Tuesday, Nov 20, 2007

 
   (From THE WALL STREET JOURNAL)  
   By Cam Simpson 

QABATIYA, West Bank -- Striding atop a patch of brown earth he rents here, Sadiq Nazal plucks leaves from one of the 200,000 almond-tree saplings he has planted this season in neat rows across a sun-drenched plain. The Palestinian farmer has bet his nursery business on these saplings, but may never get them to market. "Imagine," he says, "if no one buys them."

The problem: For seven years, Palestinian movements within the West Bank have been tightly restricted by a shifting, maze-like network of Israeli military checkpoints, barricades and permit requirements. This gauntlet, growing in size and severity over the past two years, keeps away most of Mr. Nazal's customers, the farmers who plant his trees and then harvest the olives, nuts and other fruits they yield.

Israeli defense officials say the travel restrictions are vital for securing their citizens against terrorism. But the barriers also are choking the Palestinian economy, creating what the World Bank calls "a shattered economic space" of 10 separate enclaves. Per-capita gross domestic product has fallen 40% for Palestinians since 2000. Economists largely blame the plunge on the restrictions and a loss of Palestinian employment in Israel.

The splintering of the West Bank is undermining a crucial plank in the Bush administration's latest plan for the region. The White House wants to bolster the West Bank economy, mainly through aid and development, to buoy moderate leaders, roll back growing Islamist influence and enhance prospects for peace. Forging a broader Israeli-Palestinian accord is the focus of an international conference expected to take place next week in Annapolis, Md., but dwindling hopes for progress there are expected to increase the pressure to find tangible ways to improve Palestinian life.

Washington launched an urgent economic and diplomatic push in the West Bank this summer, after the Iranian-backed Islamist group Hamas -- which won Palestinian parliamentary elections the year before -- took military control of the Gaza Strip in a bloody sweep. The U.S. responded by trying to isolate Hamas in Gaza and bolster the Western-leaning Fatah party, which still holds a tenuous grip over Palestinian institutions in the West Bank. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice brought up the difficulties of the movement restrictions in every meeting she had with senior Israeli officials on a diplomatic mission in October, according to a senior U.S. official. She was back in the region earlier this month ahead of the Annapolis meeting.

The roadblocks started going up in force after the 2000 Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada. The Israelis eased them briefly in 2005, but have been throwing them back up since. In the West Bank, some 52% of Palestinians now live below the poverty line, according to Near East Consulting, a Palestinian survey and research firm that has worked for the United Nations and the World Bank. The World Bank concluded in a May report that the blockages create so much uncertainty and inefficiency that business owners can't run their operations normally. That in turn chokes off the growth and investment needed to rekindle the region's economy, the bank concluded.

Mr. Nazal's 20-year-old Al Karmel Nursery illustrates the damage, and the difficulty of recovery. Checkpoints and closures over the past seven years have kept him from tending his fields and have increasingly depressed demand for his plants by damaging the businesses of his customers. It's also difficult for them to even reach his nursery.

Mr. Nazal now relies primarily on international aid groups that try to bridge the security strictures by purchasing his trees and distributing them to farmers. Despite their best intentions, such groups are poor substitutes for free-market forces: They never tell Mr. Nazal until harvest time what they're going to buy, meaning he must plant blindly at the start of each season. He can either guarantee a small amount of sales by planting a little bit of everything, or fill his fields with only one or two varieties in an all-or-nothing gamble.

After seven years of losses, Mr. Nazal says only a banner season can keep him afloat now. So this year he's risking everything on the almond trees. "This has been a catastrophe for me," he says of the economic chaos. Around the West Bank, growing numbers of business owners are similarly dependent on such assistance from aid groups.

A 44-year-old father of three with a bushy brown moustache, Mr. Nazal has spent his lifetime in the fields where his almond saplings rise today. His family started growing lemon trees on this fertile plain west of Jenin in the 1940s.

