WHERE LOT LIFTED UP HIS EYES

Tim Llewellyn meets Yasser Arafat's landlord,

a man with a big investment in the Palestinian settlement

Jericho THE Hisham Palace Hotel, advertised by a rusting plaque nailed up in Mandate days, sits back from one of Jericho's main streets, hidden behind high walls and a courtyard. It should be an area for oriental contemplation; a sublime evocation of Inner solitude, cast in glowing, friable white West Bank stone.

It is, in fact, a dump. In its dark interior, Mr Raja Abdou, the devout manager, tightly turbaned and loosely draped, two new copies of the Koran displayed on his table, welcomes his visitors with religious unctuousness. Mr Abdou has plans for this pile, and his small hazel eyes bulge with expectation behind thick spectacles. Like many Palestinians, he can hardly Wait for Yasser Arafat and his entourage to enter this sleepy oasis, another 'historic' event due early in 1994. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation has finally accept- ed the offer of his 70 rooms as a seat of (autonomous) government, when and if it takes shape, and he has already chosen Chairman Arafat's office and adjoining suite. 'The Hisham Palace Hotel provides perfect security and a perfect office,' he intones. The hotel has already trebled its prices.

After Mr Abdou becomes the PLO rulers' landlord, at an annual rent of f50,000 and a £1.5 million refurbishment by Spanish engineers and architects, he is ready to trade the hotel business for public life. 'My plan is to make myself available to help my people,' he says, 'and it has been suggested to me that I seek the mayor's office . . . I am trying to arrange a meeting with Mr Arafat in Tunis.' He has Correctly divined that there would be little Point in running without 'the President's' support.

He has quickly joined the ranks of those West Bankers who hope for a classically Arafatist regime, assuming, perhaps cor- rectly, that the Israelis would permit and enable no other. This is a universally popu- lar view in Jericho, where a quiet life has always been preferred to the excesses of resistance. It is, after all, a small, hot coun- try town. This way, Mr Arafat will patron- ise ancient loyalists who have stuck it out on the hoof through the exile years, while purchasing new loyalists, like Mr Abdou, inside the Occupied Territories. Loyal opposition, or doubters, will be discour- aged. It has been the Chairman's way.

Mr Abdou has a dream, as do the hun- dreds of Palestinian and Israeli business- men, some already in cahoots, talking in millions, who have their eyes on this fertile patch of real estate nearly 1,000 feet below sea level. This dream would transform what an English visitor in 1842 described, and would even now recognise, as 'a dark dense spot of wild verdure [that] occupies the site of the Gardens of Jericho...As we descended...we became painfully sensible of the change of climate; a growing lassitude replaced the elasticity of our spirits.'

There is no room for such torpid intro- version for Mr Abdou and his Levantine entrepreneurs. Where 'Lot lifted up his eyes, and saw that the Jordan Valley was well-watered everywhere, like the Garden of the Lord', they descry a forest of con- crete, high-rise hotels, new roads, fun, diversion, clubs and restaurants from the Dead Sea five miles to the south of Jeri- cho to well north of the city. All of it lies in the lee of the Mountain of Temptation, where Christ put Satan behind him.

Mr Abdou sees many opportunities for expansion. Office blocks, naturally, for a `seat of government'. Fleets of Black Mer- cedes Benz with smoked-glass windows, flanked by outriders, brushing aside the donkeys, bicycles and tourist buses, would need space and secure parking; video-mon- itors in the towering date palms. The Ommayad mosaics and arabesques of the Palace of Mefjir, whereto the Caliphs of Damascus descended for their winter breaks, might one day resonate to the thump of U2. 'We are sitting on a gold- mine,' announces the portly cleric.

There are, however, obstacles. Perhaps Mr Abdou would do well to recall the words of the conqueror Joshua, more than 3,000 years ago: 'Cursed be the man before the Lord, that riseth up and buildeth this city, Jericho.'

Although land prices have doubled in and around Jericho since 13 September, Mr Arafat's day in the White House sun, investment at this stage is notional rather than actual. No one, for example, can yet agree what Jericho is. Is it the nine square miles inside town boundaries as configured by the Israelis? Not much room for a Jor- dan Valley Canberra-cum-Torremolinos there. Or is it the 140 square miles the Palestinians say it has been from Ottoman days, and on through the British, Jordani- ans and Israelis?

If it is the former, free Jericho, tempo- rary capital of Palestine, would be as easily penetrated and dominated by the Israelis as it is now; not that Jericho, ever a vulner- able city, put up much resistance to invaders.

Even if it is the latter, which would take in three nearby Israeli settlements, the Israelis retain right of access to the main road which runs through Jericho en route from Jerusalem and the West Bank, Gaza and Israel proper, eastwards to the Allenby Bridge, the main crossing point to Jordan; to the settlements themselves; to the high- way that strikes north, through Jericho again, to Lake Tiberias and Galilee, and, of course, to the military roads which encircle Jericho. Plenty of scope for close supervi- sion there.

Jericho depends on communications for tourists, already largely hijacked by Israeli operators, exports of oranges and bananas, income from servicing the bridges, and fiddling the water supplies from the irrigation canals that flow from 'I'm absolutely certain that you didn't say pergola.' Ain Sultan, the Sultan's spring, original source of the city's prosperity. At the first sign of dissidence or non-compliance, the Israelis can easily isolate Jericho from Gaza, 70 winding miles away, over the mountains, and the rest of the West Bank.

It will not, either, be easy for Mr Arafat, in Jericho, to enforce his rule in Gaza, Hebron, Ramallah and Jenin, even if Israel really wants him to. These are four other distinct regions, or homelands, sepa- rated by, and infiltrated and strategically peppered with, Israeli roads, state land and settlements.

Vulnerable as Jericho and its new rulers are, the city's eternal role as a manipulable link between the authority of Jerusalem to the west and whatever the world is to the east is assured. Sheikh Raja Abdou's for- tune may yet rise out of his crumbling hos- tel, transmuted to an Iberian marble palace. At least the World Bank, the Euro- pean Community, the United States and Japan will be guarantors for the PLO's rent.

After I finished talking to him, Mr Abdou said, 'You will mention, won't you, that I am American-educated?'

`I don't think we'll need to,' I said.

Tim Llewellyn reported on the West Bank and Gaza for BBC Radio 4's The World Tonight.