Ein Bokek, Israel

Mad (and bad) tourism news out of Israel, talking about a mammoth proposed development on their side of the Dead Sea, encompassing an unstated number of new hotels and spas. Read it and weep.

A couple of points.

The Dead Sea is collapsing. Because of the desperate shortage of water in the Middle East (Israel’s neighbour Jordan is one of the five driest countries in the world), the Dead Sea’s freshwater inflow has been dammed and underlying aquifers have been tapped beyond sustainable levels – not just by Israel, but by Jordan and, upstream, Syria too.

The Dead Sea surface is dropping by a metre a year. That’s a bit under an inch a week. Shoreline sinkholes are opening up because the ground is now so unstable. Hotels built on the beach 20 years ago are now marooned a mile from the water.

The most seductive plan to reverse the damage – the Red-Dead Canal – is challenged by environmentalists as too slow, too expensive and too uncertain. They say the most effective way to save the Dead Sea is to alter existing habits of unsustainable exploitation.

So up steps Israel with a hotel plan that is explicitly, and deliberately, exploitative.

The idea, so the article (presumably sourced from government PR) says, is to “emulate the spas and hotels on the [Jordanian] shore”. With the new Crowne Plaza (not yet open to the public), Jordan now has six Dead Sea hotels. At the Ein Bokek resort alone, Israel already has at least 14 hotels (I was once told 26 but that may have been an exaggeration), plus around half a dozen smaller establishments nearby – and that’s not counting the hotels at Ein Gedi just up the coast.

Kempinski Dead Sea, Jordan

If Jordan’s Dead Sea hotels lie “at the heart of [the country's] tourism success” – which is debatable, incidentally – it’s because they’re world-class, not because they’re huge (they’re not) or because there are lots of them (there aren’t).

The concrete tourist pen of Ein Bokek, by contrast, is horrible, not least because it doesn’t stand beside open water, but by one of the industrial evaporation ponds which extract minerals from Dead Sea water. Here’s a story about it.

If Israel really wants to take a leaf out of Jordan’s book, it should bulldoze Ein Bokek and start again.

The Dead Sea’s “barren hills”, blithely mentioned for asphalting in the article, may look barren to a big-city hotel developer, but are better characterised as a unique wilderness habitat worthy of conservation. Such a scheme could generate jobs, tourism dollars, sustainable socio-economic development and perhaps a whisper of global prestige.

Yet the Knesset had NIS850m (US$220m; £135m) burning a hole in its pocket – so it asked the Israeli public how to spend it.

As Henry Ford once famously remarked, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Mind you, if the Red-Dead Canal works and the Dead Sea starts filling up again, the whole miserable scheme could be underwater in twenty years. Nature always finds a way.

UPDATE: full text reproduced here

It’s one of the most beautiful, poetic images of Jerusalem I think I’ve ever seen.

It shows the Dome of the Rock, half-draped in snow, viewed from Al Aqsa looking northward. (How do I know? This exceptional narrated tour with panoramic photos helped.)

If you’re surprised by snow in the Middle East, Jerusalem stands roughly 750m (2500ft) above sea level – winters can be very cold.

Maybe someone can tell me more about the image. It was taken at some point in the late 19th or early 20th centuries – but when? I wonder which year saw that much snow in Jerusalem. The website publishing the collection says nothing, though it has many more images of snow piled high in the streets of Jerusalem, presumably taken the same winter. Who’s the photographer?

The bearded man standing guard looks like he’s wearing a greatcoat, tied at the waist, and has a fur hat with a point that looks Central Asian to me. His whole costume seems unusual to me, for a guard at the gates of Al Aqsa, but perhaps it was the Ottoman imperial influence at work. Does anyone know more?

But, regardless, the image takes me off somewhere rare and special. I could look at it all day.

In 2007 and 2008, US outdoor adventure specialist David Landis and Israeli tourism entrepreneur Maoz Inon developed the Jesus Trail, a 65km walking route linking Nazareth – the town where Jesus grew up – to sites of pilgrimage around the Sea of Galilee. David and Maoz, with David’s wife Anna, created the trail from nothing, route-finding between points of interest, building relationships with people in villages along the way, encouraging them to create guesthouses and other support businesses for walkers, and negotiating with the SPNI land authorities to blaze the trail officially.

Nazareth is the largest Palestinian Arab city inside Israel, a focus for the substantial Arab population – both Muslim and Christian – in nearby towns and villages. The Jesus Trail deliberately passes through these, as well as through Jewish-Israeli and Druze communities in the area, on a village-to-village route which links specific New Testament locations with sites of historical interest from different periods and traditions.

