Eco tourists in Palestine
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By: Richard Sexton www.palecom.org
Culture and nature tourism - often called eco-tourism - is being touted as the great Palestinian tourism opportunity.
Expectations have risen recently as to Palestine's capacity to generate employment, income and foreign exchange from tourism. Currently, the Palestinian tourism sector (on the basis of provisional figures from the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS)) generates US$60.5 million value added and two percent of GDP. MAS tentatively predicts that the value-added from Palestine tourism may range from between US$180 to US$320 million by the year 2006. If these projections are realistic then some quite considerable gains can be made from tourism. Evidently, Palestine needs tourism. But who are the tourists that everyone hopes will come and spend money in Palestine?
Proponents find eco-tourism attractive since it is the fastest growing segment of the international tourism market. The tourism market globally is worth US$413 billion and accounts for some 531 million people on the move each year. Seven percent of that numbers are considered eco-tourists and their numbers are growing rapidly. Eco-tourists are people who like open-air activities, living heritage, beautiful landscapes, spiritual refreshment and peace and quiet. Over the past 12 months, other eastern Mediterranean countries, most notably Greece, Turkey and Cyprus, have all announced plans to promote eco-tourism. The approach is to shit up-market and move away from the more traditional low margin package holidays. In Palestine's case the equivalent of the package holiday, although relatively high cost, is pilgrimage tourism.
It is hard to fault the logic of eco-tourism in Palestine. What is on offer is probably 'as good as one can get' anywhere in the world. In addition to the holy sites, Palestine has the oldest city at the lowest point in the word., the grandeur of a rift valley, a salt sea shared with Israel, uniquely terraced mountainous landscape, wadis, historic sites and contrasts of such extent that they encompass both Mediterranean and Irano-Sudanian botanical zones. However, as this article will explain, these factors may not in themselves be sufficient preconditions for eco-tourism. The Palestinian landscape has recently begun to undergo a most extraordinary transformation. Its ruralism is becoming deceptive as the country makes major shifts towards a predominantly urban environment. The most dramatic type of landscape changes will take place in the first two decades of the 21st century.
In twenty years time, by the year 2017, much of Palestine's heritage-nature landscape of statue will have disappeared. From Jalame, north of to Jericho, Jordan Valley to Rafah, Gaza, open spaces will have been replaced by buildings, roads and infrastructure. The physical attractiveness of the Palestinian landscape will depend not so much on how wilderness areas are planned, but on how construction is to be carried out and how building activity will be concentrated and dispersed throughout the country. One thing certain is that in twenty years time the country will be virtually unrecognizable for anyone who knows it today.
Alarmist? Perhaps not. The Palestinian landscape is already one of the most crowded and densely populated in the world. With a population density of 424.5 persons per square kilometer (not including Jerusalem), it is almost double that of Israel, and 117% higher than Holland, one of the most densely populated countries in the developed world. Ninety one percent of all households currently live in crowded conditions with more than one person per room. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) Demographic Survey 1995, shows that the West Bank and Gaza Strip also have one of the highest and most rapidly accelerating population growth rates in the world. Between 1982-1992, for the remains in West Bank and Gaza (not including East Jerusalem) the average rate of population growth, without the influx of returnees, was 3.7%. Some rough calculations of magnitude indicate that within twenty-years, on this basis the Palestinian population will have doubled, growing from some 2.4 million to 4.8 million. This figure does not include estimates of returnees (and associated growth rates) that might be included in some final status agreement.
Tourism planners, without grasping the fundamental, will quickly be confronted with a situation in which residential space takes precedence over landscape preservation. The rapid pace of growth, will require on average, the equivalent of five towns the size of Ramallah, each year for the next twenty years. In a society with a well organized planning structure and a highly efficient economy, this would be challenging indeed. In the Palestine context, not only does the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) not have the resources for the organization of large-scale infrastructure for housing, most construction activity is family based, on privately held plots of land. Open space is most likely to be diminished by a pattern of unplanned piece-meal building with construction forming long, unbroken strips along roads between villages, towns and cities. Towns and villages will sprawl into each other and areas which could be earmarked for recreational land will disappear under concrete. Repressed demand for building, a product of decades of restrictions under occupation, will be unleashed. Moreover, this type of development has its own momentum, as has been evidenced over the past few years with major construction activity taking place in the central West Bank area and Gaza city. Whilst residential construction is important and good, the destruction of many important environmental and historic features has continued apace.
Should the 21st century be feared? No! And tourists could still play a role. Green areas, the remnants of an agricultural landscape, could be reconstructed as buffers between built-up areas. These green wedges will provide recreational facilities primarily for the resident population. Recreational space will have to be organized, in order to ensure that despite the land crunch, its greenness can be preserved. Construction will have to be high-rise in some areas in order to limit the sprawl of city areas. Micro-level architectural design - the design of the gardens and building, tree lines and parks will become important. Farmers will prefer not to farm, having built for their own use and sold off their land to others for urban development. Natural resources with tourist potential will be found almost exclusively in nature reserves and national parks, the delineation of which has to begin now, if anything is to be left in a few years time. It is in this latter areas that the PNA has begun to make tremendous strides forward.
