ABBAS: “Tom Gross’s West Bank”

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December 8, 2009

 

The following article has been written in response to “West Bank nowhere near Dafur” by Tom Gross in The Australian, 8 December 2009

Tom Gross may have visited a West Bank, but I am not sure if it was the same place, west of the river Jordan, that I visited five weeks ago. The picture he is painting is of immense disparity to what I saw.

Of course, Tom’s experience will likely differ from mine. Tom is probably travelling as an Englishman, sadly, Israel giving him far more freedom of movement than me in my own country as a Palestinian.  Tom’s drive from Jerusalem to Nablus as he describes it, is nothing short of fiction to the Palestinians living in the West Bank. Jerusalem, the birthplace of my mother, is in fact is completely off limits to us.
As for the prosperous economy Tom is describing, let’s get the facts straight. We are talking about a primitive and predominantly agricultural economy strangled by over forty-one years of conflict and occupation. The 7% or 11% growth figures suggested mean nothing when the baseline is below zero. The Nablus stock market, the second-best-performing in the world so far in 2009 according to Tom, happens to be recovering form the late 2008 crash; has only thirty nine companies listed; has been very volatile since the first trade in 1997; and its Al-Quds Index has been hovering around 500 for most of this year, way lower than its record of 1,128 points in 2004.

To put this into perspective, the PSE market cap is currently under US$2.4 billion, and lost nearly half of its US$4.5 billion high in 2005. This is merely 7% in comparison to that of the nearby Amman Stock Exchange (ASE) west of the river. The ASE Market cap of US$34 billion today is nearly double its 2005 market cap of US$18.6 billion. Any assertion of an economic boom in the West Bank is false and any comparison with the few trillion US dollars of the Shanghai Stock exchange in any respect is a joke.

Some of the Palestinian farmers referred to by Tom happen to be my uncles and cousins. They were never trained by Israeli agricultural experts or supplied with any irrigation equipment: they rather continue to be disadvantaged by the superior Israeli technology and market access. The European Union did recently offered some subsidies to some Palestinians, but never Israel.  All the farmers I met were complaining about one thing, the lack of water. One said, “our straws are always shorter than that of the Israeli authorities. Every time we dig a deeper well, they go even deeper and our wells get sucked dry.”

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

It has been nine years since my recent visit to the West Bank, and much longer since the time I used to regularly visit my grand parents as a young boy. But in all that time, very little has changed for the Palestinian people on the ground.

Amin Abbas is a Diaspora Palestinian living in Australia.