While living in Nazareth, round the corner from Maoz’s award-winning Fauzi Azar Inn in the Old City, David and Anna wrote and photographed a Jesus Trail map and guidebook, self-published in the US in 2010. They developed an exemplary website for the trail which includes stage-by-stage route outlines, video and satellite imagery, GPS downloads, links to accommodation providers, even merchandising.

Nobody “owns” the trail: it’s a free, public, non-profit enterprise, feeding visitors – and, therefore, money – directly into rural communities. It’s founded on sustainable ideals, and promotes Leave No Trace principles. Everything is maintained by volunteers.

A pretty creditable effort, you’d've thought. Worthy of an award, perhaps? Or funding? Or maybe incorporation into Israel’s national tourism effort, to help bring more international visitors and so give those villages along the way a bit more of an economic boost?

Er, no. The Israeli government has its own agenda. Fuelled by the green-eyed monster.

Facts on the ground

Jesus Trail at Zippori

Newly announced this week is the “Gospel Trail“, a 63km route linking – yes – Nazareth with the Sea of Galilee, designed by the Ministry of Tourism for Christian visitors to be able to walk where Jesus walked, blah blah.

But the ministry has taken a rather more interventionist approach. Their not-exactly-subtle signage, which includes appropriate passages of scripture hacked into chunks of basalt stone (in case walkers venture out without a bible, presumably), stands propped up as giant cairns beside the path. The cairns are widely spaced just now, but even when the path is ready they’ll be placed only every 500m or so, making it impossible to follow the trail independently.

What’s far more concerning, though, is that the Gospel Trail has been deliberately routed away from Arab communities and sites of Islamic interest or Palestinian cultural relevance – and the official map identifies every other officially blazed path in the region, except the Jesus Trail. There’s an agenda at play.

The Jesus Trail starts at the Basilica of the Annunciation in the heart of Nazareth, leading through the souk and residential districts, heading into open country to pass through the Arab Muslim village of Mashhad (reputed birthplace of Jonah) to end for an overnight stay in the Arab Christian village of Cana (one of the places where Jesus is supposed to have turned water into wine).

By comparison, the Gospel Trail begins on Mt Precipice, a manicured tourist spot – and site of a 2009 papal mass – well outside Nazareth city centre, and proceeds on day one through forest planted by the Jewish National Fund, avoiding villages to end somewhere near Mt Tabor (unspecified). The first 30km of the trail has nowhere to refill water bottles, buy food or sleep.

Further along, after an overnight stop at the orthodox Jewish kibbutz of Lavi, the Jesus Trail visits the Druze holy site of Nabi Shuayb and then heads over Mt Arbel for panoramic views across the Sea of Galilee. The Gospel Trail bypasses Nabi Shuayb and follows existing valley-floor routes.

Perversely, the Gospel Trail even avoids sites of Christian interest: I’m told the first church on the trail comes at Km 59 – out of the 63km total route. The Jesus Trail passes 8 churches on Day One alone.

A land without people

With Israel’s global tourism reach and IGTO‘s marketing budget, the Gospel Trail will probably succeed. But, even before it’s got anywhere, concerns are being raised. Judith Sudilovsky, writing for the Catholic News Service, reports:

…retired Anglican Bishop Riah Abo el-Assal, retired Melkite Catholic Archbishop Pierre Mouallem and Melkite Archbishop Elias Chacour said they were glad to see effort spent to improve Christian pilgrimage. They were less enthusiastic about side industries such as bike riding and horseback riding, which they said were not suited for a contemplative pilgrimage experience along the trail.

Even Israel’s tourism minister is already on the defensive. “Israel invests a lot of money in safeguarding the holy places of all religions,” he is quoted as saying (perhaps literally true, though an interesting follow-up question might ask in what proportions that money is allocated between sites from different religions. Anyway.). “Is it problematic,” he continued, “to use the culture and history of the [Nazareth/Galilee] area to promote tourism for the benefit of all nations? I don’t think so.”

I do. How about using the culture and history of the area to promote tourism for the benefit of the people who live there – Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Druze, Israeli and Palestinian? It’s theirs, after all. And in what way are “all nations” benefiting here? Surely “for the benefit of the Israeli government” would be more accurate?

But Mr Minister has bigger fish to fry.

