Truth on the West Bank

Published (The Australian)
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/truth-on-the-west-bank/story-e6frg6so-1225809208754

 TOM Gross (The Australian, December 8) may have visited a West Bank, but I am not sure if it was the same place, west of the river Jordan, that I visited five weeks ago. The picture he is painting is completely different to what I saw.

Of course, Gross's experience will likely differ from mine. He is probably travelling as an Englishman, with Israel giving him far more freedom of movement than me in my own country as a Palestinian. His drive from Jerusalem to Nablus, as he describes it, is nothing short of fiction to the Palestinians living in the West Bank. Jerusalem, the birthplace of my mother, is, in fact, completely off limits to us.

As for the prosperous economy Gross is describing, let's get the facts straight. We are talking about a primitive and predominantly agricultural economy strangled by more than 41 years of conflict and occupation. The 7 per cent or 11 per cent growth figures suggested mean nothing when the baseline is below zero. The Nablus stockmarket, the second-best-performing in the world so far this year, according to Gross, happens to be recovering from the late-2008 crash; has only 39 companies listed; has been very volatile since the first trade in 1997; and its al-Quds Index has been hovering around 500 for most of this year, way lower than its record of 1128 points in 2004.

To put this into perspective, the PSE market cap is currently under $US2.4 billion ($2.6bn), a little more than half its $US4.5 billion high in 2005. By comparison, the Amman stock exchange's market cap of $US34 billion today is nearly double its 2005 market cap of $US18.6 billion.

An economy with no port, no airport, inadequate infrastructure and restricted access to its own markets is not viable and won't grow. Any assertion of an economic boom in the West Bank is false, and any comparison with the few trillion US dollars of the Shanghai stock exchange in any respect is a joke.

Some of the Palestinian farmers referred to by Gross happen to be my uncles and cousins. They were never trained by Israeli agricultural experts or supplied with any irrigation equipment. Rather, they continue to be disadvantaged by the superior Israeli technology and market access. The EU recently offered some subsidies to some Palestinians -- but Israel has never done so. All the farmers I met were complaining about one thing: the lack of water. One said, "Every time we dig a deeper well, they go even deeper and our wells get sucked dry."

It is true that the Jewish National Fund is considered an Israeli charity in some countries, but one that has been strictly protecting the interests of the Jewish people since the turn of the last century. It is also true that Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayad live in villas, drive their BMWs and Mercedes and are living a normal life. That is, however, way beyond the reach of the great majority of the 3.5 million living in Gaza and the West bank, the people that Gross is unlikely to have met.

Amin Abbas is a diaspora Palestinian living in Australia

11 December 2009