West Bank universities on strike

According to this report, thousands of university employees in the West Bank, as well as students, have launched a three day strike.  The strike has nothing to do with the Israeli occupation — it is entirely focussed on bread-and-butter, economic issues.

“The union head said the protests are a response to the Ramallah-based Palestinian government’s continuous ‘haggling’ over employee demands,” according to a report from the Ma’an news agency.  Those demands include “a salary increase in relation to the cost of living, and inclusion on the government’s retirement scheme as civil service employees.”

Academics unions which have called for a boycott of Israeli universities — in solidarity, they say, with Palestinian academics — have not mentioned the West Bank strike on their websites.