According to Anna Landis, a tourism official has told her: “[The Jesus Trail] is dirty. I don’t want to show the face of Israel as…uh, you know…and I can’t fight the Arab cities to say ‘Listen, don’t throw your garbage outside.’ I’m the government, I don’t have to compete with anyone…but I can’t claim this is the best treatment you should give to pilgrims.”

Walking the walk

Government officials tend not to tread lightly. They know all about big-bus tourism, hosting Christian groups 50- or 100- or 200-strong, but do they know about developing sustainable rural tourism initiatives down at the grassroots? Have they chatted over tea with community leaders along the trail, explaining ideas and listening to concerns? Have they encouraged the growth of village B&Bs and local trail support initiatives? Have they walked similar trails – the Camino de Santiago, St Paul Trail, Abraham’s Path or Nativity Trail, to name only four – to find out how things are done elsewhere?

Or have they just sat in their big city offices and decided to graft their idea of religious tourism onto what they imagine is a blank countryside canvas?

I wonder.

But government officials also don’t think nimbly. Some time ago David, Maoz and Anna quietly bought gospeltrail.com, gospeltrail.co.il, gospeltrail.net and gospeltrail.org – and pointed them all at the Jesus Trail. Ha!

Market that, IGTO.

Disclosure: I first heard about the Jesus Trail in 2009, when I met David and Anna on a walk in southern Israel. I met Maoz soon after. Since then I’ve sat with them, eaten with them, talked with them and walked with them. I like them. They’re nice people, doing good work. Maybe that means this post is a load of biased, jealous, provocative, de-contextualised whingeing. Up to you to decide.

Note: I’m told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz is running an article on the Gospel Trail tomorrow (4 Dec 2011). If it does, I’ll give a link in the comments below.

Suraida Nasser & her grandfather

A word of congratulation for the wonderful Fauzi Azar Inn, a guesthouse in the Old City of Nazareth, in northern Israel.

Already lauded by every guidebook out there (Lonely Planet author pick: “One of the highlights of a stay in the region.” Bradt: “By far the best midrange option in town.” Jesus Trail: “The perfect base…Best budget accommodation in the region.” Frommers: “Lots of atmosphere…friendly and personal” etc etc) – this week the Fauzi added a major new award to its trophy cabinet.

It was named global winner of the ‘Best Accommodation for Local Communities’ at the Virgin Holidays Responsible Tourism Awards 2011, held during the annual World Travel Market trade event in London.

Can’t tell you how delighted I am for Suraida Nasser, Maoz Inon and everyone associated with the Fauzi. I’ve been there twice, most recently only a few weeks ago, researching a story for Britain’s Wanderlust magazine. It’s a truly inspiring place to stay.

And the story of how the inn came into being is a model example of how this kind of carefully thought-through, low-key, grassroots, community-focused tourism initiative can transform an entire city – not just shape the image of a place, but actually inject money into the local economy, refocus businesses citywide, drive growth and create jobs far beyond the limits of its own four walls.

As for responsible tourism, well, just take a look.

There’s a couple of other reasons to visit Nazareth, true – but the Fauzi brings it all together. Book well ahead to make sure you get a room at this particular inn.

Disclosure: nobody has paid me a penny to write this post. All from the heart.

UPDATE: Soon after posting, I found this nice little short video made by vlogger Daniel Baylis during his stay at the Fauzi in September (2011). Credit to him. Enjoy:

Thrilled and delighted this weekend to have another piece on BBC radio’s From Our Own Correspondent, after ones earlier this year on Saudi Arabia and Cairo. This time I’m talking about Jerusalem’s new Light Rail.

Article transcript is here.

Audio is here.

And there’s a bit of background about how From Our Own Correspondent is put together here (8min audio).

Rwanduz, Iraqi Kurdistan

A mini-roundup of some interesting news from the fringes of Middle East tourism.

Iraq

An interesting story by Gulf News mentions more than a million visitors a year to the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, with the authorities targeting a Dubai-style five million by 2015.

My favourite line? “The recent surge in arrivals is a direct result of the international media promoting the area’s tourism potential.” So says the local tourism PR chief anyway. Finally there’s a place where travel writers are truly valued. Mind you, I’ve pitched Iraqi Kurdistan to several different editors here in Britain. All I get is tutting and tooth-sucking. Maybe it’s me.

Adding to the good news: Marriott is opening in Kurdistan, as is Hilton. There are signs of sustainable community-based nature tourism as well – and UK operator Undiscovered Destinations launches a new tour there next month.

Palestine

Talking of sustainable community-based tourism, take a look at this new website showcasing guesthouses in Palestine.

