Talk:Beit Sahour

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[edit] Tax resistance issues

I don't see how the Jordanian administration bit fits in to this section. The Jordanian administration had a tax system that it imposed on Beit Sahour; the Israeli military seems to have held on to some of the same income tax policies as the Jordanians had used. But this history of tax administration doesn't really say much about the Beit Sahour tax resistance, since it was directed at all of the taxes (the value-added-tax / sales tax, the various collective punishment intifada taxes, etc.) and was in particular a protest against the occupation's use of the tax money against the residents of Beit Sahour rather than for them (as they saw it, anyway), not against taxation in general.

It seems to be worded in a misleading way right now, to infer that taxation remained more-or-less unchanged during the occupation/intifada from how it had been during Jordan's rule, which isn't the case (indeed the Journal of Palestine Studies paper you cite shows many changes the occupation authorities made to the income tax law alone).

Perhaps information about the evolution of tax law and administration in Beit Sahour could be moved to a new section about the history of civil government in Beit Sahour. -Moorlock 01:44, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

It isn't my intent to make it sound like the Intifada actions were based on Jordanian tax law, but as it reads now it sounds like the whole institution of the Israelis' taxes were an innovation. Perhaps you can think of a clearer phrasing, though it seems obvious to me that the glass/stone etc. taxes are not referred to in the previous sentence. Cheers, Tewfik^Talk 03:04, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

The two sentences in that paragraph were meant to be representative of a single topic: that the Israeli military had the authority to invent and institute its own taxes, with the "stones tax" etc. being examples of these. -Moorlock 03:22, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

The tax resistance that took place during the Intifada doesn't really have much to do with the history of tax administration preceding the Israeli occupation. What does the fact that Jordan taxed Beit Sahour residents in pre-1967 days and that Israel borrowed some aspects of the Jordanian tax law when designing their own system have to do with the Intifada tax resistance campaign? It isn't as though the tax resisters were claiming that they were resisting because they'd never had to pay taxes before Israel came along.

The evolution of tax law and other law in Beit Sahour during various invasions, occupations, administrations, and so forth may be interesting in its own right, but belongs in its own section. -Moorlock 03:22, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

The concern is that the current phrasing makes the entirety of the taxing look like some aspect of the occupation, when it was indeed unchanged from 1963 to the present decade, not borrowed in part. The only addition obvious from the sources presented are the "intifada taxes" which spurred the tax resistance. I'll try to find clearer wording. Tewfik^Talk 04:08, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

very pov section not based on reliable sources. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.178.95.33 (talk) 08:50, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

I don't think that one anonymous person saying they think the section is POV and think its sources are unreliable, in the absence of any specific examples or complaints, justifies using the "totallydisputed" tag. -Moorlock 14:41, 19 September 2007 (UTC)