Credit: jewlicious.com

Ahead of a forthcoming trip to Palestine and Israel, a couple of days ago I went to check the weather on my iPhone’s preinstalled Yahoo weather app. Tel Aviv loaded fine, but it was when I did a search for Jerusalem that the oddness began.

I started by typing “Jerus” – waiting for Yahoo’s database to find the most obvious entry. It came up with “Jerusalem, Ohio” top of the list. Bizarre. So I carried on typing, till “Jerusalem” sat in the search bar. Pause for search. Top of the list now? “West Jerusalem, Yerushalayim“. ['Yerushalayim' is the Hebrew name for Jerusalem.] Huh? There was no weather forecast for the city of Jerusalem, only for West Jerusalem. Even in the mad world of Middle East politics, that made no sense.

So I sighed and loaded the weather page for West Jerusalem, then tried to find the weather for the half of the city that I’m going to visit. There was nothing under “Jerusalem”. After failing with “Quds”, “Palestine” and various combinations thereof, I finally found it. “East Jerusale” brought up Gangtok in India (huh again?), but if you add that final M you get “East Jerusalem, West Bank“. Extraordinary.

So I loaded both. Incidentally, they’re identical.

Conclusions? On the one hand, if you type “Jerusalem” you only get West Jerusalem. On the other hand, it’s now possible to have the weather solely for East Jerusalem on your iPhone if you persevere.

The Israeli and Jewish blogospheres are, understandably, up in arms. This is one example – and this Israeli news site reports today (June 6th) that Israel’s ambassador in Washington has send a letter of protest to both Yahoo and Apple.

But the Arab, Muslim and/or Palestinian blogospheres? I can’t find a single word of comment.

This (right) is one of the approaches to Qalandia.

Pictured below is a section of the ‘separation barrier‘ at Qalandia, decorated with murals.

This (below) is what you see on the road from Jerusalem into Ramallah, having passed through Qalandia. The painted sign says “No entry to Israelis” in Hebrew (Israeli citizens are forbidden from entering Ramallah, which is controlled by the Palestinian Authority).

Traffic trying to cross Qalandia from Ramallah into Jerusalem is often heavy.

Having left Ramallah, buses arrive at the entrance to Qalandia, where everybody has to get off with their bags, walk across a parking area and into this shed (below), to pass into a narrow barred passageway, wide enough for one person at a time.

Passengers from the bus are then corralled together in this holding pen (below). The barred turnstile at the far end is controlled by the Israeli army staff, who sit in a secure office just beyond: they allow one person at a time through the turnstile for checks. The rest must stand and wait. On the day I was there, I waited in this area for about 15 minutes, shuffling forward slowly one person at a time. People were courteous but quiet. Fortunately it was a cool day: there is no air-conditioning there.

This (below) is the notice on the other side of that turnstile: each person allowed through must pass their ID card (or, in my case, passport) through a transfer window for checking by the Israeli army staff.

I could not take photos of the ID check, but on that particular day, that particular office was staffed by four people – three women and one man – all in army uniform and all, in my estimation, in their late teens or early twenties. One was seated at the window, running computer checks on the ID of the people passing through the turnstile; as she worked, she also leaned back, smiling and chatting with her colleagues, who were lounging behind – one woman was reclining in an office chair with her boots up on the desk, while the man was seated on a desk nearby, his feet on a chair, chatting and laughing.

After I passed in front of the window, there was a sudden shouted command which came out of a speaker on the wall. I turned, the person who was coming just behind me shrank back, and the shout came again. The soldier at the window merely wanted me to show my passport again – but it was (how can I put this?) disconcerting, in that context, to have a disembodied voice suddenly issuing shouted commands at me through a crackly speaker.

After the ID check you walk on. Pictured below is the sign which hangs above this passageway; it says “Israel” in Hebrew and Arabic.

Turning right at the sign, as instructed, this is the view (below) – another turnstile.

Through that turnstile, you effectively enter Israel proper. This is the scene (below) – another watchtower, with more people and traffic waiting to pass into Ramallah.

Everybody reboarded the bus, which continued on its way into East Jerusalem.

For them, it was routine: they presumably do the same thing twice (or more) a day, every day. Perhaps, since the crossing only took about 20 minutes and nobody was singled out for body or property searches, it was a good trip.

