Halfway down the Danube

Public option

Or, God hates a welcher.

So Josh Trevino and I had a bet.  (If you don't know Josh Trevino, I used to post at his old "Tacitus" blog, waay back in 2005 or so.  Then he was one of the cofounders of Red State.  These days he's blogging, very intermittently, over here.)  Josh bet that we'd get some sort of health care reform, but without a public option.  I bet that we would get a public option. 

This was back in [rummages through inbox] the summer of 2008. Health care reform passed, sans public option, in February 2009.  So I'm a little late on this one.  But New Years' Eve is the time to discharge obligations.

The bet?  Loser does a blog post on "I was wrong, and why".

White, white Christmas

We've had some snow.

Coming back from the West Bank: snow.  Had to stay in Frankfurt overnight and catch a morning train.

Back in Fladungen: snow.  Lots of shoveling.

Then more snow.  And more shoveling.

And more.

We have... oh, between two and three feet of snow on the ground right now.  More than that has fallen, but we had a warm snap for a couple of days that melted it down a bit.  It snowed yesterday and it snowed today.  I'm pretty sure I've shoveled well over ten tons of snow in the last two weeks.

Not to complain.  The kids still like it.  They complain about going outside, but once they're out there they start thrashing around, throwing snowballs, playing King of the Hill on the drifts.  On Christmas Eve we went for a walk around town for a couple of hours, delivering Christmas cards to various relatives.  The boys grumbled and whined about being forced to go out in the snow and walk...  but then they spend two hours climbing up and down snowdrifts all over town.  (The snowplows have pushed them up over ten feet high in some places.)

Anyway.  We had a very nice Christmas!  We're bi-cultural, so we do presents both on Christmas Eve and then again on Christmas morning.  And then we go to the grandparents' house for still more presents!  So that's good.  The boys got a lot of things they wanted (Lego Star Wars for David, a wooden crane for Jacob, Snap Circuits and a chemistry set for Alan).  We had a fire in the stove and lots of chocolate and goodies and a big Christmas Eve dinner and fondue at the grandparents' on Christmas night.  Like.

And now we have the kids home for Christmas vacation for a week.  Fortunately, there are things to distract them.

 

Military Order 1650

So the West Bank is an "occupied territory".

One consequence of this: the Israelis require that every Palestinian have an ID card.  (Officially it's called a West Bank Residence Card.)  They're occupying the territory, they want to know who lives there.  You have to present your card any time you cross a checkpoint, or whenever an IDF soldier demands it.

Your card contains the usual ID information, including your home address.

So what if you're a Palestinian in the West Bank, but your ID says "Gaza"?

Well, you probably get sent to jail or deported.  Israel doesn't let Palestinians out of Gaza, except under some narrowly definied circumstances -- humanitarian, mostly.  And it doesn't want Palestinians moving from Gaza to the West Bank. 

Makes sense, right?  Gaza is an overcrowded hellhole with pretty much no hope of improvement in the near term.  The West Bank is pretty messed up too, but compared to Gaza it's Switzerland -- less crowded, better roads and schools, more jobs.  If Palestinians could move freely between the two parts of their "country", there'd be hundreds of Gazans getting off the bus in Ramallah every day.  Since Israel is trying to push more Israelis into the already-crowded West Bank, they're hardly going to allow a flood of more Palestinians.  So, no Gazans allowed.

Nonetheless, some number of Gazans -- about 35,000 according to Israeli sources -- have by various means made it into the West Bank.  A little over 1% of the population, say.  Israel has always claimed the right to deport these people back to Gaza, possibly with a stop in jail along the way.  Officially they're "infiltrators", and Israel has a thing about infiltrators.

But earlier this year, Israel upped the ante.  Until recently, the Israelis claimed the right to grab and deport anyone who had "knowingly" entered the West Bank illegally after first passing through one of the neighboring countries (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria).  Military Order 1650, which went into effect in April of this year, changed this.  Now Israel can deport anyone who entered the West Bank unlawfully, or who is present in the West Bank without a permit.  (Text of the order here, if you're interested.)  So it covers not only Gazans, but any Palestinian who doesn't have a proper permit.  Violators are to be judged by the IDF, not a civilian court; there is no right of appeal.

So far, this has only led to handful of deportations, all of Gazans.  But the Order gives the IDF a pretty broad grant of power.  If it decided to start doing sweeps and roundups, checking Palestinians for their IDs, and deporting anyone found without one, it could. There was a flurry of concern about this six months ago when the Order went into effect (including a statement from South Africa that the Order was "reminiscent of pass laws under apartheid").  It has since subsided, as the fears of mass deportations have not materialized.  But the Order is still on the books.

There's a lot of other stuff to blog about here.  This one just struck me, is all.

 

 

Tangle, Part 2

Palestine's legal system is a fine mess.

On the West Bank, the laws are a mixture of Jordanian, British, and a few statutes going all the way back to Ottoman times.  Over in Gaza, it's similar, but some of the laws are different (because Gaza was never under Jordanian administration).

