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Ramallah, Occupied West Bank. – Palestinian and international rights groups have renewed a campaign demanding that digital payment giant PayPal stop excluding millions of Palestinians from accessing its services.
As part of the #PayPal4Palestine initiative, the Haifa-based 7amleh digital rights group hosted a webinar yesteday featuring Palestinian entrepreneurs and business managers who have faced obstacles in their careers due to what rights groups describe as “discriminatory practices”.
PayPal is an online money transfer service that operates in more than 200 countries, including war-ravaged Yemen. It offers its services to all Israelis, including those living in illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, in and around Palestinian villages and towns – but not to the five million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza.
“Palestinians should have a right to use the platform. The platform should not have a right to bar Palestinians from using it,” Nadim Nashif, director of 7amleh, the group leading the campaign, said.
“Access to platforms, information and the internet more generally are part of digital human rights,” he said.
Among PayPal’s founders is German-American billionaire Peter Thiel, who is also the founder of Palantir, a provider of artificial intelligence predictive policing systems to the Israeli military, used in surveillance and in arresting “Palestinian suspects”. – Al Jazeera.
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