Palestinian Investors See Dreams Shatter

RAMALLAH, West Bank —  Nidal Harb’s state-of-the-art heart clinic here seems far from the smoke-blanketed street corners seized lately by stone-throwing Palestinians.

Diplomas from top U.S. schools line the walls of his sprawling medical offices. The latest cardiac-imaging equipment stocks his examination rooms. By giving up a prosperous practice in the United States a few years ago and returning to their Palestinian homeland, Harb and his wife, Sana, have been doing their part to build a new nation.

Now, Harb says, “all the dreams are shattered.”

The last tumultuous weeks of insurrection and chaos have shaken the 45-year-old doctor and thousands of other Palestinian professionals and businesspeople. They are the engines of the new Palestinian economy, the catalysts of the future state. Their commitment will determine whether that economy and that state, and the concept of peace with Israel, have any sort of future.

With violence engulfing the land, they have everything to lose.

Uncertain how this crisis will unfold, they are gripped by ambivalence: supportive of the cause of Palestinian liberation, outraged at what they see as Israeli abuse but horrified at the cost and devastation.

That they share the anger evident in the streets shows the depth of Palestinian alienation. Their voices, however, are rarely heard over the screech of politicians and ideologues and gunmen.

“The intifada is not just throwing stones,” Harb said of the uprising. “It is a culture of uprising. Everyone does his part. The doctor treats patients, the engineer does his best, the teacher should teach. Everyone contributes to the intifada; everyone is very angry.”

Many spent years in the diaspora, only to return to the West Bank or the Gaza Strip in the early 1990s after the Israeli and Palestinian leadership embarked on a historic and, it seemed, conclusive peace process. They cast their lot with the future Palestinian state, invested millions of dollars and lifetimes of experience.

Most came to understand that there were serious problems with a too-slow peace process, an unresponsive and corrupt Palestinian political leadership and a festering discontent among the poor and the working class. But they thought progress was being made.

Today they are questioning many of their assumptions and wondering where it all goes from here, especially as the uprising evolves into an ugly, protracted guerrilla war.

Empty Offices Still Smell Newly Built

Nader Shahin was so bullish on the future that he sunk a small fortune in a new brokerage firm, launched it on the Palestinian stock exchange, was expanding his staff and had just finished building a beautiful office complex appointed with inlaid wooden panels, recessed lighting and etched-glass windows.

Shahin moved in to the building Sept. 15, just two weeks before hell swept the West Bank.

“Good timing,” he said with a grimace.

His opulent office today is deserted. It still smells of fresh carpet glue.

Business has skidded to a halt. The stock exchange, after two years of phenomenal growth, was closed for 17 days in October and then reduced its trading time to three hours a week. Shahin said he has not yet made the decision to close up shop altogether. But soon he will consider cutting back and stopping projects in the pipeline.

“I knew there were risks in Palestine, but I didn’t think it could get this bad, this fast,” said Shahin, who is an energetic 33-year-old U.S.-schooled engineer. “Our investment was very calculated. The numbers were going in the right direction. We were doing very well. I would still like to expand, but the situation has forced us to put everything on hold. Everything is uncertain, and that makes investors think twice.”

It is a far cry from the optimism that led him to take the plunge into the Palestinian economy a year and a half ago and that made him wish, just three months ago, that he had more money to invest.

Seated at a long conference table in his office complex, Shahin contemplated how his life and that of his friends has changed, from a go-go enthusiasm to a nervous wariness. The only time Shahin’s phone rang, on what should have been a bustling business day, was when his secretary called to say she had just heard that the Israelis warned they were going to attack Ramallah with rockets again. (This time, the alarm was false.)

“The situation never should have been allowed to get this bad,” he said. “They should have continued at the negotiating table. It never should have escalated to shooting and to the street level.

“Can it be fixed? I really believe peace will prevail. The question is when. In the end, it will happen. But the delay will kill the economy.”

‘Lose-Lose Situation’ for Both Sides

Neither Shahin nor the Harbs are ready to give up. Ditto for Bashar Masri, scion of a prominent West Bank family and head of a management consulting firm. They know, however, that recovery will not be swift.

Even if Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat “kiss and make up and say it was all a mistake, it will take quite some time, it will take years, to repair the damage,” said Masri, 39, who until September had scored considerable success in attracting investors to high-risk Palestinian territories. Masri and his American wife, Jane, have two daughters and live in a gated compound that includes the family home and business.

“This is a lose-lose situation for both the Israelis and the Palestinians, and especially for the Palestinians,” Masri said. “The long-term damage is severe. . . . It is hard for me to believe that it has come to this. I never thought that we could accept such a human toll and that Israel would accept inflicting such misery.”

Throughout the West Bank and Gaza, companies have begun laying off employees. Sales have all but stopped; profits have evaporated. Many businesses have simply written off the rest of the year. Tourism, the mainstay economic activity, has died. Unemployment has more than tripled. Lost income, trade and tax revenue will cost the Palestinians uncounted millions of dollars.

