financed the structure, whether you like it or not, whether you're super pro-hawkish Israel or you're super critical of our policy, this is just the reality, it's the fact. We are financing the whole thing.
There's a guy named Shir Hever, who's a really interesting Israeli academic, and he calls this thing "a profitable venture", meaning the occupation. And the reason why is because Israel receives payments in foreign hard currency. So, the Israeli central bank gets dollars, they get Canadian dollars, they get euros, but they build walls and pay troops in shekels. So, as a result, the foreign currency reserves in the Israeli central bank go up and these can be used to strengthen the shekel. As a result, the shekel has actually appreciated over the dollar 25% over the last 20 years.
So, in a weird way, Israel continues to sort of profit from the occupation, and it's kind of sad to think about, but as Fadi's pointing out, so does the PA; the PA profits so much. I mean, Yasser Arafat's corruption is so legendary. I mean, he was estimated to be worth billions. He has a wife in Paris and he would wire hundreds of millions of dollars out to different secret accounts and again, this has resulted in a reality where there's just basically economic depression, and could you really blame Palestinians for trying to work in Israel, if the average wage is 123 shekels in the West Bank, and 264 in Israel?
They're going to do it to themselves, because they have to, because they have to support their families. So, they're going to leave their farms in the West Bank, where they can't make any money, and where they're getting crushed by imported goods by Israel, and they're going to go work for Israel, and they're going to build stuff over there. This has just been this long story over the last few decades of this getting more intense and more intense. So, what do people do about it?
So, there's long been this idea in the Palestinian discourse of a resistance economy, which would allow people to stay, resist, gain sovereign, in the West Bank obviously. After the second intifada, there was an Arab-Israeli author, a guy named Azmi Bishara, and he lamented the lack of a single Palestinian bank, insurance company or printing press. And he called on Palestinian investors to begin to think of local economic ventures with their own structures, market and labour. But as his contemporaries have pointed out, how can you do this if everything's reliant on the shekel and the Israelis control all the banks? What they've basically said is they've always lacked the tool to make the resistance economy happen.
Okay, enter Bitcoin. So, on the back of everything we've just gone through, now we're seeing the emergency of something interesting, where Palestinians both in the West Bank and Gaza, and their counterparts in countries across the Arab world and Middle East, including Turkey, Lebanon and Syria, their governments are failing them, their occupiers are failing them, so they turn to Bitcoin as a currency basically of resistance, of a currency that can't be debased and can't be stopped. And that is why I think Fadi has said that maybe there's some hope here, because there's just very little hope elsewhere; maybe there's some hope in Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: Well, let's talk about that then, because you and I, Alex, understand Bitcoin very well, we understand how it can help people living under authoritarian regimes or in Third World countries. I do come back to the point though, what is the goal here? Is it for people who are already trying to send remittances back to be able to get money back to their family? Is it for people who want to send money to support someone, like myself; if I could, would there be a charity I could send money to? Is it to try and encourage providers of aid to send money back? Is it everything?
Alex Gladstein: Let me give you a couple of examples, and then I'll ask Fadi to colour in some of this. One would be simply having access to a savings instrument. In the West Bank, forget Gaza, what people do is they save in real estate, and it has driven the real estate market insane out there. It is comparable to very advanced expensive western cities, the price per square metre. It is the only thing people can put in where they think they'll reliably get more money in the future. They don't have access to the S&P 500. You can pay somebody to try and get you exposure to a stock exchange or some equities, but it's very difficult. There is no Robinhood for Palestinians.
So, number one, first and foremost, it gives them a way to save for the future that does not require a particular nationhood or passport or bank account status. Number two, it connects them to the outside world. So, for Gazans, it's almost impossible to get money from the outside world. It has to go through all these loops and loopholes, and then eventually they have to get Hamas to sign off on it, and it's just absurd.
Meanwhile, tons of people in Gaza have smartphones, they have social media, they can film stuff and share it with the outside world. Anyone who uses social media can use Bitcoin, and it's growing in an unstoppable way there, so much so that the government has been forced to, I've learnt, meaning Hamas, essentially, they run brick-and-mortar exchange shops in Gaza where public sector employees and others are basically taken their shekels or Jordanian currency and buying Bitcoin, or selling the Bitcoin into local currency to buy stuff.
