They have DST, but it's not on fixed dates, the government just announces each year when it's going to start and end. Sometimes with less that a week's notice, which must cause all kinds of interesting problems for people.
Which leads to an interesting phenomenon where two people living in the same physical place might observe two different current times depending on how they identify ethnically and geopolitically. Israeli and Palestinian daylight savings times don't necessarily begin or end on the same day.
Brazil doesn't have DST anymore. And when it had, it used to be announced with 6 months of antecedence. It also had "standard" dates that were almost always used.
If your comment was about the 2019 change that almost all computers got wrong, this one was announced with 6 months of antecedence like most others.
Without getting deep into politics I don't understand why they would prioritize spending effort on DST at all, seems like there are plenty of other concerns.
Again, without wanting to get too political, I think it's essentially bikeshedding. The Palestinian National Authority is riven with factional conflicts and has very limited state capacity. That almost inevitably leads to a lot of bickering over largely irrelevant decisions as a symbolic but hollow demonstration of political authority. The ability to make the decision takes on an importance completely out of proportion with the actual significance of the decision.
Most of the population there is interested in those dates for non-DST-related reasons. They will want to know when Ramadan begins and ends, regardless of whether it's used to determine DST.
If your life is dominated by an us vs them dynamic small demonstrations of difference become hugely important.
In a similar vein different people in Xinjiang in China observe entirely different timezones - Han Chinese observe Beijing time (because China is insane and uses one timezone despite spanning 5), while Uyghurs observe a local time 2 hours behind.
It’s a small show of resistance, which is sometimes all a people have if they have limited control of their own affairs.
You (and everyone else opining here) are missing the practical context: DST makes Ramadan easier, because the sun sets an hour earlier. Yes, you are fasting the same number of hours, but your day “starts” at a point fixed to the TZ-adjusted clock and the sooner sunset arrives, the shorter your effective day.
Even if DST did save something (it does not), it becomes a problem when your timekeeping is done by computers. My computers know I live in Poland (Europe/Warsaw), and they know the DST rules. I can trust the time on my computers’ clock matches the official time the government recognizes.
In Palestine, this depends on my OS vendor managing to update the tz database in the short window before the official announcement and the decision coming into force. (I believe the tz database makes some assumptions based on past performance, but the government can change their mind any year.) If my OS does not update, I need to change my time zone manually to something that has the right UTC offset, and then I need to manually change back in the autumn, and I can never be 100% sure if any given computer shows the official time.
Announcing is not a big effort. Having millions of people, and thousands of companies (in the territory and outside the territory) adjusting to the announcement is a big effort. If you're going to have DST, you want it to be stable and predictable so that people can plan for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_the_State_of_Palestine
They have DST, but it's not on fixed dates, the government just announces each year when it's going to start and end. Sometimes with less that a week's notice, which must cause all kinds of interesting problems for people.