It was the most shocking bus journey I’ve ever taken. Qalandia is a disgrace: it feels, looks and smells like a prison. The casual behaviour and jokey attitude of the Israeli soldiers running ID checks was disgusting. (Then again, perhaps it fits: imagine soldiers making eye-contact with everyone and smiling, saying please, thank you and have a nice day. It’s almost worse than the honest reality of treating people like cattle.)

And Qalandia is only one of dozens of similar military checkpoints, set up in and around the West Bank in order for Israel to control the movement of Palestinians.

It brutalises – but I wonder if it isn’t brutalising Israelis even more than Palestinians.

While I was waiting in that holding pen, it struck me that when Palestinians are one day governing themselves in a fully autonomous State of Palestine, Israelis will still be living with the insidious, corrupting mental and social consequences of having maintained such an occupation for so long.

I’m absolutely certain that the Palestinians can survive the occupation, however long it continues. They seem to have the kind of inner strength and collective resolve that no army can touch.

What I’m less sure about is whether the Israelis can.

I had a great time researching this: everybody I spoke to, without exception, was open and willing to talk to me – a foreign, straight journalist – about their lives and the challenges (or lack of challenges) they face in everyday life. I loved it all. Seeing the Middle East through gay eyes was a revelation. And I’m absolutely thrilled to be off the travel pages and in the Indy’s Saturday mag.

The most difficult task came during the writing process. After roughly 7 days of research I had a mass of material – six or seven hours of interviews recorded on an iPod and an A6 notebook (160 pages) literally full to the last page. In a way, I’d done too much – but, then again, without all those discussions, I could only ever have skated over the surface of the issues. Every meeting and every conversation helped me to understand the situation better, and shape the article.

But, with only 2,500 words to play with, I had to leave several interviewees out of the final edit altogether; several others, despite long talks and – in one case – hours of sightseeing around the city together, ended up reduced to a couple of lines of backstory and a single quote. One interviewee has already emailed to say how disappointed they are in me (and in how ‘negative’ the article is); others have so far been universally positive and supportive.

The problem, I think, is that I went in with an open mind: the conception of the article changed several times – from the pitch, to when I first arrived, to when I left, to when I sat down to write. The final piece has a quite different tone from how I originally imagined it – due entirely to the people I spoke to on the ground. If I had fixed on an angle before arriving and stuck to it, I could have interviewed fewer people, for a shorter time, asked more targeted questions and come up with 2,500 words to suit that agenda.

But I preferred to see this project as a journey of discovery for me, too – I genuinely wanted to find out about LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) life in Israel… but perhaps that held me back and made the resulting article a little too quote-heavy. Not sure. It’s all a learning process. Might do things differently next time.

Then there was the Palestinian issue – lots to talk about there, in relation to gay issues, civil rights, the occupation… but, in truth, it’s a whole other article. I thought, early on, to bring in Palestinian perspectives, and I also had gay friends & contacts in neighbouring Arab countries ready to give quotes and insight – but, in the end, I decided that the subject of gay life in Israel merited discussion by itself. Expanding the boundaries of the subject would only have made the article fuzzier and less focused than it is. Tough decisions, these.

One thing that did jar was the images chosen by the picture editor to accompany the article. The Independent commissioned a Jerusalem-based freelance photographer, Ahikam Seri, to shoot the story – and he did an outstanding job, in interview situations, portraits and reportage. But the story ended up being illustrated with voyeuristic nightlife images on every page – men kissing, women kissing. I barely mention clubbing or Tel Aviv’s reputation for hedonism, but Ahikam’s portraits of the people I did write about, and his brilliant visual insights into ordinary gay life in the city, don’t get a look-in.

Instead, the newspaper thought: it’s a story about gays and lesbians – therefore, we must pack it with images of same-sex snogging, preferably in red-lit nightclub basements. Such a pity. Reinforces tired stereotypes, when there was an opportunity to undermine them. Opportunity lost.

My guess might surprise you. If you discount Mecca during the haj – which hosts 3 million people from seemingly every country in the world – I’d say the answer is Tel Aviv. I just got back from there, on assignment for The Independent, and was delighted to get reacquainted with what is an amazingly diverse city.

In the space of a few days, and aside from Israelis, I talked to Afghans, Iranians, Palestinians, Egyptians, Iraqis, Romanians, Americans, Ethiopians, French, Brazilians, South Africans, Moroccans, British, and more – most of them Israeli by nationality but carrying cultural identities originating all over the world.