So, the local government is even being forced into doing this, simply because there's so much demand from the public.
Peter McCormack: Is there a premium being paid?
Alex Gladstein: Yes, 100%. From what I can understand, it seems like the government, or the people who operate on behalf of the government, are taking a cut. Now, on the West Bank, it's very different; Binance is active there. So, you can basically link up your Bank of Palestine account to Binance. It only allows you to buy Tether, which is important to point out; that's one of the reasons why Tether is so popular in these areas. And then from there, you can use the Tether to buy Bitcoin.
But I think it would be helpful to understand and for Fadi to explain what it's actually like to be in, let's say, America and to try and send $1,000 into Palestine. Fadi, why don't you walk us through that; I think it's so important?
Fadi Elsalameen: It's a nightmare, to be honest. First of all, I worry who's going to call me and ask me, "Why are you sending this money?" Is it going to be the US Government, is it going to be the Israelis, is it going to be the Palestinian Authority? So, forget about just the level of worry that you have to go through. I had to send a wire transfer to my lawyer, who lives in Ramallah. She was brought in an interrogated by the Palestinian Authority, because I am a critic of the Palestinian Authority's corruption; she was brought in, investigated, interrogated, "Why did you receive this payment; what is it for?" etc, and they almost denied it why she couldn't get it. But because it's a corrupt system, she ended up calling some of the higher up people that she could reach and get her payment. That's just one face of the complications.
The other face is, you worry, like you said, Peter, there are families, there are charities who help, orphanages who help disadvantaged students or people, and you want to help. But at the same time, you don't want to end up on a list, on somebody's list, or be implicated in something that obviously is completely contrary to your intentions, etc. And then there's the usual thing, which we said before, which is the corruption aspect. If you're sending a $10,000 wire, you will get a call from the Palestinian Authority that says, "You want this wire to go through, what's our cut? Can you give us $2,000, can you give us $5,000?" and they might not even ask, "Can you give?"; they'll say, "This is the fee to have the wire go through.
They've done this to people, they've done this to businessmen who were based in the Gulf, who were sending wire transfers to companies that they started in the West Bank and Gaza. They were brought in by the security services and told, "Either you pay the bribe to have the wire transfers go and then for us also not to ask any questions about the previous wire transfers, or we will accuse you of supporting terrorism and doing money laundering; the list is ready, but you pick whichever one you want".
Alex Gladstein: And this is something that not just Palestinians in the West Bank deal with, but also in East Jerusalem. I mean basically, you get red-flagged, you get discriminated against, your account gets frozen. So, number one, again, why Bitcoin? For savings, for the future. Number two, for cross-border payments. Again, with your bank account being so dysfunctional and the fees for Western Union being so high and with such a high likelihood that things are going to get delayed, the fact that now you can send a decent amount of money instantly, peer to peer, from phone to phone, is a revolution.
I interviewed a former banker, who lives in Ramallah, and while we were talking, I had him set up a Muun Wallet and I sent him $5 from Boston, where I was at the time, to Ramallah. It was instant; it blew his mind, because he'd used Bitcoin before, but never Lightning. So, even the usage, we're just at the beginning of what's possible.
The third thing, beyond savings and cross-border payments, is to fight inflation, which is counterintuitive, because you're like, "Wait a second, but the Palestinians have the shekel, which is performing really well. There's not inflation"; there is inflation, so I'll explain why. A laptop arrives in Tel Aviv, it costs $1,500. Now, a laptop in Ramallah is going to cost $3,500. Why? It's the very same laptop. The thing is, when the laptop arrives in Tel Aviv and then is marked to go out into Ramallah, remember the Palestinians cannot import directly, it all has to go through Israel, so it's got to sit in a truck, it's got to go to a warehouse, it's got to have inspections, it's got to go on another truck, it's got to go into Palestine. Laptops get stolen, there are security guards that have to get hired.