One of the few planning instruments available to the PNA is land zoning. The demarcation of areas, suitable for building on the one hand, and for landscape preservation n the other. The Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation's (MOPIC) Directorate for Urban and Rural Planning and Environmental Planning Directorate, have recently completed a major piece of work called the Emergency Natural Resources Protection Plan. The plan - a piece of groundbreaking pioneering work - has used zoning as the key planning and policy instrument for maintaining landscape quality. The objective of the plan is to:
"protect the most valuable and sensitive environmental and natural resources, including inter alia, water recharge areas, surface and groundwater, agricultural areas, forests, cultural heritage areas, bio-diversity and landscapes, from undesirable land use, pollution and development with the aim to facilitate sustainable socio-economic development and to preserve and create the best environmental conditions."
In all respects, the plan has provided the basis for achieving this objective, in defining spatially, three categories of landscape quality for water resources, agricultural land, ecologically sensitive areas, cultural landscape and landscape. However, the major task now will be to get the plan promulgated in law and implemented under the authority of the Cabinet advised by an inter-ministerial Planning Council, the Higher-Planning Council. The plan comprises two legal documents: the Protection Plan Regulations and the Land Use Zoning Map. Exempt from the Plan are existing urban areas. Other types of planning approaches and instruments are required if quality urban planning is to succeed. However, the PNA will have an uphill battle in delivering implementation, given the legacy of problems it still has to tackle arising from occupation. How the PNA succeeds in implementing and enforcing the emergency plan is not cut and dry. Despite efforts by the PNA to undertake environmental protection: natural resources cannot be presumed to be adequate as a key element in tourism potential. International eco-tourism requires high quality open spaces and it is unlikely that these will remain in Palestine for much longer. Internal tourism may be a better bet particularly when such a large population is constrained to such a small area. Urban heritage tourism is a different matter. Experience tells us that globally, towns and cities can keep on absorbing many tens of thousands of tourists. However, international tourism when becomes localized, the backward and forward linkages that extend the benefits of tourism out geographically fail to materialize. Exposure to the benefits of tourism are then very unevenly distributed. Elsewhere, where potential does exist, the Palestinian tourism sector is in direct competition with the Israelis. Key areas such as the Dead Sea and Jerusalem remain final status issues. Strategic areas such as Jebel Abu Ghneim are being incorporated into settlements by the Israelis. Hotel building is envisaged as a major feature of this settlement in order to create the Israeli equivalent of Bethlehem - "Bethlehem-Israel". In this context, the focus on nature-tourism may simply be a desire on the part of agenda setters, to ensure that landscape and environmental resources preservation retains a high profile on a crowded Palestinian agenda.
The Palestinian tourism industry is often accused of being "parochial" in its understanding of what tourism is about. Agenda-setters have argued that, the 'lack of skills and understanding' on the part of the general population, hinders the shift to new segments of the tourism market. This argument has also been used in the case of culture and nature tourism. The response to this can only be - "it depends on where you are standing". A fixation with the fact that 95% of "Palestine's tourism income" (sic) accrues to international or Israeli tour operators, leaves you competing with the Israeli - from a disadvantaged position - for a slice of the international tourism market. Assuming you were ever to beat the Israelis at their own game, it would then be correct to say that the growth potential would be tremendous. An 'equity' rather than a 'pure growth' strategy would view the problem differently. A strategy which aimed at building links into the domestic economy, aiming for social acceptability, geographical spread and a strengthening of local economic multipliers, would take tourism out on a quite different limb. Whilst a certain amount of attention has been focused on Islamic tourism (and even Israeli companies are trying to develop programs in this area), there has been almost no focus on leveraging gains from Palestinian Diaspora tourism. This appears to have been something of a blind spot in international tourism consultancy.
In an area of landscape change and one hopefully of peace (the critical factor underpinning all tourism), landscape site attractions will carry far less weight in the calculations of a Palestinian Diaspora tourist than in the calculations of an international tourist. The international competitiveness of Palestine's landscape site attractions will not be so much an issues. Whilst Diaspora Palestinian have always returned to their homeland there has never been an attempt to service them as tourists. As a consequence, no strategies have been launched to increase their number, to redefine family visits as holiday visits, to increase the frequency of visits, to extend the duration of stay, to develop site attraction and leverage increased expenditure on the part of these visitors. Yet, the Palestinian Diaspora community numbers 4.7 million, 58 percent of all families in the remaining West Bank and Gaza having close relatives abroad, and a large segment of the Palestinian Diaspora would visit if they could. have cultural affinity and interest in the area it would then be of no surprise to find that a significant proportion also had an interest in heritage and nature site attractions.
The point to be made here is that eco-tourism sites should not simply be developed for the international tourists of the North American and European variety. Palestinian residents will also have the need for more recreational space as urbanization takes its toll. A tourism strategy which does not take into account the inevitability of landscape transformation is undoubtedly going to fail. In such circumstances, if tourism strategies are to be sustainable, additional elements have to be built-in. One such element is the role of the Palestinian Diaspora community. As yet, there has been little attempt to factor-in this important tourist segment. This, despite the excellent potential that this segment holds for making an additional contribution to the Palestinian economy.
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