#PayPal4Palestine is the hashtag that campaigners have been using on social media to lobby PayPal to open up its services to Palestinians after the payments firm refused to meet with activists from Americans for a Vibrant Palestinian Economy (A4VPE). PayPal is freely available to Israelis and Israeli settlers.
The group has sent an open letter to PayPal CEO Daniel Schulman asking him to reconsider the company’s stance. In the letter the A4VPE reject the assumption that offering PayPal to Palestinians represents a security threat.
The letter says: “We have been told that PayPal is concerned about the compliance investments required to enter the Palestinian market. We believe such costs have been greatly overestimated. The U.S. Treasury Department has spent a great deal of time working with the Palestine Monetary Authority to strengthen safeguards against abuse. PayPal currently operates in over 203 countries including places with major problems of corruption and terrorism like Somalia and Yemen. We are confident that Palestine will prove a much easier place to profitably do business than these and other markets that PayPal has already entered.”
PayPal have been in contact with a statement:
“PayPal’s ambition is for everyone ultimately to have access to our services for digital payments and commerce, in accordance with applicable regulatory requirements. We appreciate the interest that the Palestinian community has shown in PayPal. While we do not have anything to announce for the immediate future, we continuously work to develop strategic partnerships, address business feasibility, regulatory, and compliance needs and requirements, and acquire the necessary local authority permissions for new market entries.”
6 Responses
Not sure if someone called Daniel Schulman would willingly do business with Palestinians, but until I read this article, I had no idea there might be a problem.
After all, if Israel supplied weaponry to Argentina during the Falklands war, why are the Palestinians given the cold shoulder ?
I fully believe that any small business should have the right to choose not to deal with someone because of personal beliefs or prejudices, but a massive organisation like Paypal surely has to be accessible to everyone……. or are certain groups above the law ?
bet you would not include far right neo Nazis in that statement
Schulman seems to be taking business with Palestine personally. Not very professional and of CEO material.
Bring on the next impartial professional CEO and boot this guy out!
Not sure what the sentence ‘PayPal is freely available to Israelis and Israeli settlers’ has to do with this story? Sounds rather irrelevant to the topic and therefore anti-semitic to me…?
Sam O’Levski, (commented earlier,) must be anti-israel too, not sure what ‘After all, if Israel supplied weaponry to Argentina during the Falklands war, why are the Palestinians given the cold shoulder ?’ had to do with anything either?
Paypal is an American company, (so nothing necessarily to do with Israel) and like any company they are free to choose what business they do and don’t do. If someone told me where I HAD to sell my products, I’d call that unfair?
It could be Israeli banks that work with PayPal and the banks are only available to Israeli people