By the time the goods get into the West Bank, or to Gaza, to a much higher extent, there's massive price inflation. So even though, in the last 20 years, there's arguably been some deflation in Israel for some Israelis with certain things, there's been ridiculous price inflation in the Territories for this reason. It's really interesting, just to give you the numbers on it. After 2000, Israel experienced deflation, but by 2008 -- and before 2000, the prices in the two territories, in Israel and Palestine, kind of matched each other. But after that moment, it split, and basically by 2008, the same product would have cost 32% more in any Palestinian place than any Israeli place.
So, the third reason is to fight inflation, and then the fourth and final reason I'll mention here is something Fadi alluded to, is if you're going to donate to a Palestinian charity, good luck if you're an American or a Brit. That thing's going to get flagged, there are going to be questions. You're going to be donating to a good cause -- I spoke to a charity that's working on agricultural sustenance in the West Bank and helping people actually turn their property into sustainable farms. They can't find a payment processor who will allow them to receive donations, and they're just farmers, they're not doing anything wrong. So, they're using Bitcoin now and it's working.
They didn't want me to reveal the name of their organisation, because they don't really want people to know that they're using Bitcoin, so there is this shadow economy that's starting to happen and it's unstoppable. And again, I think it gives some hope for the future. But it's probably important for Fadi and I to also acknowledge the fact that everybody's going to use it. This means the bad folks are going to use it too. This is an open technology, just like the internet, just like email, and that's something that people just need to keep in mind. It is for everybody.
Peter McCormack: That does remind me of what Peter Van Valkenburgh said. I think it was a Senate Testimony, he said, "We can focus on the bad uses of Bitcoin. But for every criminal or money launderer who uses Bitcoin, there's somebody who needs access to open and free money that benefits from this, whether it's somebody in", I mean his examples were within Nigeria or Belarus, where people were protesting against the government.
So, I think we've all come to accept that. The reality is that the corrupt government has access to what we could consider bad money right now, and they're going to have access to Bitcoin, but we can't really focus on that; we have to focus on what these people need, which is access to good money.
Alex Gladstein: Right, and how can we do that? So, here's why I struggled and why I didn't do much, again, activism in this space at all really, is because I didn't know I could make a difference; I thought it would be hollow. Like, what does posting, "Free Palestine" on Twitter really do? Not a lot. But maybe today, we can make a difference, by educating people about Bitcoin. I mean consider, again, today Palestinians have no monetary independence, they're increasingly forced to use the currency of their occupier, their capital base is shrinking, they've become more consumerist, more slaves to debt basically, entirely reliant on foreign aid. And in Gaza, their society's basically destroyed. So, what can we do?
Well, Sara Roy, who coined the term "de-development", when she was reflecting on this recently, and she's been thinking about this for 30 or 40 years, what is to be done? One of her conclusions was that knowledge production is itself a form of resistance, and I think that's so key. There's nothing to lose by sharing information about Bitcoin in Arabic to help people understand how to be their own bank, how to be self-sovereign, how to connect with their families. It's not magic, it's not going to help, in terms of solving this situation tomorrow; it's not going to liberate everybody, but it can make a small and meaningful difference in somebody's life, in the way that a hashtag cannot.
This is why I find it so staggering that none of the other Palestinian rights organisations are talking about Bitcoin; it's like it doesn't exist. If you look at their websites, there's not a single mention. Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, none of the other groups that spend a lot of money on this topic are actually talking about the one thing that I think could actually make the biggest difference. So, that's just something I'm tracking carefully.
Peter McCormack: Do you think that's just because it's a lack of education and understanding?
Fadi Elsalameen: I honestly think it's a very simple reason. I don't think they've caught up on it yet and, like Alex said, quoting Sara Roy, maybe knowledge sharing and knowledge spreading is not just educating in passing in public, but also reaching out to the different organisations that are working on the Palestinian issue, and highlighting the importance of Bitcoin and how it can make a difference.
To be fair, everything I've learnt so far about Bitcoin has come from Alex, and that's when it hit me. I've been promoting the idea of building a development bank for the Palestinians that, regardless of the volatility of the political situation, this bank, similar to the World Bank Group, but away from the hands of the corrupt Palestinian Authority and others, is able to promote infrastructure projects and education of projects and so on.
