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UK Sanctions on Israel Puts Palestinian Jobs at Risk
(The Times-UK) Gabrielle Weiniger - Yehuda Cohen, the chief executive of Lipski, which manufactures plastic pipes that may run under the floorboards of houses across the UK, believes the UK's import ban announced on Tuesday will hit the livelihoods of his Israeli and Palestinian workers, who work side-by-side on the assembly line. Cohen's factory is in the Barkan industrial complex in the northern West Bank. "Who will suffer from this? The simple employee who needs this place to feed his family," Cohen, 66, told The Times, adding that all his employees were paid equally. "Part of the solution for this conflict is co-operation between two peoples, so I am part of the solution. And this is exactly where the British are coming in and causing damage....They're hurting the exact place where this is actually working." "I hope [Ed] Miliband will compensate Arabs who will lose income or even employment as a result of his ban," said Yisrael Medad, the Israeli spokesman for the West Bank community of Shilo, which produces wines and is known for its ancient sites. "Palestinians as a whole in the West Bank don't have a lot of workforce places or employment opportunities. The only employment opportunities they have in the West Bank is either working for Israeli companies, working for Hamas or working for the Palestinian Authority (PA), one of the three," said Ella Rosenberg, a senior research fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs. "Once you eliminate or you make the Israeli companies less profitable, they won't hire as many Palestinian workers, and the very delicate relationship between the Israelis and the Palestinians will be hindered."