Mr. Nazal's older brother, Khalid, traded farm life for militancy. A senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Khalid was gunned down on an Athens street in 1986. It's unclear who carried out the assassination, a rival Palestinian faction or Mossad, the Israeli spy service. A year after his brother's death, Mr. Nazal chose a different path, opening the nursery with his father where his family had grown the lemon trees.

"My resistance was to stay and work our lands," he says between drags on an American cigarette.

His first year, the nursery planted about 10,000 olive-tree saplings on less than one acre of land spread across two different fields. There was little machinery, except a 1984 Subaru he drove between home and his plots. He drives the same battered silver five-speed today, a string of Muslim prayer beads wrapped around its gearshift.

His business grew. Soon he was tending some 60,000 saplings, including olive, almond, apricot and cherry trees. A mix of Israeli and Palestinian farmers came from as far away as 80 miles from the north and south to buy them.

By 1998, business was booming. He rented more land, hired additional seasonal workers and boosted production the next three years. He carefully calibrated his mix of trees before planting each season, balancing weather forecasts and demand patterns from his local customers. "I knew exactly what they would want," he says.

The rest of the Palestinian economy was surging as well. West Bank economic output grew by more than 10% annually from 1996 to 1999 -- almost three times the rate of growth for Israel.

But Palestinian prosperity ended in late 2000. In September, Ariel Sharon, then Israel's right-wing opposition leader, marched to what is widely recognized as the third-holiest site for Muslims, the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, built about 13 centuries ago atop Judaism's most sacred site, the Temple Mount. Many Palestinians saw it as a deliberate provocation in the midst of peace talks. Protests erupted, turning into riots. Israel responded with tanks, helicopter gunships and thousands of security forces, killing dozens of Palestinians. Within weeks, Palestinian militants answered with car bombs and suicide attacks against civilian targets inside Israel.

Israeli forces began blockading West Bank population centers, including Mr. Nazal's hometown of Jenin. At the time, his operation was reaching the peak of its production, with more than 250,000 saplings rooted in his fields.

With the Israeli-West Bank border all but closed, Israeli farmers disappeared from Mr. Nazal's fruit and olive groves. Israeli forces also closed roads inside the West Bank to channel Palestinian cars and trucks onto main arteries and through new, manned checkpoints. Cities and villages were cut off from each other. Palestinian farmers had a hard time reaching the nursery.

At one point, Israeli soldiers surrounded Mr. Nazal's hometown of Jenin, declared it "a closed military area" and imposed an around-the-clock curfew for 13 days. Mr. Nazal says he lost 60,000 saplings in those two weeks because the curfew kept him from making the three-mile run to his field to turn on the water.

Fighting abated, but movement restrictions didn't. Around Jenin's perimeter, Israeli soldiers dug trenches to cut the city off and built checkpoints at main arteries. Concrete barricades, boulders and earth mounds bulldozed into place by Israeli soldiers cut off byways used by Mr. Nazal and other Palestinians across the West Bank. The U.N. counted about 200 roadblocks and more than 80 manned checkpoints inside the Palestinian territory by the summer of 2002, excluding those along Israel's border.

Individual Palestinians needed permits to cross checkpoints and move from town to town, and were only allowed to be on the road from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. Israeli soldiers would roll their Humvees across roads, stopping and screening cars at "flying checkpoints," which still pop up across the territory today.

At the main checkpoint outside Jenin, through which Mr. Nazal's trees had to pass, Israel adopted a so-called back-to-back system for cargo. Israel wouldn't issue permits for trucks to pass. So, goods had to be offloaded from an incoming truck, then reloaded onto another one on the other side. The system went up outside seven other major West Bank cities.

In just the first two years of the fighting and the resulting restrictions, the Palestinian economy shrank by 35%, as the flow of workers, raw materials and finished goods dried up, according to a 2003 report by the World Bank. Mr. Nazal says he was having a hard time getting to his own fields from home. He used to complete the drive in the time it took him to smoke a single cigarette. But long lines at checkpoints that could close without notice turned it into a two-hour expedition, he says.