The top hotel in Ramallah, which Masri co-owns, averaged 1.75 guests a day during October. Previously, the 82-room Grand Park Hotel had been doing so well that Masri was adding rooms to double capacity and a major international chain was bidding for a piece of the action.

For all the problems plaguing Palestinian development in past years, the prosperity that Masri and others experienced was finally being reflected here. Elegant villas and high-rise office complexes were sprouting throughout Ramallah, which emerged as the undisputed commercial capital of the Palestinian territories. Jazz clubs, restaurants and Internet cafes gave the city a vibrant night life that even Israeli Jews ventured to sample from time to time.

Elsewhere, luxury hotels went up in the Palestinian cities of Jericho, Bethlehem and Gaza. Banks and cellular telephones multiplied. In the six years since Palestinians gained control of some territory under the Oslo peace accords, the region seemed poised to take off.

Still, the affluence did not conceal a basic dissatisfaction with the way that Israel continued to exercise control over the daily lives of Palestinians. The seething anger among the masses, who today are hurling stones or taking up far more lethal weapons, is clear. Those who seemed to have “made it” also have serious grievances; they may forbid their children to throw rocks, but they express similar frustration at the vestiges of Israeli occupation.

And like many ordinary Palestinians, they were further alienated in recent weeks as Israel sent helicopter gunships whomping over their villas and shooting over their offices.

After the drafting of the Oslo accords in 1993, Israeli troops withdrew from most cities and towns in the West Bank and Gaza Strip but continued to have authority over most of the roads connecting urban centers. Unless a Palestinian is lucky enough to have a foreign passport, he or she has to obtain permits to travel to other Palestinian cities if it means traversing Israeli territory.

Palestinians find the constant subjection to Israeli military checkpoints degrading. Further, Israel controls the airspace, border and some water supplies of the Palestinian statelet, whose physical integrity is further punctured by more than 140 Jewish settlements. Most Palestinian trade also has to go through Israel.

None of these issues was resolved to Palestinian satisfaction in the Oslo negotiation.

Dr. Harb’s wife, Sana, 36, who is a business professor at Bir Zeit University, had to “smuggle” herself into Jerusalem every time she wanted to visit friends or relatives there; attempting to attain a permit is too tedious.

“There were growing pains in the new Palestine, but we always were hopeful it would get better,” Nidal Harb said. “The average Palestinian doesn’t see any dividend of peace. I see patients from all walks of life, all classes. Peace has not meant a substantial change for their lives.”

The Harbs left Ramallah in 1973 and decided to return after the Oslo accords were signed in 1993. He hails from one of the original Ramallah Christian families, of which there are only 2,000 members left here today. An additional 40,000 are in the U.S.

Coming home from Iowa meant uprooting their four children, none of whom read or wrote Arabic, selling their medical practice and leaving friends and an adopted culture. They were determined to make those changes and immerse their children in the Palestinian milieu. And they wanted to “make a difference in a big way,” Sana Harb said.

By this year, she said, they were starting to see results. They had contracted architects and investors for a new health-care center. Their children were speaking Arabic and quoting the best writers of the language.

“We started feeling good, at home, comfortable,” she said. “Everything was falling into place. We were hopeful. Too hopeful. Now we are in the eye of a storm.”

Like many Palestinian parents who stay away from the street skirmishes, the Harbs are keeping close tabs on their children, not hiding things from them but shaping their understanding of the conflict. Their 16-year-old son, a straight-A student with his eye on Harvard, follows the fighting through the Internet. He volunteers at an arts center set up to help children deal with the death and destruction.

“People say to me, ‘What kind of place are you raising your kids in?’ ” Nidal Harb said. “But I think it’s extremely important that the children know we belong to this land. It sends a message to those Palestinians who want to come back, and to those in Israel who want us to leave, and that is the best possible investment.”

If anything good comes of the bloodshed, Harb said, he hopes it will be a definitive separation between Israel and the Palestinians.

The Masris also are worried about their children and the cataclysmic toll being exacted on relations between Arabs and Jews. Their Jewish friends no longer come around, though many have called; the Israeli government bars its citizens from entering Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Worse, their 6-year-old American-born daughter hides when she hears the Israeli helicopters, moaning that yehud, or Jews, are coming to kill her.

Jane Masri said she and the people in her circles do not believe that the current intifada is the answer to the Palestinian plight. Bashar Masri said that, while the death toll has been tragic, there have been gains in the support of other nations for the cause of Palestinian independence.

The Masris agree on one thing. The explosion of rage, while arguably justified, has unleashed possibly irreparable damage to humanity, the economy and visions of the future.

“An intifada is a desperate act,” Masri said. “That Palestinian state that we were trying to create, that has faded out. The dream is in my heart always. But the state that I thought might come . . . in a few weeks, or in a month, has been put off. A year? Ten years? I don’t know.

“What we are living now is not what I envisioned.”