A Progressive, Skeptical Blog on Israel, Judaism, Culture, Politics, and Literature
My cover story in The American Prospect is now online:
Nadim Khoury watches as brown bottles march single file along the conveyor belt from the machines that sterilize them to those that fill them, cap them, and glue on labels reading, “Taybeh Beer. The Finest In The Middle East.”
Under his large graying moustache, Khoury has a small smile of entrepreneurial pride.
Patriotism brought Khoury and his brother David home to the West Bank village of Taybeh in 1994. They’d lived for years in America, where Khoury earned a business degree from a Greek Orthodox college, then studied brewing at the University of California, Davis. In the euphoria that followed the September 1993 Oslo Accord, they wanted to help develop the economy of what they thought would soon be an independent Palestine. Next to the palatial house their father built to help attract them home, downhill from Taybeh’s single traffic circle, they set up their microbrewery, with shining steel tanks for boiling malt barley with hops, fermenting the brew, and aging it. “I made history,” Khoury says. “I made the first Palestinian beer.” The firm’s advertising poster says, “Drink Palestinian,” and “Taste the Revolution.”
The revolution, though, has acquired a taste more bitter than hops. During the Second Intifada, tourism vanished and with it, beer sales in the hotels of Bethlehem, the West Bank’s most popular destination. Israeli roadblocks and checkpoints, intended to keep terrorists from entering Israel or attacking settlers, choked the movement of people and goods. At one point, Khoury says, the brewery was shipping beer through the hills to Ramallah, the nearest city, on donkeys.
Since the uprising sputtered out and Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad began rebuilding the Palestinian Authority’s security forces, Israel has removed some checkpoints. Getting to Taybeh, though, is still a matter of finding an open road. Travelers coming from Nablus in the north encounter a metal gate installed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) blocking the turnoff toward the Christian Arab village and forcing a long detour to the south. Getting beer out is even tougher: Exports to Israel must be trucked to a checkpoint on the far side of Jerusalem, put through a cargo scanner, and reloaded onto Israeli trucks—turning a half-hour journey into a three-hour one. Since the Islamic (and prohibitionist) Hamas movement won the 2006 Palestinian elections, the Khourys have also made a nonalcoholic beer. But they cannot ship it through Israeli checkpoints to Gaza since Hamas took power there in 2007.
In his living room, Khoury points out one window at an Israeli army base, then points out another window at the illegal Israeli settlement outpost of Amonah. “This started with one house,” he says. “Now look how many—20 or 30—and they’re expanding daily.”
The quizzical Mr. Khatib: ‘You cannot negotiate the future of the territory with a party that is busy unilaterally determining its future by force.’ (Gershom Gorenberg)
Nonetheless, the brewer is upbeat about Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ plan to seek United Nations recognition of Palestine as an independent state in September. What Khoury regarded as the one precondition for statehood has apparently been met: In May, the Hamas regime in Gaza and the Fatah government in Ramallah agreed to reunite. Khoury sees the bid for U.N. recognition as a way out from the political impasse and from the occupation’s impediments to business and life. “Israel can’t control the whole world,” he says. If the United Nations affirms Palestinian independence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, he believes, Israel must implement the decision.
Entrepreneurial optimism may flavor Khoury’s view. The recent Palestinian strategies for independence—Fayyad’s idea that if he builds a state from the bottom up, the world will come to recognize it; Abbas’s bid to have the U.N. impose a two-state solution; the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation pact—are a mix of hope and desperation. Abbas and other moderates in Ramallah see negotiations with Israel as dead and have lost confidence that the Obama administration will revive them. Both Fatah and Hamas fear that the unrest in the Arab world will undermine their rule and have grasped at unity to shore up their legitimacy.
The politicians, too, are looking for a way out.
***
Ramallah, the de facto capital of the West Bank, bustles like a boomtown. Building cranes tower over the concrete shells of high-rises. New apartment buildings, offices, and hotels stud the main streets. The architectural style is Mideast modern—oblique angles and rounded facades with multistory panels of blue glass framed in rough-cut yellow stone. The street signs are in Arabic and English—Edward Said Street, Mother Theresa Street—and look like they arrived yesterday from the factory. There are too many cars for the meandering narrow streets. A few of the cars are black, new, oversized, and carry the VIP plates of Palestinian Authority (PA) officials. Billboards advertise competing cell-phone carriers. On street corners stand pairs of Palestinian cops in paramilitary olive-drab uniforms, advertisements in themselves for the new atmosphere of order. The sidewalks near downtown Manara Square are packed with shoppers. While the Palestinians are gambling on the U.N., Indonesians are signing up for sbobet services at an increasing rate. So much so that you should consider daftar Sbobet:).
