Palestine: a conference less ordinary

Australian Financial Review, September 2008

If you find yourself bored by the predictable drudge of conferences, try going to one in Palestine. You will encounter a range of emotions in doing so, but it can be pretty much guaranteed boredom won’t be one of them.

The AFR attended the Palestine Investment Conference in Bethlehem on the West Bank in May, a landmark and important event. It attracted 1500 delegates, 500 of them from overseas, to hear about how Palestine (or more accurately the West Bank – Gaza, the other half of the Palestinian Territories, was and is under a state of complete siege) has a future as a viable economy and an independent state. Some interesting presentations came and went, but the real significance of the conference was its very existence: people turning up on the West Bank to talk about investing in it rather than shunning, bombing or pitying it.

It was, though, never going to be an easy trip. The West Bank has no airport. (In fact, Gaza doesn’t either anymore, after its runway was cut in half by bulldozers during the second intifada in 2002.) Instead, delegates have to fly in to either Tel Aviv in Israel, or Amman in Jordan, and head across from there. The AFR opted for Amman.

It started well: a bus was waiting to take a handful of delegates as far as the border at the Allenby Bridge on the Jordan River (which, incidentally, is a remarkably disappointing watercourse given its striking Biblical imagery: one can barely see it, it’s so small). On the Jordan side of the border is a pleasant little compound where one is invited to sit down, drink local tea and chain smoke while officials locate your paperwork, after which they charge you US$92 for the VIP service (which apparently consists of the tea).

At this stage the AFR had fallen into the company of two Kuwaitis from an engineering company who, like most delegates, were going along just to see what Palestine is like and whether there might be an opportunity or two there. It was a tricky position for them: Palestine is occupied by Israel, and handles its border formalities, but Kuwait does not recognise Israel and the two countries have no diplomatic relations. Spotting that their permits were in Hebrew, the younger of the two hit upon a scheme to steal the other one’s permit – clearly his boss – and extort him by threatening to show his superiors he’d been to Israel, which would have been unconscionable to a Kuwaiti company. Both found the idea hilarious.

The Kuwaitis, despite their stateless state, were more swiftly on their way than the AFR, which had encountered a problem with the necessary permits; nevertheless, Jordan is not particularly worried about who it lets out so sent us to a car to be whisked to the Israel side and sort it out over there. This is where the fun really started: two hours of waiting and questioning from three separate members of the Israeli border personnel about why we would want to go to an investment conference in Palestine. It did, though, have the most exhilarating piece of safety hardware: a large box in which one is required to stand while jets of air are blasted at you in the hope of dislodging explosive particles.

With that having been navigated, the AFR emerged blinking into the harsh desert light of Palestine, not far from the Dead Sea; at several hundred metres below sea level the lowest point on earth. All buses to the Bethlehem conference long since having disappeared, your correspondent found a bus to Jericho and then a shared taxi the rest of the way. This proved an education: not just because of the nine other occupants who, delighted to find a journalist in their car, railed at length about the injustice of their own situation and the world’s misunderstanding of their plight; but also because of the case study it gave into freedom of movement restrictions in Palestine. It’s not just the checkpoints, which are frequent but which you expect. This taxi had white plates, denoting a Palestinian taxi, unlike the yellow ones on Israeli cars, and Palestinian vehicles are only permitted to use selected roads even within the Palestinian West Bank itself. So, on a pristine freeway heading the quick way to Bethlehem via East Jerusalem, we were instead diverted onto a crumbling track over the arid hills amid the goats and the tin shacks that the Bedouin, unromantically, now live in instead of tents.

And so to the conference itself: an impressive spectacle, enough to make you believe Palestine has a future. Tony Blair was there, and French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner; private equity, aid donors, telcos. This was a big deal, a powerful statement of intent. But as always it’s the wonky novelty that sticks in the mind, like the eight-metre-high wall that Israel is building to separate itself from the West Bank, snaking incongruously across the road by the gorgeous Bethlehem Intercontinental.

One night the delegates took over Manger Square, next to the Church of the Nativity which marks the place of Jesus’s birth, for a celebratory dinner before a dual language English-Arabic stand-up comedian (and if you want a challenging way to earn a living, try that for size). Occasionally the AFR’s eye was caught by something on the roof of the Church of the Nativity: ah, a sniper.

Conferences were never like this on the Gold Coast.