It’s interesting stuff, inevitably with a political tinge, but also comprising a bunch of good ideas for how to travel independently through the country. There’s an article about it here. The site is compiled by Bradt guide author Sarah Irving – for more on her, see below.

Bradt Guides

Speaking of which, props to Bradt. They are the only publisher in the world I can think of to have one guidebook to Israel, and another separate guidebook to Palestine (and may the mealy-mouthed ‘Palestinian Territories‘ henceforth be banished to history).

The new Bradt guide to Israel is written by Samantha Wilson. Despite a bit of leakage in the Jerusalem chapter and around Qumran, and (regrettably) a chapter on the Golan Heights, this is remarkable for sticking to its subject. Bethlehem is not covered. The book is a bit light on political perspectives, and the country map on page 2 is frankly bizarre (“Palestinian controlled territory”? “Area of Israeli settlement”?), but it’s a sound effort.

The Bradt guide to Palestine, by Sarah Irving, is classier still. The Israel book is 312 pages; Palestine – though a fraction of the size and with a fraction of the infrastructure – gets 326pp. I’ve seen pre-publication proofs; not the final book. Irving knows her stuff, and has covered the ground intimately. It is refreshing (inspiring? simply bloody wonderful?) to have the Green Line respected in a guidebook. After decades of one-way traffic in terms of travel priorities, travel narratives and travel coverage, Irving reverses the flow. Jerusalem coverage is East Jerusalem coverage. People are front-centre, with homestays featuring prominently and sustainable tourism emphasised. Irving gives informative first-hand accounts of places that not only don’t appear in other guidebooks, but which most other specialist writers (this one included) have never even heard of. I showed her account of Bethlehem to a friend who lives there: after one paragraph he was saying “I never knew that”.

What’s even more interesting is that the last chapter – titled “Palestinian Communities in Israel / Palestinians of 1948″ – includes coverage of Nazareth, the Golan (fascinating to compare the two books’ approach), Haifa and elsewhere. This is as much a guide to Palestinians as to Palestine. But it dodges the romantic, armchair-traveller feel of, say, Palestine: A Guide, thanks to an informed journalistic style which is partial but not tub-thumping, and a wealth of practical info on independent travel. It’s a breath of fresh air.

(The only guide on a par is Daniel Jacobs’ outstanding Rough Guide to Jerusalem, which has 300 pages on the city alone, scrupulously balanced, infinitely knowledgeable, quirkily readable. Add in Jacobs’ coverage of Tel Aviv, Bethlehem, Hebron, Masada, the Dead Sea and Jericho, and his book should be much better known than it is.)

Footnote: I haven’t seen Bradt Palestine’s colour maps yet.

Another footnote: Bradt have Lebanon on the way and their Eastern Turkey is already out. How soon before Iraqi Kurdistan?

Qatar

Not exactly tourism, but in case you thought everything in the Gulf was new – or commercialised – take a look at the fascinating oral history project Swalif. Click on some of the links to hear stories about life in Qatar before oil, before glitz, before malls, before countless luxury hotels. Arabic audio with English text.

Oman

A campaign late last year to push domestic tourism in Oman continues, with starry-eyed op-ed press articles still appearing. It’s all good. Local people travelling for pleasure within their own countries – such as in Lebanon, Israel or Saudi Arabia – fuels rural hospitality, helps diversify tourism economies, improves infrastructure and fosters innovation in non-commercial and/or nature-based attractions. The others in the region should look and learn.

Tunisia was amazing. Egypt is astounding. Bahrain boggles the imagination. Libya is off the scale. At the time of writing, none of those 4 revolutions is resolved. And there is also Yemen, Algeria, Morocco, even – staggeringly – Syria. Of a different character, but no less significant in their own way, are protests in Jordan and Oman, government handouts in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and even baby-steps towards parliamentary elections in the UAE. Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine and Israel may be fairly said to have their own concerns right now. That only leaves Qatar. Nuff said.

Anyone who’s been following me on Twitter will know that I’ve been trying to keep on top of the changing situations across the region day by day, which is a full-time job in itself. But this is a tourism blog, not a news digest – and I’ve held off from blogging travel titbits, since just about the only noteworthy tourism issues arising so far from these multiple revolutions have focused on less-than-gripping tales of Western governments’ efforts to repatriate their stranded citizens.

