A Palestinian boy rides a bicycle on an empty street during a commercial strike in the West Bank city of Nablus. (Rami Swidan, Maan Images)

On September 22, the Ad-Hoc Liaison Committee (AHLC), the main donor forum charged with coordinating international assistance to the Palestinians, met in New York on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly to discuss prospects for Palestinian economic revival and development.

This is seen by the international community not only as a humanitarian imperative given the dismal socio-economic conditions of the population of the occupied Palestinian territory, but also as a key pillar of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking and Palestinian state-building. Although economic growth will in itself not guarantee peace, widespread poverty, unemployment and despair will make the search for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and prospects for a viable Palestinian state much more difficult.

Key issues on the AHLC agenda were: (a) status of implementation of the Palestinian reform agenda as laid out in the Reform and Development Plan the Palestinian Authority (PA) presented to donors in Paris in December of last year; (b) status of implementation of measures by the Israeli government to remove obstacles to Palestinian economic revival, notably through facilitating the movement of goods and people as well as access to key natural resources such as land and water; and (c) the need for donors to sustain their financial engagement through continued high levels of funds in direct support of the PA budget.

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Though originally envisaged as an "ad-hoc" mechanism, the AHLC has now become a permanent donor mechanism and has been meeting regularly since the beginning of the Oslo process in the early 1990s. In view of the continuing Israeli occupation and the lack of Palestinian national sovereignty and control over borders and natural resources, a tripartite approach to further Palestinian economic development with parallel actions to be taken the PA, Israel and the donor community has also characterized those forums from the outset.

Sadly, however, not only has the AHLC become a fixed feature of the Israeli-Palestinian donor and diplomatic landscape with a fairly predictable tripartite format, but the issues on its agendas, analyses provided at its meetings by international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and the United Nations, and the policy recommendations made on the basis of those analyses have also been remarkably constant. In fact, they seem to have become immovable.

This is how those meetings generally go and what they say:

The PA presents its development plan and is asked to make further progress in security performance, reform of its institutions and public financial management. Over the years, a number of plans such as the Palestinian Reform and Development Plan have been drawn up with more or less the same mix of measures to be taken, such as ensuring law and order, containing the wage bill or reducing Palestinian fiscal deficit. And some progress has been recorded in terms of security reform, transparency and fiscal management particularly in the post-Arafat period, even if much more can always be done.

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