Friday, June 28, 2002

Largely Spared by the Israelis, Jericho Is Quiet, Too Quiet
The casino is dead. The cable cars that once took tourists up to where the Bible says Jesus faced down the Devil now dangle pointlessly, like a clump of dates just out of reach. Half of this city, which claims to be the world's oldest and the lowest in elevation, is now out of work.

So there is no real sense of jubilation that Jericho, which held so much promise during peace, is also the only one of the eight major cities in the West Bank not locked under curfew by Israeli tanks.

Many Palestinians here worry that it is only a matter of time before Jericho too is caught up in Israel's new military campaign to stop suicide bombings by moving back into much of the West Bank. Tonight, that worry was behind the hustle of a 45-year-old woman named Khitam Shihadeh, who was sneaking herself and her four children back into Jericho, which is more or less sealed off, after only a few hours visiting her mother in a nearby village.

"I wanted to stay with my family for longer than that," she said after weaving through a line of military concrete barriers on the city's outskirts. But she said, "If they invaded Jericho, I would be in one place and my husband would be in another."

"It's very quiet there, and that's why we don't go in there," said Jacob Dallal, a spokesman for the Israeli military. "I wish we could say that about more cities."

He said Jericho had not been a source of unrest or suicide bombers, and so there was no reason for a greater military presence. This was by design: at this point in Jericho's 12,000 years of continuous habitation, its most relevant feature is the Allenby Bridge, which leads to Jordan and is now the only way for Palestinians in the West Bank to leave for the outside world.

Not long after September 2000, when the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis erupted again, local officials and the Palestinian Authority agreed to keep the bridge open by keeping Jericho calm.

"Whenever anything happened in this city, the Israelis directly closed the bridge," said Abdel Karim Sidr, the mayor. "And that's a problem for Palestinians."

So far Jericho, separated from much of the rest of the West Bank by desert and mountains, is still viewed by Israel as less militant. So much so that this month, Israel allowed six top terror suspects holed up in the Ramallah headquarters of Yasir Arafat to be placed in a jail here monitored by American and British wardens (though some Israelis accuse the men of continuing to play a covert role in terror activities).

But Jericho has been far from immune from the 21 months of conflict. All the roads leading into Jericho are manned by Israeli soldiers, and few Palestinians are permitted in or out. The fabled wall of Jericho has a modern-day replacement: a ditch the Israeli military dug around the city to prevent cars from sneaking in and out.

Even the mayor has had problems. About three weeks ago, Mr. Sidr said, he left on a back road to attend an official meeting of the region's electricity company, but was stopped by soldiers, searched and stripped down to his underwear.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/28/international/middleeast/28JERI.html

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