But the role of tourism in all this has increasingly felt rather seedy to me. Throughout the Egyptian revolution, governments and the travel industry kept on maintaining that Sharm and the Red Sea resorts were completely safe and unaffected by the upheavals in Cairo and around the rest of the country. Two British travel writers – who I won’t name, for their sakes – were flown into Sharm during the protests to ‘experience’ a luxury hotel. They did a bit of desert touring, tweeted about how peaceful it all was, and took some vox pops (which, unsurprisingly, were all about wanting to encourage tourists back – and this was before Mubarak had resigned).

That shocked me. It highlighted just how detached Egyptian tourism had become from Egyptian life. While people from all sectors of society, in all parts of the country, were engaging in serious political action – perhaps for the first time in their lives – all some Westerners seemed to care about was their ‘right’ to relax on the beach. The industrialised mass tourism which Sharm (and other places) specialise in filters virtually no money back to the communities which host it: a huge proportion of the cash spent on a typical Sharm holiday remains either outside Egypt altogether, or in the hands of inbound tourism conglomerates controlled by the kind of tycoons Mubarak’s regime favoured. People don’t go to Sharm, or Taba, or Hurghada, or El Gouna, or Marsa Alam, or any of Egypt’s other chiefly purpose-built seaside resorts in order to engage with Egyptian culture, or to enjoy a characteristically Egyptian beachfront scene. Most of these places didn’t even exist before mass tourism anyway; there often *is* no local “scene” other than tourism. People go because it’s sunny, cheap and you can fly there directly.

Is that bad? Well, since you’re asking me, yes it is bad – but some people like that sort of disconnect. What got my goat was that such disconnects enable Mr & Mrs Westerner to lie on sunloungers being served cocktails by Mr Egyptian, even while Mr Egyptian’s country is in flames as society is being completely reshaped by events a few hours’ drive away – and that Mr & Mrs Westerner are able to feel good about it because they are ‘supporting’ a vital plank of Egypt’s economy by not cancelling their holiday. Airlines and holiday firms kept on flying tourists into Egypt throughout the revolution.

That’s wrong. That’s a moral problem. If your tourism doesn’t allow your hosts to retain their dignity, you need to change your tourism. Dignity comes through income, sure. But nobody – in the UK anyway – seemed to relate industry calls for continued tourism to noses in troughs. At no point did the UK government advise its citizens not to go on holiday to Egypt (if it had done, then the rules on insurance reimbursement would have changed, whereupon the travel industry could have pulled out without losing money). I might be naive, but that is a failing of British foreign policy. Equally, the travel industry’s current reliance on Foreign Office travel advice benefits insurers (and reinsurers), not the industry – and certainly not holidaymakers.

Looking ahead, Bahrain and Libya don’t have anything like the same level of tourism – but the last couple of days have seen violent protests in Oman, which has a flourishing and important tourism sector. If the violence there escalates, will we see the same thing – Westerners holed up in luxury hotels, pretending all is normal, while Omanis try to reshape their society around them? It’s hard to tell. One complicating factor is that, unlike in Egypt, in Oman tourism is concentrated in the capital.

Globally, tourism is dangerously close to getting too big for its boots. It seems to enjoy being last out – only halting altogether under extreme duress – and, above all, being first back in, even while the last stones are being placed on fresh graves. That’s topsy-turvy. When people are trying to grasp political power previously denied to them, holidays become unimportant. They should stop. We should stop them.

The reality, though, isn’t quite so rosy. The common visa would only be issued for tourists travelling in groups. Independent travellers – that substantial bloc of price-conscious, culturally aware, potentially high-spending visitors – are being given the cold shoulder yet again.

And then, when you think about it, do visa issues actually hinder group tourism in these four countries at the moment? Probably not. Although Jordan’s tourism minister Zeid Goussous is quoted as saying a common visa would encourage more tourists from faraway countries such as Latin America, I’d suggest a far greater disincentive for people in Asia or the Americas contemplating a long-haul holiday in the Middle East might be the perceived threat of violence or terrorism, the unfamiliarity of the destination(s), the high cost of international travel and ground arrangements, and/or the necessity of taking 10-14 days’ holiday at a minimum to justify the long flight. Red tape on the border is rarely an issue for group tourists, who get all their paperwork handled by their tour company.

(By contrast, bureaucracy for independent travellers at Middle Eastern border crossings can be miserable – but independent travellers will not qualify for these common visas. An opportunity missed.)

A key question, unanswered in the news report, is how much the visa would cost. That could make the difference between successful stimulation of a semi-dormant market – and negligible returns on yet more diplomatic hot air.

