10,000 year bash falls flat

Jericho stagnates despite an attempt to highlight the birthday of what is said to be the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city.

By DANIELLA CHESLOW, JERICHO, WEST BANK
jericho (photo credit: hajdi mohammed / ap)
jericho
(photo credit: hajdi mohammed / ap)
MICKEY MOUSE, MINNIE Mouse and Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad walked through a sea of squealing children in Jericho’s main square to mark what was touted as the city’s 10,000th anniversary in early October. While the celebration was billed as the start of an ambitious plan to develop the Jordan Valley, despite Israeli hopes of keeping the area, the actual event fell far short of the fanfare.
At noon on October 10, the day officially chosen to mark the anniversary, it was hard to tell that Jericho, just north of the Dead Sea, was celebrating anything. Apart from a small stage being constructed outside city hall in the main square, the dusty desert oasis town of 18,300 carried on as usual. Down the street, a Russian museum that city officials had planned to inaugurate in honor of the festivities was still in the throes of construction, with shirtless workers shoveling cement, and scaffolding enveloping the building. The museum is being erected with Russian funding and will feature archaeological finds, Russian religious art and exhibits about the Russian-Palestinian relationship. Work was also continuing on a wall around Jericho’s ancient sycamore tree, which Zacchaeus the tax collector is said to have climbed to see Jesus two millennia ago. Tour guide Salah Barahme, 62, grumbled that no outside visitors had come to the party.
“Our government doesn’t do anything for Jericho,” he said, eying the street for potential buyers of postcards and keffiyas, the checkered black or red Arab headdresses.
Although the event was touted as a tourism opportunity, there was no itinerary in English available online. PA President Mahmoud Abbas, rumored to be attending, was absent. While later in the day Fayyad spoke to reporters and inaugurated a new stamp at the city Post Office, local officials were underwhelmed by the celebration, directed by the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism, which said it spent $1 million on the event.
“We were expecting that people would come to Jericho in buses, and that the city would be full of foreign people and tourists,” Jericho spokeswoman Wiam Irqat tells The Report. “The people who came were mostly friends and official delegations already involved at the event.”
Jericho, where, according to the Bible, Joshua made the walls come tumbling down some 3,400 years ago, is a half-hour drive east of Jerusalem. The city is also known for Hisham’s Palace, the remains of an 8th-century CE sprawling Umayyad winter palace, whose intricate floor mosaics are still intact. In the 1950s, on the historical mound named Sultan’s Spring, the British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon discovered remains from settlements dating as far back as 8,000 BCE.
“The inhabitation [of Jericho] never stopped from that time until now,” says Marwan Abu Khalaf, an archaeologist at Al Quds University in Jerusalem. “The spring nearby, called Ein ASultan, still provides the people of Jericho with water, from that time until today.”
It’s a history locals do not take lightly.
“The mayor of Paris said his city was 2,000 years old,” says Jericho Mayor Hassan Saleh. “However, Jericho is the world’s oldest city.”
JUST AHEAD OF THE SECOND intifada, the Palestinian uprising that broke out in late 2000, Jericho had planned for tourism expansion. The city already took spillover from travelers to Jerusalem, and entertained Palestinians looking for warm refuge from the cold winters in the hills of Jerusalem and Ramallah. In the optimistic days of the mid-1990s, Jericho became a destination in its own right. The Oasis Casino opened in 1998, drawing 3,000 people a day, mostly Israelis. The luxurious Intercontinental Hotel rose beside it and plans for other hotels abounded. But those dreams came to an abrupt stop with the intifada. The casino closed in 2000, one of the first victims of the intifada, and Israelis were soon after forbidden to visit the Palestinian city.
Yet last spring, officials were hopeful for the potential transformation “Jericho 10,000” could unleash. Saleh said he intended to double Jericho’s annual number of local and foreign visitors to two million. It was thought that the renovations around the sycamore tree and the opening of the Russian museum would induce people to linger in the city, and Spokeswoman Irqat even believed that new hotels would have to be built to house all the visitors. In the end, the renovations missed their deadlines, and the anticipated masses of tourists did not show up.
Palestinian Tourism Minister Khouloud Daibes, who steered the interministerial committee on Jericho, says about 20,000 people came to the opening day, which included a night marathon and a performance at the police academy. Daibes says that while the initial concept behind “Jericho 10,000” was as a branding tool for the desert oasis, it evolved to include development around the region. One of those building projects was a road, inaugurated the same day in the nearby village of Auja. Others include the construction of a sewage system for the city.
“We were thinking of developing infrastructure and encouraging investment in Jericho, and we ran out of time by the target date of 10.10.10,” says Irqat.
Whatever development Jericho manages to carry out will be limited by Israeli rule. The small city is surrounded by date palms and banana groves, which can only flourish if they have water. The Palestinians claim Israel is diverting most of the water in the area to the heavily irrigated Jewish farms in the Jordan Rift Valley.
Furthermore, while the tour bus or car ride to Jericho takes half an hour, for tourists using public transport, the trip requires two buses and can take up to an hour and a half, because Palestinian buses do not use the Azzayim checkpoint on Route 1. Their buses bypass this checkpoint by going through Abu Dis. In Abu Dis there is a bus transfer to Jericho.
Additionally, because Jericho is in Area A, Israelis who used to stop by for lunch purchases have been banned by Israeli military order since the intifada. In August, the IDF announced that it was considering allowing Israelis to enter parts of Area A.
At the least, the celebration was exciting for Jericho’s youngest residents. About 50 children crowded the main town square, cheering and dancing with Mickey and Minnie Mouse and three clowns, and cheering Fayyad as he inaugurated the new stamp.
Some older Jericho residents were also upbeat because tourism figures are up despite the understated opening. At the 170- room Intercontinental Hotel and the 104- room Jericho Resort Village, the largest hotels in the city, managers said they were either at or near capacity.
“We were at full capacity on Sunday,” says Yousef Salman, manager of Jericho Intercontinental. “The tourist industry is booming... You could not find an unoccupied room during the whole month of October.”
“OK, maybe they should have done more, maybe some more preparation, more decorations, more marketing, I don’t know,” said Tanas Baddour, assistant general manager of the Jericho Resort Village. “But in general, the 10,000 idea itself is very good.”