There are huge holes in the legal system.  To give one example, Palestine completely lacks a bankruptcy law.  A company goes bankrupt: who gets its assets?  Owners, managers, employees?  The bank it owes money to?  Creditors?  The tax authorities?  Nobody knows. And this is no small thing; banks, for instance, hate lending money when they suspect the owner might be able to repudiate the debt through bankruptcy, even if the bank has taken the precaution of securing a mortgage or other collateral.

Then there are laws that combine with other laws to give ludicrous results.  There's a provision in the labor code that gives severance pay: one month for every year you've worked for that employer.  But then there's another law that defines "severance" so broadly that it even includes firing for incompetence or theft.  Caught your accountant stealing?  You can fire him, but you still have to give him that severance pay.  (Employers get around this by hiring people for eleven months, firing them, and then hiring them again.)

There's all sorts of stuff like this.  It doesn't contribute to an attractive investment environment.

Palestine had exactly one decade to sort this out: from 1996, when the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) first convened, to 2006, when the PLC shattered under the Hamas-Fatah conflict.  Unfortunately, fixing the legal system was not a high priority.  They did get some stuff done -- passed a decent company law, amended the civil code -- but they were just coming to grips with the problem in the early years of this decade.  Then they had elections and, boom.

-- The election thing deserves a little expansion.  See, in 2006 there hadn't been legislative elections for years, and they were overdue.  By this time Hamas -- the Islamist party that's more hardline against Israel -- had become pretty powerful, especially over in Gaza.  Fatah -- the very corrupt ruling party that had dominated Palestinian politics since forever -- had put off holding elections because it was afraid Hamas would do well, but by 2006 the pressure was becoming irresistable, not only from inside Palestine but from without.  The United States, in particular, was still dreaming of an "Arab Spring" in which democracy would sweep across the Middle East.  So the Bush administration was pushing pretty hard for elections.

Shortly before the elections -- N.B., I am simplifying the hell out of a complicated story; bear with me -- shortly before the elections, Israel announced that it wouldn't allow voting in East Jerusalem, because it considered Hamas a terrorist organization and didn't accept its legitimacy.  Fatah seized on this as an excuse for cancelling the whole election.  In a beautiful moment of perfect harmony, Israel and the Palestinian government (still run by Fatah) mutually agreed that, alas, there could be no elections just now...

...and the Bush administration stepped in and insisted, no, there had to be elections.  The Palestinians needed a legitimate government to negotiate peace with Israel!  So the US twisted arms, and the elections went forward...

...and Hamas won, with a clear plurality of votes and a thumping majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council.

Oops.

Tangle, Part 1

So I'm in the West Bank.

One of the things I occasionally do is give advice on commercial laws.  Not as much as you might think, mind.  I'm a lawyer, I'm a commercial lawyer, I'm a development consultant, sure.  But commercial laws?  Mostly sets of solved problems.  (Emphasis on "mostly", and also on "sets".  Maybe I'll unpack that sometime.)  There's been a lot of convergence in commercial law around the world in the last 15 years or so, and a lot more consciousness of comparative law.  (Except in the US, of course.)  Investment and trade are powerful drivers of legal standardization.  And then of course there are the World Bank Doing Business Indicators, about which don't get me started. 

So these days, a broken commercial law is almost like the economist's legendary $20 bill on the sidewalk: if the Zambian bankruptcy law were really as bad as that, someone would have fixed it by now.  More seriously, if it really is that bad, then there's some strong reason: either some local power center is making a lot of money from that bad law, or there's some overwhelming ideological reason for it.  The former is generally depressing; the latter, endlessly varied.  ("It's because President Nyerere, God rest him, drafted that provision himself."  "It's to prevent foreign guest workers from owning shares in companies."  "There's a concern about Genetically Modified Organisms."  "It's because we're still officially socialist.") 

Because if there's not a strong reason to keep the bad law, and nobody important is getting rich from it, there's going to be a surprising lot of pressure to fix it.  A donor -- USAID or someone like it -- will come in and target it in order to claim a win: "Our mission was responsible for drafting Yemen's wonderful new law on secured transactions!"  Or pressure from investors and traders will make itself felt: "We're going to lose the regional tractor distributorship to Zimbabwe if we don't fix the finance leasing law."  Or (sigh) the World Bank Doing Business rankings will come out:  "Dammit, man, we're 168th in the world for construction permits!  Who's working on the licensing law?"

So while I do occasionally get to do this sort of work -- I wrote Albania's invoice financing law from scratch in 2005, and I'm still pretty chuffed about that -- these days most developing countries have surprisingly complete legal frameworks for the conduct of modern business.  Oh, the courts may be corrupt and the currency may be unstable and you may have to bribe the Minister's brother in order to get your work permit.  But the actual laws on the books -- contract law, company law, secured transactions -- are likely to be surprisingly okay.  There's a wonderful phrase that gets used: broadly consistent with international best practices.  More and more, the world's commercial laws are just that.

Except in Palestine.