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Emily Sharratt: A package holiday in the West Bank

IMEU

09 September, 2007

"There is more to Palestine than politics," says tour guide Wisam to our group of 19 to 60 year-olds, sitting in the foyer of the Paradise Hotel in Bethlehem. It's the first day of our tour with the Alternative Tourism Group, and there are 20 of us from Britain and Ireland.

The first and second floors of the Paradise Hotel are still closed - since the start of the Second Intifada in 2000 the hotel has felt the full force of the Israeli occupation; having been hit by missiles and occupied by Israeli troops. In November 2001 it was burned out by the Israeli army, only reopening for business in 2005. When the history is this recent it is inescapable.

Without trying to ignore politics, ATG’s mission is to get beyond it and encourage visitors to explore Palestinian culture. They want to demonstrate the hardship of the day-to-day realities of Palestinian life, while indicating that conflict is not the natural state for Palestinians: they have a way of life that is worth struggling to maintain.

The itinerary for the trip supports this, alternating meetings with political figures, activists or human rights groups with more conventional sight-seeing attractions, such as a dip in the Dead Sea or a tour of Herod’s summer palace.

ATG was set up in 1995, and a decade later produced a guide book, Palestine & Palestinians. Last year they organised 88 tour groups within the West Bank. All tours have a political flavour, including visits to the Jerusalem settlements in conjunction with the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.

One of the ATG’s most popular offerings is the Olive Picking Programme. This gives visitors the chance to join locals for the annual olive harvest (otherwise jeopardised by the occupation), while experiencing Palestinian culture first hand. Olives have been cultivated in Palestine since Neolithic times, and the farming has created the landscapes of terraced fields. But their emotive significance is perhaps even greater, being connected with both the land and the traditional way of life that has been lost to the Palestinians, not to mention the symbolic associations of the olive branch with peace.

Tourism may seem a relatively trivial concern, given the terrible urgency of daily life in the West Bank, yet both Palestinian and Israeli policy have acknowledged its fundamental role in the economy and as a means of national representation.

The Israeli Public Relations machine efficiently seeks to reduce the appeal of Palestinian tourist attractions, and further to that checkpoints and closures make travel in the West Bank daunting and inconvenient. Palestinian guides are unlikely to have been granted the correct permits to allow them to move freely within the West Bank, let alone to Jerusalem or further afield.

Bethlehem provides one of the most striking examples of this, but as the 2000 Jubilee preparations demonstrated, it also possesses enormous potential as a tourist destination. The city’s streets are as clean and pretty as any Mediterranean hilltop town, and brimming with inexpensive restaurants serving fresh falafel and mezze, hotels and coffee shops where nergilehs (pipes of flavoured tobacco) and small glasses of sweet, mint-flavoured tea are passed around. And even a hardened cynic might be hard-pushed not to feel some reverence in the small cave-sanctuary where Jesus was supposedly born.

Sadly these days Bethlehem is perhaps most famous for the nine metre high concrete wall that snakes around the city, cutting it off from Jerusalem and much of its own land. "Now we are entering the prison," grinned our taxi driver, without a trace of bitterness, as we drove through the main Bethlehem checkpoint of that formidable structure in the sepia morning light.