There are, of course, very specific political and cultural reasons for Tel Aviv’s diversity – before and after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 people were encouraged to go there to make a new life, in the process erasing several pre-existing communities. For some observers, that turns the city into an illegitimate implant. For me, it turns it into a living reflection of the region’s human tragedies – a precious, uniquely valuable record of the results of intolerance.

The injustices are not clear-cut. The thinking among politicians and ordinary people, both in Israel and in other countries, which resulted in whole communities arriving en masse in Tel Aviv strikes me as being just as racist as the thinking which has legitimized the complete emasculation by Israel of Old Jaffa. This once-thriving Palestinian city, dating back to the Old Testament, is now shockingly reduced to a touristy stop on a sightseeing tour, hosting only galleries run by wealthy Israeli artists and a handful of underplayed (or, in the case of the Jaffa museum, neglected) historical attractions.

Seafront districts of Jaffa are now full of luxury villas and condos, designed in a pastiche style more reminiscent of contemporary architecture in the Gulf – pointed arches splashed around in a vain attempt to locate the building within some kind of cultural context. Tel Aviv has much beauty, but it has made Jaffa ugly – literally and metaphorically.

Jaffa is a mostly overlooked link to further themes of exile and displacement. In 1948 many people from there were forced to flee to the Jordanian capital, Amman – barely 100km to the east.

Like Tel Aviv, Amman’s character has been shaped by movements of people. Once a mainly bedouin city, its population doubled in the space of a few weeks in 1948 as Palestinians arrived in large numbers seeking refuge from war and persecution in Israel. The same thing happened in 1967 – and again in 1991, as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from Kuwait. After the 2003 Gulf War, hundreds of thousands more people arrived in Amman from Iraq. The city, poor to begin with, and buffeted by waves of refugees, has often struggled to cope.

Amman has remained overwhelmingly Muslim and ethnically homogeneous. Yet Tel Aviv – which has remained overwhelmingly Jewish – has become ethnically very diverse.

This isn’t the place to bang on about cultural identity, but one thing is interesting to note. Tel Aviv has frequently been active in facilitating the absorption of large numbers of immigrants (aided, of course, by political engagement and lots of money). Amman, by contrast, has been almost entirely passive: urban planning is a recent innovation and a sense of shared endeavour has been almost completely lacking. As a consequence Amman sprawls, while Tel Aviv flows.

Yet both were founded in 1909. Both have been celebrating their centenary this year with cultural events and public parties – a parade in Amman, fireworks in Tel Aviv – and dedicated websites (this for Amman, this for Tel Aviv). Both cities identify strongly with their populations’ experience of transplant and exile: in both, a simple “Where are you from?” is enough to cue a life-story. They have a lot to share.

But there has been no contact. I know only a handful of people in both cities who have made the journey to visit their urban neighbours. Isn’t that a pity?

More significantly, the highly successful UAE-based low-cost carrier Air Arabia has announced that by the end of 2009 it will be launching a new airline, Air Arabia Egypt, to link several Egyptian airports with destinations in the Gulf, North Africa, Europe and the UK.

The Israel example shows the power of what the airline industry calls VFR – ‘visiting friends and relatives’. Despite the political problems, tourism to Israel has always remained buoyant, fed by special-interest religious tours in particular – but fuelled above all by VFR, especially from areas with a high Jewish population. In the UK that means, firstly, north London: even before easyJet’s launch, El Al is the only full-service national flag carrier able to maintain regular near-daily scheduled service out of Luton (and, previously, out of Stansted), in addition to its twice-daily Heathrow service. Another key VFR origin is Manchester, from where jet2 launched nonstop Tel Aviv flights in January 2009 – shortly afterwards announcing that it was doubling its peak service.

VFR out of the UK to most other Middle Eastern destinations isn’t as strong – there just aren’t that many expat Jordanians and Syrians in Britain. Air Arabia, though, has already proved that VFR works: in April 2009 it launched Air Arabia Maroc, a low-cost carrier which today links Casablanca with a clutch of francophone cities in western Europe (alongside London, Milan and elsewhere).

Its new venture, Air Arabia Egypt, on the other hand, is squarely targeting the leisure market, with multiple bases in Egypt serving different markets: Cairo and Alexandria will no doubt benefit from expanded links to Africa and the Gulf (where the large numbers of Egyptian expats brings VFR into play again), while Luxor, Sharm El-Sheikh and Hurghada will likely attract service chiefly from northern and western Europe. The three Air Arabias will also, no doubt, link up, making it possible to fly in a series of hops from the Atlantic to the Bay of Bengal, low-cost all the way.

Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary

The new venture also kick-starts a fascinating contest. easyJet, a pioneer of low-cost travel in Europe, already serves Egyptian holiday airports such as Sharm and Hurghada from the UK. It will, it seems, soon have to compete with Air Arabia, a pioneer of low-cost travel in the Middle East. Two highly successful carriers from different parts of the globe are about to meet head-to-head. Be sure that Ryanair will be watching closely.

Beside all of this, the Gulf (although aided by market protection) is able to support six more low-cost carriers – Sama, Nas, Felix, Bahrain Air, FlyDubai and Jazeera. The last of these has announced that it is searching for a new regional hub. Will it be Beirut? Istanbul? Perhaps Athens?

As Middle East airlines start reaching out towards Europe, expect an ever-intensifying clash of low-cost cultures in the months ahead.

A mammoth undertaking

It’s a mammoth undertaking. Although the terrain – and the long distances – suit train travel perfectly, there are only a few scattered lines currently in operation.

Saudi Arabia runs a passenger service between Dammam and Riyadh. Syria has a good network, which links – through the tenuous connection of the Toros Express – to Turkey. Israel also has a decent system, but for political reasons it is completely isolated from its neighbours: trains once ran from Cairo all the way along the eastern Mediterranean coast to Beirut, but the lines were cut in 1948.

Flying the Arab Revolt flag

And the old Hejaz Railway, built by the Ottomans to take haj pilgrims from Damascus to Mecca, blown up by Faisal and Lawrence of Arabia during the ‘Arab Revolt’ – and which, in its latter years, hosted passengers trains between Damascus and Amman in Jordan – is also no more. Jordan resurrected it as a novelty this month, running ‘Ramadan Specials’ between Amman and the nearby city of Zarqa, but hardly anybody took notice. As this article pointed out, Jordan has no culture of rail.

Big plans

Yet big plans are afoot. Jordan is planning a new national network, incorporating a commuter light-rail line between Amman and Zarqa along the route of the old Hejaz track. The intention is to link up with Syrian railways, and idealists envision that – once there is sufficient political will – Jordan might also link up with the Israeli network. Relaxing one day aboard the Galilee Flyer from Haifa to Irbid, or the Umayyad Express from Damascus to Jerusalem? We can only hope.

But the biggest plans are on the Arabian Peninsula. Saudi Arabia’s rail expansion includes a Landbridge project to extend the Dammam-Riyadh line as far as Jeddah, thus linking the Gulf with the Red Sea for the first time. The Haramain high-speed rail line from Jeddah to the Holy Cities of Medina and Mecca will be partly ready for next year’s haj, and a driverless monorail is planned within Mecca to ease the traffic problems caused by 3 million pilgrims a year. The intention is for the Saudi network – specifically a new north-south line running from Riyadh to Ha’il – to continue to the Jordanian border, forming a connection with Jordan’s domestic railways.

Then the six GCC countries are well advanced on plans for an international railway along the Gulf coast from Kuwait to Oman, which would link to domestic rail networks planned throughout this region. The Friendship Causeway, a massive engineering project to build a road link across 40km of sea between Bahrain and Qatar – thus reducing the journey time between Doha and Manama from almost 5 hours to 30 minutes, when it opens in 2015 – was hastily redesigned at the last minute to include space for a rail line. Both countries are designing railways and urban metros within their own, small territories.

And the UAE is planning a national railway, linking Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ras Al Khaimah and crossing to the east coast to Fujairah. In addition, a triangle of high-speed lines will connect Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Al Ain. Lines will extend into Oman to the capital, Muscat.

Finally, the GCC line would join with the Saudi network, by then itself linked with Jordan, Syria and Turkey. Syria and Iraq are already connected. Trains could, in theory, run the whole distance from Istanbul to Muscat, across half a dozen countries or more, making the prospect of travelling by train from Europe to the Gulf a real possibility.

Social cohesion

The potential for change is very exciting. Railways – or, more specifically, opportunities to travel easily and cheaply – make healthy societies: they foster social cohesion. Railways are progress. British policymakers forgot this in the 1960s and 1970s, cut lines and denied the railways decent investment. This contributed to the isolating, individualistic, London-centric reshaping of society which continued through the 1980s and which we are still grappling with today.