Then, when I finally understood the concept of Bitcoin and the value of Bitcoin, I said, "This is the perfect idea for the bank. It should definitely have cryptocurrency as its tender, it should definitely adopt the idea of Bitcoin to do this", because then you really are an independent entity that is working free of, not just the economic issues like inflation and worrying about monetary supply and currency manipulation, etc, but you're also away from the hands of corrupt individuals, etc.
So, I think again, this is a concept that is born first in the brain of Alex, and we're slowly getting a better understanding of it; and so, I wouldn't blame Amnesty or any of these groups, but I do think that they need to pay attention.
Alex Gladstein: Yeah, let's have the conversation. Look, I'm not blaming them. It took me years to figure this out and I'm trying to share that with as many people as possible. I will be having a conversation with the Gaza Sky Geeks soon to help them, bring them up to speed on this, and I think there's some excitement there that some of the young people they work with might want to get involved in coding Bitcoin, contributing to Bitcoin.
I mean, look, here's an interesting thing, Peter, you can be in Ramallah, or you can even be in Gaza, as long as you have an internet connection, you could make a lucrative career, you get paid in Bitcoin. There are brilliant software engineers in Palestine, in the same way that Nigerians are working as Bitcoin Core contributors and are working for western companies and making a lot of money, the same thing could happen in Palestine. So, that's what the currency enables, is actual economic activity, which I think is the most important part.
I was interviewing this one Palestinian-American woman, she's a remarkable entrepreneur based in East Jerusalem, and she was telling me that aside from Bitcoin, that just this idea for her, "Independence is financial", is what she told me. And she said, "If we don't have financial freedom, nothing's going to change", that's basically what she said. She looked at other resistance movements around the world, she spent some time growing up in Atlanta and she looked at the civil rights movement in America, she looked at Northern Ireland, all these places there is starting to be this resistance economy built up, where people would exchange currency with each other.
So, some of the ideas that she and her friends have is that Palestinian businesses could start accepting Bitcoin as this parallel economy. It's almost like a peaceful protest against both the PA and Israel. You're opting into something that they don't control. And I think this gets really important as we turn this corner and start looking at the future of central bank digital currencies, because I think it's sort of inevitable that what will happen is the World Bank, or the IMF, will team up with Israel and the PA and they'll say, "We're going to be introducing, maybe it's a Palestinian currency, or maybe it's a digital shekel", I'm not sure; but this thing is going to be aimed at basically destroying the informal sector in Palestine.
One of the last bastions of freedom in the West Bank is that everybody uses cash for everything. Well, guess what happens when all that cash goes out the window? That cash is the way that you can do stuff without the PA knowing, without the IDF knowing, and that's good, that's your privacy, that's your freedom. You don't want that stuff to get confiscated, stolen, taken up by this big scam that's going on between these two powers.
The unfortunate thing is that that cash is slowly going to disappear, so what's going to take its place? If it's some sort of CBDC, that's going to be even worse. I mean, it's going to be so easy for the Israeli military to blacklist anybody that they don't like, they can do it with the touch of a button. That's why it's so essential for us to continue to promote Bitcoin as a resistance currency.
I think that we always have this saying, Fadi, "Fix the money, fix the world". Obviously, it's tongue in cheek, it doesn't actually work like that, but it has a grain of truth to it. I think that, if Palestinians can't fix their money, they can't fix their world. I mean, it's a part of it, it's a very important part of it. So, we're here for you, we want to help educate and translate things into Arabic and into Hebrew, and I'm happy that my article got put into both Arabic and Hebrew, it's out there. I've gotten a lot of interesting quiet feedback from a lot of people on it. It's not something that everybody wants to be super outspoken about because, again, it could get them in trouble.
But the rise of Bitcoin in the Palestinian Territories, I think is unstoppable, and I think whatever we can do to expedite it will actually help bring an actual sense of justice and individual empowerment sooner rather than later, and I just don't know any other tool or construct or framework or ideology that could do the same.