Separately, I’d also suggest that people coming to the Levant from, specifically, Latin America would very likely want to be visiting the Christian holy sites in Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth rather than lazing in Beirut or ballooning in Cappadocia – but Palestine and Israel are specifically excluded from these visa proposals.

So is this the wrong visa, for the wrong people, at the wrong time? No. Any moves to cut red tape must be welcomed – and it seems to me the whole Latin America thing is a red herring: this is, in truth, focused on tapping growing markets in India, China and East Asia for overseas leisure tourism.

Middle Eastern cooperation, in whatever form, is good. From such initiatives do greater visions take hold. Bring on the common visa.

The researcher and I exchanged emails and had several long chats on the phone – she asking me about the logistics of travel across the Middle East and possible points of interest for a driving show, me bending her ear at length about how wonderful the region is and throwing lots of ideas at her about how and where the trip might run.

I can’t remember whether it was her or me who mentioned the idea of the show following the route of the Three Wise Men, travelling from “the East” to Bethlehem. But it was probably her. Almost certainly her. I mean, let’s face it, it must have been her. Must have been.

Anyway, so there were more emails, and more long phone calls (“I wondered if you would be free for a chat about the Golan Heights?” “Do you know if it’s possible to drive through the West Bank now?”), and I passed on specialist contacts in Jordan, in Palestine, I sent her links for theories of where the Three Wise Men originated – perhaps Iran, perhaps elsewhere – I explained what frankincense and myrrh are, and where they come from… the whole thing. We got on alright, I thought.

Perhaps I was naive in freely sharing knowledge without fixing terms, or without discussing the possibility of being involved in the show (or at least being acknowledged somehow).

Perhaps she thought I was doing it for the love of the Middle East, or because she thought images of Clarkson in the desert would instantly cause a soaring rise in sales of my Rough Guide to Jordan, thereby recompensing me through vastly increased royalty payments at no cost to the licence-fee payer.

Either way, the emails stopped in May, and I heard nothing more.

Then, this appeared: a Top Gear Christmas special, broadcast on 26th December, centred on a trip whereby Clarkson, Hammond and May follow the route of the Three Wise Men, travelling from “the East” (Iraq) to Bethlehem, via Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Israel, with attempted detours via Iran (not possible with a BBC crew), across the Syrian desert, and into the Golan Heights.

Iraqi Kurdistan came off rather well, with lots of epic scenery and enthusiasm about the friendliness of the people. Turkey was portrayed as shabby and dangerous. Syria seemed rather fun. Jordan was dismissed as a basket-case. Israel was glossed over, and Palestine didn’t exist – we saw nothing of Bethlehem. Top Gear’s not my favourite show, and I’m the wrong demographic, but all that burqa-wearing stuff struck me as particularly stupid.

And, of course, I got no credit. Perhaps I’m over-estimating my input, perhaps my info was utterly tangential, but I think that stinks. Sour grapes? Of course it’s sour grapes. I’m wallowing in sour grapes. They chewed me up and spat me out.

I’ll leave you with an email from me to the Top Gear researcher, dated 1st February 2010:

hi again
Struck me over weekend that this might also be of interest:
http://jerashchariots.com
Can just imagine the 3 of them racing, Ben Hur-style, around the Roman hippodrome…

On the right is a still frame, taken from the sequence where the 3 of them race, Ben Hur-style, around the Roman hippodrome at Jerash, Jordan.

Great idea, BBC.

The walk has been developed by Anna Dintaman and David Landis – lovely people, who I met and walked with in southern Israel last year. The Jesus Trail has been totally self-motivated: they’ve plotted it, waymarked it, GPS’d it and now they’ve just published a map and guidebook to the whole trail. (Disclosure: they very kindly sent me an unrequested free copy, not so’s I could blog about it but just because! I’m blogging because I like it…)

I’ve only had a quick skim through, but it seems excellent to me – full colour, loads of maps, route plans, detailed walking info – but also loads of insight. Anna and David live in Nazareth, at one end of the trail, and clearly know Israeli culture and Palestinian culture very well.

It’s an incredible achievement, to have put this amount of personal time, energy and resources into opening up ways for ordinary visitors to access village culture. And, despite the trail’s name, it’s up to you whether you want to also buy into the religious motivations for walking these particular routes or not. Like Abraham’s Path, like the St Paul Trail, the point is to put your feet on the ground. Anything that encourages grassroots travel and personal encounters in a place like the Middle East, so smothered with negative images, is a good thing. Buy the book!

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.