Mecca monorail?

In the UAE, where 80% of the population are from elsewhere, Emiratis are very unlikely to use their new mass transit systems – at least for another generation, until the individualism (and subsidised petrol) which ties people to their cars is abandoned. Consequently, building railways seems to me to be a rare, tacit acknowledgement by the UAE governments of the contribution made by outsiders, in particular by South Asian expats. It is – momentously, for these fragmented societies – a step towards integration.

Rail buffs in the West may get misty-eyed about all this, dreaming of historic lines converted for a new age, trains as harbingers of peace, new networks in virgin territory – and, of course, the romance of all those ancient cities of Arabia linked by gleaming new high-speed expresses.

But for the people in the region, the plans for rail are far more meaningful than that. Never mind all those skyscrapers and multibillion-dollar megaprojects; railway construction represents the most tangible, realistic move towards nation-building yet seen in the region. For the first time, virtually unlimited public funds are being married with level-headed, long-term planning policies. Two generations on from the biggest lottery win in history – the discovery of oil – the Gulf countries are starting to find their feet again.

Railways really matter.

UPDATE 7/9/09: A specialist rail writer friend advises me that the Hejaz line was in fact built by the Germans, under Ottoman direction, and also points out that it might be misleading to compare Syria’s network with Israel’s; the latter is far more advanced. Also check out this great video (5mins), posted today, of a journey aboard one of the ‘Ramadan Special’ train services along the old Hejaz line in Jordan – atmospheric visuals, “slumdog” scenery, but no toilet paper! Commentary is in Arabic, but the footage and music speak for themselves.

Never mind. Politics aside, one of Aleem’s most memorable stories – apart from his blog from the haj – came from his idea last year to walk from Nazareth to Bethlehem, retracing the journey made by Joseph and Mary in the Christmas story, arriving in Bethlehem on Christmas Day. If you haven’t read his blog and watched the video clips from along the way, take time to do so – it’s a great travel story, told brilliantly well.

Then came this story about Israeli transport officials planning to impose Hebrew place names on locations throughout Israel. Tourists – and, apparently, locals – are “confused” by the lack of standardised spellings, so in future Nazareth will be signposted in English and Arabic as Natsrat, using the transliteration of its Hebrew name. Similarly Caesarea will be shown as Kesariya, Acre as Akko, Jaffa as Yafo.

If the advert map was (in the most generous interpretation) merely cackhanded mismanagement of spin, it’s hard to see this as anything other than part of an attempt to erase official recognition of any cultures other than Israeli Hebrew culture in these towns and cities.

Do they imagine that they are doing tourists a service by replacing Nazareth with Natsrat? Are they expecting the Arabic-speaking residents of Acre to suddenly start calling their own city Akko?

If the Swiss government in Bern were to issue a decree forbidding the mention of “Genève” and requiring Geneva to be signposted using only the German name Genf, it would (rightly) be interpreted as an attempt to deny the reality of that city’s francophone culture.

Who, then, are the Israeli government trying to kid by, in effect, trying to squeeze the very word Jaffa out of existence? Nobody but themselves, it seems.

The author, Daoud Kuttab, is a renowned Palestinian journalist, and writes in detail about the tortuous border problems – and financial corruption involved – from a Palestinian perspective.

I’ve crossed here, both ways, maybe half a dozen times. Being a ‘foreigner’ (as opposed to a Jordanian, a Palestinian or an Israeli) it’s much, much easier to make the trip, but this nonetheless still rates as the longest, nastiest, least appealing border crossing I can think of. Not everyone, regrettably, shares my freedom to cross elsewhere.

One of the most interesting things was Rabbi Froman’s affirming the possibility of maintaining viable Jewish communities under Palestinian rule within a Palestinian state on the West Bank – surely a ‘third way’ between the expansionist status quo (immoral and profoundly damaging) and a Gaza-style settler clearance (inconceivable under current conditions, it seems to me). I would love to talk to him about it – and to try and gauge Arab opinion about Sheikh Bukhari in Jerusalem and Ibtisam Mahameed in Faradis. Are they admired? Respected? Marginalised? Ridiculed?

…but I’m not going to blog about that.

