Palestinians and the talks: Suspicion prevails

The Economist

The people of a town touted as a model for the Palestinian future are still wary
Sep 16th 2010 | Jenin

MAWAL restaurant is a favourite haunt of Jenin’s shisha-smoking professors, politicians and policemen for whiling away the nights. A decade ago it was a battlefield. After negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians collapsed at Camp David in 2000, gunmen traded fire in the city, heralding the violent second intifada.

It is hard to imagine Mawal falling back into ruin. The northern West Bank city of Jenin, once home to 30-odd suicide bombers and a plethora of rival fighting groups, is today a picture of Palestinian normality. The 500-plus American-trained security men whom Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, sent to the city in May 2008 have chased out gangland militants and criminals, and prevented attacks on Israelis even when their soldiers raid the refugee camp in central Jenin. Former fighters speak of a new era of law and order in which police impose fines of 500 shekels ($133) for talking on a mobile phone while driving. Jewish settlers near Jenin cast less of a shadow over the city than they do elsewhere in the West Bank, in part because Israel’s government dismantled four nearby settlements in 2005.

Signs of normalisation abound. After a nine-year closure, Israel now lets cars as well as people go through the Jalameh terminal, the gateway between Jenin and the Galilee district of northern Israel, where Arabs outnumber Jews. Hundreds of Israeli Arabs drive across every day, ending Israel’s economic boycott. Around Jenin Israel has lightened its footprint; many checkpoints are unmanned. On a good day you can drive from Jenin to Ramallah, the Palestinian administrative capital, without a single Israeli soldier demanding papers.

Western benefactors offer a helping hand. In the past year alone the American government has paved 200km (125 miles) of road, narrowing the gap in quality between the highways exclusive to Jewish settlers and the potholed Palestinian variants that wiggle underneath. A newly done-up main road linking Jenin to Nablus, the northern West Bank’s biggest town, opened this month. After a 23-year interval, the German government has funded the reopening of Jenin’s open-air cinema on the slopes below the refugee camp. Jenin is a rare place in the Arab world where ordinary people have a good word for Tony Blair, whose visits as envoy for the Quartet (the EU, Russia, the UN and the United States) put the city on the map.

And yet, in this city that Mr Blair hails as the model of a future Palestinian state, people are still disenchanted. When the Palestinian Islamist movement, Hamas, shot four settlers dead on the eve of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in Washington, even policemen and local chiefs cheered. “Our grassroots were even more thrilled than Hamas’s,” says Ata Abu Rumeila, provincial leader of the ruling Fatah faction.

The chasm between bottom-up state-building and the top-down negotiations in America or Egypt looks wider than ever. Mr Abu Rumeila praises Mr Fayyad, a non-Fatah technocrat, for his repeated walkabouts in places such as Jenin, but pours scorn on his Fatah masters who seem either to jet around the world or stay cocooned in their government compounds in Ramallah. In his eyes, the condemnation of Hamas’s attacks issued by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president who has re-embarked on the negotiations, showed how divorced he is from popular sentiment. Most people in Jenin think the talks will just give Israel breathing space to keep the status quo.

Moreover, Jenin’s economic upswing could easily be reversed. A World Bank report due out soon shows that economic growth of 8% is almost entirely driven by Western aid. Private-sector investment is minimal. Jenin’s much-hyped joint Palestinian-Israeli industrial zone is still a bare patch of land.

The Jalameh terminal, too, is a symbol of Palestinian-Israeli mistrust that sours the mood of economic peace. In its brave-new-world concrete compound, snipers, sniffer dogs and intelligence people subject Israeli Arabs returning home to more intrusive and humiliating inspections than at any other West Bank crossing. At night a vast yellow barrier descends on the crossing, trapping latecomers inside. Israel’s Arabs can visit Jenin. But Jenin’s workers, who before the 2000 intifada garnered most of their earnings in Israel, remain barred from taking jobs there.

Most precariously of all, Jenin’s stability depends on the continued payment of government salaries just when a hole in Mr Fayyad’s finances is widening. Though he has tapped Western governments for funds, a dearth of Gulf money has left a gap of some $300m in this year’s accounts.

This month’s salaries arrived just in time for the Eid al-Fitr festival that ended Ramadan, and Jenin’s markets were packed. But portraits of grateful Palestinians smiling from USAID billboards could bear very different expressions if the funds dry up. Palestinian security men could switch loyalties to one of the militant groups that has promised to resume guerrilla attacks in protest against Mr Abbas’s return to negotiations. As in Gaza, stability can fast give way to lawlessness, leaving Hamas or Israel to staunch the anarchy.