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The West Bank continues to grow and prsoper
by Eli Ashkenazi, •
Tuesday, Dec. 22, 2009 at 8:49 AM
A new city is built on the west bank
Hirui Amara excitedly held a bunch of pine seedlings and was quick to dip their soft roots in a bucket of water. Several seconds later he was next to an elderly man, and helped him plant one of the seedlings.
This was the end of an exciting day for Amara, who heads a Jewish National Fund greenhouse at Golani Junction.
Amara and five other JNF employees took part, 10 days ago, in an extraordinary project that involves the JNF assisting in planting trees in the area where a new Palestinian city, Ruwabi, is scheduled to be built north of Ramallah. The name means "City of Hills."
As a first step, the JNF contributed 3,000 tree seedlings for planting in what is meant to be a forested area on the edges of the new city. At the same time, the forestry experts of the JNF have been advising the city planners on the matter.
Suhil Zaydan, one of the JNF's forestry managers, is serving as liaison between the organization and the city planers.
"There have been a number of meetings, both at the location where the city will be built and also at the JNF greenhouses," he says. "We have contributed with our know-how, by advising on how to prepare the ground for the planting and how public gardens should be planned, as well as the best times for planting, and what kinds of trees it is preferable to plant. We did not talk about politics and we shall not talk about it - we deal with trees and understand forestry, botany and greenhouses."
The ambitious project of building a city from scratch has drawn an estimated investment of $800 million, mostly from Palestinian and Qatari sources.
The plan is for 6,000 housing units over a 6,300 dunam area that is supposed to provide housing for nearly 40,000 people and employ some 10,000 Palestinian workers. The project is aimed at the Palestinian middle class.
Zaydan says that a new kind of planning attitude is involved.
"There is no other city like it in our area with regards to the ecological-forestry aspects of planning. Everything will be natural, and there is great attention to preserving nature, the trees, the springs, the streams, the topography and other values, such as antiquities. During the planning stage the natural resources are taken into account," he said.
Ruwabi will be located nine kilometers northwest of Ramallah. A few days ago, at what will be one of the entrances to the city, workers were busy setting up a large sign advertising the project.
Several hours before traveling to the site of the tree planting, Amara was ready at the greenhouse for the truck to arrive so that the seedlings could be loaded.
"This is not a regular day of work," he said. "Today there is a sense that something special is happening. This is a project that grants hope to young people for a better future. I am proud that I am party to this thing."
Like a proud father who nurtured his children, he walked through the rows of seedlings.
"These are seedlings of high quality from every respect - thickness, shape, health, development of its roots," he said.
The seedlings originate from locations throughout the country where seeds were collected and were planted at the greenhouse under conditions favorable to their species.
A bumpy ride along a dirt path comes to an end at the foothills of the settlement of Ateret, at the edge of what will be Ruwabi. Dozens of people are there to plant, ranging in age from youth to people in their 60s, waiting for the truck with the seedlings.
Everyone brought tools from home. One person has a metal hoe with a serial number dating back to Ottoman times.
"This is a very old hoe which belonged to my grandfather," he tells the JNF people, who are amazed by the fact.
Michael Weinberg of the JNF acknowledges that there is a great deal of "professional pride in the project. We are helping in any way we can."
Kneeling to touch the earth, he is optimistic: "There are excellent conditions here."
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1131323.html
A promising, independent Palestine is quietly being developed, with Israeli assistance
by Tom Gross
Wednesday, Dec. 23, 2009 at 10:01 AM
It is difficult to turn on a TV or radio or pick up a newspaper these days, without finding some pundit or other deploring the dismal prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace or the dreadful living conditions of the Palestinians. Even supposedly neutral news reporters regularly repeat this sad tale. "Very little is changing for the Palestinian people on the ground," I heard BBC World Service Cairo correspondent Christian Fraser tell listeners three times in a 45-minute period the other evening.
In fact nothing could be further from the truth. I had spent that day in the West Bank's largest city, Nablus. The city is bursting with energy, life and signs of prosperity, in a way I have not previously seen in many years of covering the region.
As I sat in the plush office of Ahmad Aweidah, the suave British-educated banker who heads the Palestinian Securities Exchange, he told me that the Nablus stock market was the second best-performing in the world so far in 2009, after Shanghai. (Aweidah's office looks directly across from the palatial residence of Palestinian billionaire Munib al-Masri, the wealthiest man in the West Bank.)