Curfews were imposed from town-to-town and day-to-day. Mr. Nazal says he frequently had to evade curfews and checkpoints to keep his trees alive. Once, he tried to drive his Subaru over a dirt mound that Israeli soldiers plowed into a barricade across the middle of an unpaved roadway. With Israeli troops moving toward him in the distance, his car got stuck. A group of Palestinian farmers helped push his Subaru over the top in time to escape possible arrest.

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November 19, 2007 23:07 ET (04:07 GMT)

Tuesday, Nov 20, 2007

The U.N. counted 710 roadblocks and checkpoints in January 2004. Farmers who braved the security gauntlet to reach Mr. Nazal's nursery purchased fewer and fewer trees. Their own fruit and olive sales were withering, and they feared saplings would die on truck beds behind checkpoints.

In February 2005, following the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, new Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called a truce with Israel. As violence tapered off, Israelis started dismantling roadblocks.

In July of that year, the U.N. counted 376 checkpoints and roadblocks, down by almost half from 18 months earlier. Ms. Rice helped work out a "movement and access" agreement between the two sides in late 2005 aimed at further reducing restrictions.

Despite the peace and the rhetoric, barrier numbers started going up again. This summer, the total reached 539, according to the U.N. Israeli officials won't discuss details, citing security concerns. But they are clearly worried about the rising power of Hamas, and dramatically stepped up security operations in the West Bank after Hamas won parliamentary elections in January 2006, a crackdown aided by tighter movement restrictions.

This has created a sort of Catch-22: Internal West Bank restrictions squeeze Hamas, but also damage hopes for prosperity needed to politically counter the group in the long run.

"It's a very difficult subject," says Mark Regev, an Israeli government spokesman. "We want to move forward and we have every reason to move forward in order to strengthen [Mr. Abbas] . . . . But at the same time, we don't want to create a security vacuum, because we know who will move in to fill it."

The U.S., the U.N., the European Union and Russia -- the so-called quartet that spearheads international diplomacy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- have called at least 18 times in the past five years for Israel to ease restrictions. The group has charged its special envoy, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, to push the issue.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pledged earlier this year to roll back the system. But Israeli defense officials said in September they would knock down only a small number of dirt mounds blocking roads between some Palestinian villages. Earlier this year, Israeli officials acknowledged that 44 barriers they claimed were "dismantled" never existed.

The Bush administration has been channeling a wave of international assistance into the West Bank since Hamas seized Gaza, fearing the militants might ultimately mount a similar challenge there. But assistance won't have a lasting impact in the West Bank unless travel restrictions are eased, says Naser Abdul Karim, a Palestinian economist. "An Israeli captain at just one important roadblock can wipe out the impact of international assistance in one day, maybe one hour," he says.

Foreign aid groups have tried to help Mr. Nazal and other suppliers who have lost the business of farmers who can no longer reach them. These groups take bids on only one or two varieties of saplings. And because of the complexities of their arrangements with multinational funding sources, buyers and the Palestinian Authority, they only manage to identify what crops they'll buy just before the harvest. When he plants, Mr. Nazal has to bet which variety they'll want, and he's been a poor gambler thus far. He once held onto a crop of olive trees for three straight seasons, even though aid groups weren't buying them.

This year, he chose almond trees because he read somewhere -- he can't remember precisely where -- that Arab states had plans to boost almond purchases from Palestinian farmers. Firas Badran, a West Bank agronomist who works with aid groups that buy the trees, says he believes Mr. Nazal probably bet well this time.

Mr. Nazal estimates it would take three years for his business to return to normal even if his almond-tree gamble pays off and travel restrictions are lifted. He employs only four to 10 workers, depending on the season. "If things were back to normal," he says, "I could absorb 50 employees."

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 19, 2007 23:07 ET (04:07 GMT)