Instead I’m going to blog about this story in yesterday’s Jordan Times – which I followed as it unfolded on Queen Rania’s Twitter page. The Queen and Minister of Tourism went to Rasoun, a small village in northern Jordan, to mark the launch of the ministry’s project establishing walking trails in under-developed rural areas. I was in Rasoun a few weeks ago for the Independent: it’s a simple country town, set in a beautiful landscape of forested hills. Down in the valleys, streams water orchards of fig, olive and pomegranate. Up on the slopes are a few hard-to-find towns: Rasoun itself, Orjan, Baoun, with some smaller villages, linked by goat tracks. Some people are farmers, but most are public sector employees: civil servants, police, army.

Last year I also passed through Rasoun during a stay in a nature reserve run by Jordan’s Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN), which occupies a swathe of forest on the hilltop nearby. They operate a network of rural trails through the reserve, crossing Rasoun’s remote countryside.

Then I revisited the area this April to walk the Al-Ayoun Trail, a separate concern originating in a cooperative effort among the local villagers to introduce tourism to their area. This has been fostered by the Abraham Path Initiative (API), an American organisation seeking to establish an international walking route linking sites of Abrahamic interest across the Middle East. I’ve written in more detail about the Abraham Path for Wanderlust magazine and the Times. The API discussed cooperation with the RSCN in Rasoun, but were rebuffed (so I understand) by the RSCN’s policy of insisting that anyone walking on its paths must pay for an RSCN guide to accompany them. So instead the Al-Ayoun Trail runs around the reserve perimeter, purposely routed through the villages in order to encourage interaction between walkers and villagers.

Now the Jordan Times is reporting how the Ministry of Tourism wants to establish its own, compeletely separate walking paths in the Rasoun area, following neither the RSCN’s routes nor the existing Al-Ayoun Trail.

It’s a circus! From five years ago, when Rasoun was unknown and unvisited, suddenly everyone from lowly British hacks to the Queen herself are busy visiting, talking and planning. The poor Rasounis must be wondering what they’ve done to deserve it.

Why isn’t everyone co-operating? The background is complicated, but it boils down to this. The RSCN don’t like to work with anyone else: they set their own rules, devise their own business plans and pursue their own goals. They also have closer links with the Ministry of Environment than the Ministry of Tourism, who tend, as a consequence, to leave them alone.

The API has a different vision: their raison d’etre is to bring travellers and local people into contact with one another. For them, the RSCN’s trails, which bypass centres of population to traverse wild countryside, miss the point.

Yet the Jordanian tourism ministry, for its part, is suspicious of the API, since the Al-Ayoun Trail is intended to form one link in the longer Abraham Path (map here), which will connect across the border into Palestine and Israel. The underlying idea – to encourage Jordanians to follow the pilgrimage route into Israel and to encourage Israelis to walk the path in Jordan – is anathema to mainstream Jordanian opinion. The government, I’m sure, feels like it can’t be seen to condone such overt ‘normalisation’, let alone support it. Yet promoting rural development through sustainable tourism is a key theme in the government’s – and the king’s – plans for the next few years, especially in the beautiful, downtrodden region around Rasoun. So with the API cold-shouldered, and the RSCN playing the lone wolf, the government has chosen to go it alone, drawing in (to my knowledge) at least one ex-API specialist to help map new walking routes that follow none of the existing paths.

But how unseemly it all is! Rasoun is such a little place, in an unregarded corner of a much-overlooked country – does it merit a squabble? Aside from anything else, I wonder how sustainable three separately plotted, separately waymarked, separately guided (and, no doubt, separately charged) walking routes can be, in this tiny backwater.

The worst is that everybody is fighting about promoting walking and the enjoyment of nature! It’s such a simple idea: meet, talk, walk, for the benefit of all. Make contact through the physicality of walking on the land, and it becomes possible not just to share experience, but to compare experience. But if nobody can agree in Rasoun, what hope is there for the bigger picture?

Those who plough on regardless hoping or imagining that competing interests will just fade away are condemned to a life in denial. That applies in politics just as much as in business – or in building communities. Ideas are nothing without people. It seems that the Jerusalem Peacemakers – unlike almost everyone else – have realised that to bring about a desired goal (peace) you have to work with all the resources available to you (settlers, non-settlers, Palestinians inside and outside Israel, Jews, Muslims…). The Jordanian tourism authorities, if they wish to bring about the goal of sustainable rural development through tourism, should also be working with all the resources they have – which include, in this case, both the RSCN and the API. Even if the prospect of Israelis walking in the Rasoun hills upsets them, they should hold their noses and work to make it happen. Benefit may accrue – and ignoring the problem will not make it go away.