Later I met Bashir al-Shakah, director of Nablus's gleaming new cinema, where four of the latest Hollywood hits were playing that day. Most movies were sold out, he noted, proudly adding that the venue had already hosted a film festival since it opened in June.
Wandering around downtown Nablus the shops and restaurants I saw were full. There were plenty of expensive cars on the streets. Indeed I counted considerably more BMWs and Mercedes than I've seen, for example, in downtown Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.
And perhaps most importantly of all, we had driven from Jerusalem to Nablus without going through any Israeli checkpoints. The government of Binyamin Netanyahu has removed them all since the Israeli security services (with the encouragement and support of President George Bush) were allowed, over recent years, to crush the intifada, restore security to the West Bank and set up the conditions for the economic boom that is now occurring. (There was one border post on the return leg of the journey, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, but the young female guard just waved me and the two Palestinians I was travelling with, through.)
The shops and restaurants were also full when I visited Hebron recently, and I was surprised to see villas comparable in size to those on the Cote d'Azur or Bel Air had sprung up on the hills around the city. Life is even better in Ramallah, where it is difficult to get a table in a good restaurant. New apartment buildings, banks, brokerage firms, luxury car dealerships and health clubs are to be seen. In Qalqilya, another West Bank city that was previously a hotbed of terrorists and bomb-makers, the first-ever strawberry crop is being harvested in time to cash in on the lucrative Christmas markets in Europe. Local Palestinian farmers have been trained by Israeli agriculture experts and Israel supplied them with irrigation equipment and pesticides.
A new Palestinian city, Ruwabi, is to be built soon north of Ramallah. Last month, the Jewish National Fund, an Israeli charity, helped plant 3,000 tree seedlings for a forested area the Palestinian planners say they would like to develop on the edge of the new city. Israeli experts are also helping the Palestinians plan public parks and other civic amenities.
Outsiders are beginning to take note of the turnaround too. The official PLO Wafa news agency reported last week that the third quarter of 2009 witnessed near-record tourism in the Palestinian Authority, with 135,939 overnight hotel stays in 89 hotels that are now open. Almost half the guests come from the US or Europe.
Palestinian economic growth so far this year – in a year dominated by economic crisis elsewhere – has been an impressive 7% according to the IMF, though Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayad, himself a former World Bank and IMF employee, says it is in fact 11%, partly helped along by strong economic performances in neighbouring Israel.
In Gaza too, the shops and markets are crammed with food and goods – see, for example, the photos from the Gaza-based newspaper Palestine Today about the recent Eid celebrations in Gaza. These are not the pictures you are ever likely to see on the BBC or Le Monde or the New York Times. No, Gaza is not like a "concentration camp," nor is the "humanitarian crisis in Gaza is on the scale of Darfur," as British journalist Lauren Booth (who is also Tony Blair's sister-in-law) has said.
In June, the Washington Post's Jackson Diehl related how Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas had told him why he had turned down Ehud Olmert's offer last year to create a Palestinian state on 97% of the West Bank (with 3% of pre-1967 Israeli land being added to make up the shortfall). "In the West Bank we have a good reality," Abbas told Diehl. "The people are living a normal life," he added in a rare moment of candour to a western journalist.
Nablus stock exchange head Ahmad Aweidah went further in explaining to me why there is no rush to declare statehood, saying ordinary Palestinians need the Israel Defence Forces to help protect them from Hamas, as their own security forces aren't ready to do so by themselves yet.
The truth is that an independent Palestine is now quietly being built, with Israeli assistance. So long as the Obama administration and European politicians don't clumsily meddle as they have in the past and make unrealistic demands for the process to be completed more quickly than it can be, I am confident the outcome will be a positive one. (The last time an American president – Bill Clinton in 2000 – tried to hurry things along unrealistically, it merely resulted in blowing up in everybody's faces – literally – and set back hopes for peace by some years.)
Israelis and Palestinians may never agree on borders that will satisfy everyone. But that doesn't mean they won't live in peace. Not all Germans and French agree who should control Alsace-Lorraine. Poles and Russians, Slovenes and Croats, Britons and Irish, and peoples all over the world, have border disputes. But that doesn't keep them from coexisting with one another. Nor – so long as partisan journalists and human rights groups don't mislead western politicians into making bad decisions – will it prevent Israelis and Palestinians from doing so.
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/dec/07/obama-interference-in...
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