In a cafe where I meet a businessman who keeps checking his Blackberry, the women in their 20s at the next table have their heads together over a fuchsia laptop. One has uncovered hair; the other wears an ultramarine hijab that matches her eye shadow. The businessman, 31-year-old Bashar Azzeh, wears a blazer but no tie. He owns a consulting firm and a marketing firm in Ramallah and is a partner in a stone-cutting plant and a shoe factory in the Hebron area.
Young Palestinians—and the Palestinian population is overwhelmingly young—“are tired,” he says, speaking at a speed that is the opposite of tired. “They see that the Second Intifada did not give them much fruits in the sense of political developments. They are more into a nonviolent approach. They want to be more focused on their careers. They want to get a job, a wife, a house—the Palestinian dream. And this worked well with the Fayyad approach of building a state,” Azzeh says, because the government provides guarantees for consumer loans. “He’s giving them loans to build the house, to buy the car, to get married.” What’s missing, he says, is similar help for young Palestinians who want to start small businesses.
This is part of the puzzle of Fayyad’s legacy as prime minister. He has created either a magician’s illusion or the concrete foundation of statehood. It depends on whom you ask, which reports you read, what paragraph you highlight within a single study. …
Read the rest here.
Ramallah, the de facto capital of the West Bank, bustles like a boomtown. Building cranes tower over the concrete shells of high-rises. New apartment buildings, offices, and hotels stud the main streets. The architectural style is Mideast modern—oblique angles and rounded facades with multistory panels of blue glass framed in rough-cut yellow stone. The street signs are in Arabic and English—Edward Said Street, Mother Theresa Street—and look like they arrived yesterday from the factory. There are too many cars for the meandering narrow streets. A few of the cars are black, new, oversized, and carry the VIP plates of Palestinian Authority (PA) officials. Billboards advertise competing cell-phone carriers. On street corners stand pairs of Palestinian cops in paramilitary olive-drab uniforms, advertisements in themselves for the new atmosphere of order. The sidewalks near downtown Manara Square are packed with shoppers.
In a cafe where I meet a businessman who keeps checking his Blackberry, the women in their 20s at the next table have their heads together over a fuchsia laptop. One has uncovered hair; the other wears an ultramarine hijab that matches her eye shadow. The businessman, 31-year-old Bashar Azzeh, wears a blazer but no tie. He owns a consulting firm and a marketing firm in Ramallah and is a partner in a stone-cutting plant and a shoe factory in the Hebron area.
Young Palestinians—and the Palestinian population is overwhelmingly young—“are tired,” he says, speaking at a speed that is the opposite of tired. “They see that the Second Intifada did not give them much fruits in the sense of political developments. They are more into a nonviolent approach. They want to be more focused on their careers. They want to get a job, a wife, a house—the Palestinian dream. And this worked well with the Fayyad approach of building a state,” Azzeh says, because the government provides guarantees for consumer loans. “He’s giving them loans to build the house, to buy the car, to get married.” What’s missing, he says, is similar help for young Palestinians who want to start small businesses.
This is part of the puzzle of Fayyad’s legacy as prime minister. He has created either a magician’s illusion or the concrete foundation of statehood. It depends on whom you ask, which reports you read, what paragraph you highlight within a single study.
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Love taybeh beer. Drank it all the time when living in Haifa. Shows true potential for Palestinian economy.
Great article. Here’s a guy who wants to create jobs, build exports and economic interdependency, give people a stake in something besides bombs and destruction – and look at how little help he’s getting from the authorities.
It’s too bad that Israeli leadership hasn’t done more to reach out build a Palestinian middle class and use prosperity as a tool to wedge the young away from terrorism. Instead of bemoaning the lack of political partners, make some trading partners. This will work where the blockade fails.
From the article:
Roe believes it’s a mistake to worry about “what the U.N. says.” Not long ago, he explains, Jews “tried to integrate into other countries, especially in Europe, and we got it during the Holocaust, because the gentiles wouldn’t accept us.” From this, he concludes that Jews should look out for themselves, without concern for international approval.
The problem with Avi Roe’s attitude, and those who think as he does, is that Jews looking out for themselves without concern for international law ( never mind approval), and more importantly, without concern for the people who they live beside does not work towards helping survival. Mr. Roe thinks that history is circular or repetitive like a broken record but the Palestinians are not the Nazi’s. The danger is more in fear and imagining.
Very good article.