Al-Ahram Weekly | Region | Squeezed in Jericho

		18 - 24 July 2002 Issue No. 595 Region	Current issue Previous issue Site map
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Squeezed in Jericho
Palestinians are stuck in Jericho due to new border controls imposed by Jordan. Is the kingdom strengthening the Palestinians' struggle against Israel or punishing them for it? Graham Usher in Jericho reports

Men surge toward the door, each pushing to be first in line. A Palestinian police officer waves them back, microphone in one hand, a wad of papers in the other. He reads out 13 names: passengers for the next bus to Jordan. Several hundred Palestinians slump back in their chairs, stretch out on mats, beat away the flies. Uncalled today and -- most of them -- tomorrow.
This is Jericho's Allenby Bridge terminal on the Jordanian border, for the last six months Palestinians sole crossing point for leaving or entering the West Bank. For the last month it has been subject to new controls, reducing the flow of Palestinians crossing the bridge on any one day from three thousand to a few hundred.
The official Jordan line is there are no "new" restrictions on West Bank Palestinians entering the Kingdom. There is "regulation" of entry to staunch any new flood of refugees born of Israel's latest re-conquest of the West Bank, say government ministers.
To steel them in their "national steadfastness", Palestinians now require permission from Jordan's Interior Ministry to cross the bridge or have to provide evidence of "humanitarian need" from the "concerned Palestinian authorities". They also have to show a return ticket.
Other Jordanians are more candid in the reasons for their government's closure. They acknowledge the drawbridge is being pulled on the Palestinians to prevent any Israeli designs to transfer them en masse to a "substitute homeland" in Jordan.
"If we are not concerned for the Palestinian West Bank, we should at least be concerned to keep Jordan Jordanian," wrote leading political commentator, Fahd Al-Fanik, in Jordan's Al-Ra'i newspaper on 8 July. The panic is fanned by reports that up to 70,000 Palestinians have set up home illegally in the Kingdom since the Intifada erupted in September 2000.
Palestinians say Jordanian fears are a storm in a bottle, and they are being strangled in its neck. Officials at Allenby insist the numbers leaving for Jordan this summer are actually down on the average, precisely because Israel's re-occupation of the West Bank has made it so much harder for Palestinians to travel. They also point out that Jordan is a country of four million, over half of them Palestinian. And was so long before the Israeli re-conquest, Ariel Sharon or the Al- Aqsa Intifada .
A trawl through Jericho suggests the Palestinians are right. There are hundreds stranded in the West Bank's last remaining Palestinian Authority controlled town. Many are cooped up in hotels, some camp under the shade of trees and a few are treated for heat exhaustion in a tented Red Crescent "field hospital" pitched outside the terminal. But there are not -- pace Fanik -- "40,000 massing at the bridges". And those who are massing are there for the usual reasons.
Like Harbi Masri: he is taking his sister and four other family members to Amman so that she can meet her cousin and future husband. He works in a cigarette factory in Jenin and has to be back at work by the month's end. They have been bedding down at the terminal for the last six days. He hopes to be "called" after three more. Why not go home?
"Because it took us eight hours and cost us a hundred dollars to get here. There are 12 Israeli checkpoints between Jenin and Jericho. I can't afford it."
Many Palestinians stranded in Jericho don't actually want to go to Jordan at all. They want to go to Europe and America, but are forced to use Amman airport because, since January, Israel has banned West Bank Palestinians from using Ben Gurion Airport in Lod.
Like Amjad Muhayden: he is a Palestinian businessman with a US passport who has just spent two weeks seeing family in Ramallah. For $140 he purchased a ticket at the head of the queue courtesy of "VIP Travel", a Palestinian-Israeli outfit that promises a "fast- track" to Jordan at a steep price. That was four days ago and he has yet to get a seat. "They are all thieves," he seethes.
Mahmoud Salami drove Amjad to the terminal from his hotel in Jericho, and expects he will take him back again. His taxi plies the same journey back and forth a dozen times a day for other Palestinian "VIPs", whose queue jumping is bitterly resented by the less important Palestinians squatting at the terminal.
Mahmoud's family hails from Beersheba. He used to work for Saudi Arabia airlines before being kicked out -- like hundreds of thousands of his kin -- during the 1991 Gulf War.
"I was a flight attendant. Now I'm a taxi driver -- in Jericho. The Israelis won't give me a permit to drive anywhere else in the West Bank."
As someone who has trailed the usual Palestinian stations of dispersal, exile and confinement, what does he think is happening at Allenby? Is it the harbinger of the next Palestinian exodus into a Kingdom that has been rocked by three such waves in the last 50 years? Or is it simply another wall in a West Bank studded with scores, only this time built by the Jordanian "brothers" rather than the Israeli occupier?
"It's part of the same squeeze," he says. "Israel, America, Jordan are all putting us under pressure until we accept the unacceptable."
And will you accept?
"No."

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