The journey from the Allenby Bridge crossing from Jordan to the Israeli-occupied West Bank town of Jericho takes 15 minutes. For the time being, it is free of Israeli checkpoints, soldiers, walls, but the checkpoints and soldiers can return at a moment's notice.
Israel’s 700km-long grey West Bank wall snakes its way across the West Bank close to Jerusalem on the summit of mountain range. Entering Jericho, narrow streets are lined with clothing shops, garages and food stalls, bright with the primary colours of bananas, bell peppers and velvety green almonds. A fountain spouts precious water in a tiny park at the centre of this oasis town. Shoppers heavy with bags hurry across the busy street.
There’s not a tourist in sight, despite the fact Jericho vies with Damascus as the oldest city in the world. Tourists shun the town and make quick tours of Tel Sultan and the 8th-century Hisham palace. They ride the telepherique to the monastery on the Mount of Temptation, where tradition holds Jesus was challenged by the devil to transform stones into bread.
Autonomy
The first city in the West Bank to be granted autonomy under the 1993 Oslo accord, Jericho has been transformed from a provincial backwater into an administrative centre for the Jericho governorate and a catchment area for Palestinians being squeezed out of the Jordan Valley by expanding Israeli settlements.
In 2007, before Israel stepped up efforts to settle the valley, Jericho town had 18,000 residents; today it has 22,600 permanent and 2,000 temporary inhabitants. The governorate has a population of 55,000, including two camps housing 10,500 refugee.
Most of the temporary residents are Palestinians from Jerusalem and Ramallah. Scores of white stone houses, many with red tile roofs, have obliterated grain fields and fruit orchards.
Wealthy Jerusalemites come here because Israel refuses them permits to build in their home town. In Jericho, Israel charges huge fees for building permits, which take years to obtain and require lawyers’ fees, and then it levies heavy taxes once buildings are completed.
Something new
"Every day there is something new to say about Jericho," says Jericho district governor Majed Fityani. "Israelis are planning to transfer Palestinians [Bedouin] living south of Nablus and Bethlehem to 46 locations," he says, including two in his district.
The Israeli aim is to “clear these areas of Palestinians in order to expand their settlement blocks. There are 39 Israeli settlements in the Jordan Valley with a population of a maximum of 6,000 during the day and 500 at night. Israel is investing in agriculture, consuming 95 per cent of the water, and extracting minerals from the Dead Sea, making a profit of $1 billion.
“Eleven per cent of the Jordan Valley is under the settlers’ control, 85 per cent is a closed military area. Palestinians have only 4 per cent.”
The settlers consume 6.6 times more water than the Palestinians, who are 8-9 times more numerous. “Palestinians are not allowed to sink new artesian wells,” he says. “They can only use the 200 present during Jordanian rule before 1967. Now there are 67 functioning and their salt content is high. People in the valley are planting palm trees due to salt; vegetables [formerly a main cash crop] are at a minimum.”
Israeli soldiers
Although Jericho is classified as “Area A”, under full Palestinian control, he says, “every day Israeli soldiers enter the area and arrest people . . . even for keeping caged birds . . . the fine is 5,000 shekels [€1,160]. Israel’s aim is to say to us, ‘We are the rulers here.’”
Muhieddin al-Husseini (1860-1944), the grandfather of my friend Dyala, whose family has lived in Jerusalem for 1,000 years, bought land here at the end of the 19th century and early in the 20th, dug canals and brought water from the mountains above Jericho.
Over lunch in her modest family house, the first to be built in stone here, Dyala says, "He went around on horseback in the mountains and befriended the outlaws . . . gave them food to protect his crops. He sold bananas to Jordan and Saudi Arabia, transporting them across the Dead Sea by boat."
Today on his lands stand the homes of descendants who can stay only a limited number of days in Jericho if they are to retain their precious Jerusalem identity cards. Israel’s 2010-2020 Master Plan aims to ensure a 60:40 ratio of Jewish to Palestinian residents of Jerusalem, annexed by Israel in 1967, through administrative deportation to Jericho, other West Bank cities and abroad. The previous ratio was 70:30 but the high Palestinian birth rate and an exodus of Israelis from Jerusalem defeated the planners.
Second in a series of three - tomorrow: report from Rawabi, the first new town in living memory to be built by Palestinians on Palestinian soil
