ABSTRACT
Makram Sa'ad and three fellow Bethlehem pharmacists have refused to pay tax for over two years. They claim that Israeli tax collection is illegal under international law and that all the money goes towards maintaining the Israeli military presence in the West Bank. The Israelis spend no money on public works or health services and extremely little on education and other services. People learned the art of conversation in Beit Sahur, after the Israelis took away all their radios and television sets. The Israelis stopped people from going to school, the army occupied the local schools for three months, so the people responded by turning in their identity cards — thousands of them did that. When the Beit Sahur siege took place, the Israelis had occupied the West Bank for twenty-two years, and they still had no budget for the occupied area, nothing allocated to schools and hospitals and the like.