Peter McCormack: Alex, if people are listening and they want to get involved, they want to support, what are the things they can do? You've mentioned provide translations of content. Is there anything else that specifically people should be doing, or should be thinking wider and saying, "Yes, it's great that we can have content translated", but should we be trying to drive towards some kind of content hub which is getting translated for a number of different languages around the world; is that something we should be striving for now?
Alex Gladstein: Well, I don't think it can be done at the official level because, again, hearing about what Fadi's taught us about in this conversation, the PA's not going to be interested in any sort of reform that's going to benefit for the people; they want everything for themselves and they like their little relationship with the Israelis.
But if we could get into schools, if we could get teachers and NGOs in the West Bank at least to start teaching about financial literacy and start teaching about Bitcoin, just as a "Hey, it exists, this thing. It allows you to do X, Y and Z. If you want to use it, let us know, we'll teach you", I really believe in Bitcoin as a voluntary phenomenon; I don't think you can force it on people, or I don't think you should.
But I think, Fadi, if we could just get it into the dialogue over there, especially when it comes to educational institutions, I think it will be a great start. So, my goal is to visit next year. I would love, Peter, if you could join.
Peter McCormack: I'd love to go there.
Alex Gladstein: Maybe we could go to Birzeit, Fadi, we could hold a workshop, we could just have a discourse. The most important thing is to hear people's concerns about Bitcoin, and we'll walk through those concerns and we'll point out how this is not a magic dust that you can sprinkle and fix everything, but that it is a tool, and it's a very powerful tool.
At the minimum, we just want the young Palestinian youth to know how to use the tool, because it can absolutely fix certain things, like again, receiving a payment from abroad is just a no-brainer upgrade with Bitcoin. Or, saving over a three-, four-, five-year period of time, Bitcoin is going to crush the other options that Palestinians have. And, if you're starting an organisation, or you're trying to do investigative work against the PA or the IDF, your income from abroad is almost certainly going to be blocked.
I spoke to an organisation the other day that this happened to them. A European group wanted to donate to them. It was actually a Jewish group that had all this money they have in a fund from Holocaust survivors actually, and they wanted to donate to Palestinians in solidarity, and the wire got rejected. Ultimately, the group decided that they wouldn't be able to send the money, because it was too difficult. So, this Palestinian group, which is doing great work, lost a huge amount of money due to bureaucracy.
So again, showing people the tools will at least allow them to surmount these small challenges, so that they can go and fight the big challenge, which is ultimately how do they free Palestine; that's an ambitious question, but I do think that we can help free Palestinians with Bitcoin.
Fadi Elsalameen: There's a slogan and every political movement there has that slogan, "So-and-so is the answer". Hamas would say sometimes, "Islam is the answer", or Fatah would say, "Fatah is the answer". I want to start a movement with Alex that says, "Bitcoin is the answer"!
Alex Gladstein: Right, let's get T-shirts, let's get stickers, let's go! That will be our tour when we go to the West Bank next year; we'll make it happen. So, count on me, Fadi, whatever we can do. I look forward to working with you and super grateful to Peter for having us on to allow us to share these ideas, and hopefully it's sparked some things. If you're listening and you want to help, please reach out, my DMs are open.
Peter McCormack: Well, Alex, as ever, thank you. I appreciate your work no end and I appreciate you always coming on and being so eloquent with your explanations of these tricky subjects. I find the whole issue of Palestine, particularly Gaza, depressing, so if there are things we can do, the platform remains permanently open to you, Alex. And, Fadi, if you ever want to come back on or there's anything you want to push, you let me know. This remains open to you. I'll do anything I can to support, and I would love to travel there next year with Alex and go and support people in the West Bank, maybe even Gaza, we will see.
Everybody knows Alex but, Fadi, if people want to follow you, say on Twitter, where would they follow you?
Fadi Elsalameen: My Twitter is easy, it's just my last name, @elsalameen.
Peter McCormack: Well, listen, we'll put this all in the show notes. We'll get this out soon and do everything we can to support the work of people trying to help people in Palestine. So, good luck, keep doing your good work. You've obviously faced quite a bit of danger doing it, so I commend you for that. And, Alex, just keep crushing it like you always do. Good to see you both.
Fadi Elsalameen: Thank you.
Alex Gladstein: Take care, peace.
