On the West Bank

by John Thompson

06/01/04

At the checkpoint on the highway from Jerusalem to Ramallah, the young Israeli soldiers in their bulky body armor with their assault rifles, were sympathetic, but firm. "You can go past on foot, but your driver stays here and you wouldn’t want to be in Nablus today either."

My driver, a Palestinian Arab was only licensed to work in Jerusalem, and the Israeli crackdown on West-Bank terrorism (now in its second year), has severely limited his abilities to travel elsewhere for fear lest he bring in bomb-making materials.

The Israeli fear is a valid one. Two days before, a plan to use a 30 kg bomb inside a street vendor's cart in one of the Hassidic neighborhoods of Jerusalem (about 200 metres from my hotel) had been defeated just before it was due to be executed. The reason why Nablus was best avoided was the funeral for the local leader of Hamas. I had the news about that one directly from a senior Israeli police officer, who got it on his pager while we were meeting in a coffee shop. The van transporting a Hamas bomb maker ‘prematured’--killing two members of the group (and methinks this was no accident). When I mentioned that I planned to go to Nablus today, he gave a smug smile and asked if I should like to bring flowers for him.

I made two more tries to make it into Ramallah, and then gave it up and went to Jericho instead.

Two years ago, Yasser Arafat’s Second Intifada was at its height. Suicide bombers on buses outside restaurants had killed some 900 Israelis across the country, and the country was gripped in fear. "We wouldn’t send our kids to school, go out in the evenings, and the tourism economy had almost vanished", as one Jerusalem resident told me. Now, tourism inside Israel is booming in a good way, and life has almost returned to normal--barring the young, armed security guards outside every café, mall and theatre in the country. The economy is growing again, and Israelis are more confident than they have been in years.

The turnaround is the result of a total lockdown on the West Bank Palestinians. My driver for the day is one of the few thousand Palestinians allowed to work inside Israeli areas. A few years ago, tens of thousands of Palestinians made their incomes that way. The guidebooks I consulted prior to my visit to the region indicated that tourism was active inside many West Bank cities… but there has been a major difference between 2001 and 2004.

In Jericho, over half the restaurants, shops and hotels were boarded up tight. The modern casino complex on the outskirts of this most ancient city was locked up; and not much else was happening in town. At the restaurant where we stopped for lunch, the food was excellent and relatively cheap; the place should have been crowded with tourists and locals alike. But my driver and I were the only customers they had seen so far that day. In the Eastern Mediterranean, most restaurants with outside tables will have a cat or two, ready to swear eternal friendship for some table scraps. Here, the cat was on the edge of starvation and plainly desperate. Hard times indeed.

There were some things that were plentiful in town--there were four sites of graffiti and impromptu shrines praising the town’s Shaheed. These are martyrs, as the Palestinian media describes them, suicide bombers--usually--as the rest of the world does. There was also a big wall painting of Yasser Arafat and some screed about how the cause will triumph. Other than that, the signs of the local Palestinian authority consisted of two rumpled PA cops with AK-47s lounging in what passes for the centre of commerce, and a nice camp on the outskirts of town.

The camp consists of a neat orderly square of tents given over to house the families of Shaheed. When a family member brings ‘honor’ to the family by getting killed, there are all sorts of cash prizes from the Palestinian Authority, from admirers of terrorism safe off in Saudi Arabia or Syria, and many accolades from the community. Then the Israelis come with a bulldozer and knock the house to rubble; hence the tent camp.

Jericho is well below sea level and near where the River Jordan spills out into the Dead Sea, the climate is bone dry and sun is unrelenting… and you can’t stay cool on pride alone when living under canvas.

Jericho could get its prosperity back and see its shops and hotels re-open. All they have to do is stop letting their young people be turned to Shaheed. Somehow, I don’t think that moment will come anytime soon.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca