Jerusalem tourism - challenges and opportunities

Palm Sunday in Jerusalem. Photo by Tarik Bakri. 

The Palestinian consensus is that Jerusalem is a tourism destination of the first degree. It is perceived to be the city that possesses the strongest competencies as far as tourism is concerned. The current reality, however, is that its hotel capacity has decreased by half during the past twenty years, and many shops inside the Old City have closed their doors, forcing their owners to look for work at Israeli establishments. So what is happening to the city? What can be done to overturn this decline, and who can and/or should do it?

First of all, it is important to understand that Jerusalem has been deprived of its hinterland as a result of the Wall that the Israeli authorities have constructed around the city. This deprivation has detached Jerusalem from the rest of the Palestinian body and impacted its economic, cultural, social, and central importance, characteristics, and dynamics. A quick nostalgic glimpse at Jaffa might help explain this decentralization or de-urbanization that Jerusalem seems to be suffering from. The Israeli Wall not only prevents people from nearby cities and villages from accessing the city and hence annulling its ability to serve its natural clients, it has the double-edged-sword effect of draining the city of its residents as they seek to spend their time and attend to their interest with their counterparts in other Palestinian cities, rendering Jerusalem a town that is suffocating. The influx of visitors into the city is mostly international and is subject to the seasonality of Christian pilgrimage, the main source of business in the city, and the Islamic market, which is limited and occasional.

Secondly, due to the political setup dictated by the Oslo agreements, the Palestinian government has very limited intervention in the city. Its ability to act as a reference for the residents of the city, addressing their needs, aspirations, challenges and plans, is hampered by this fact. The Israeli authorities, on the other hand, have their own plans for Jerusalem, which for the most part don’t take into account Palestinian economic, cultural, and touristic well-being as indicated by the tragic decrease in the number of hotel establishments and room capacity. Civil society organizations, educational, cultural, and religious establishments have moved in to close the gap. Although this sincere and well-appreciated effort is pivotal for the city, it is fragmented and poorly coordinated.

Hence, the situation in Jerusalem is impacted by a number of imposed threats and mounting challenges such as the Israeli-imposed siege of the city, the absence of a governmental body to cater to its well being and aspirations, and the seasonality of its business. The situation is further compounded by the negative perceptions of travel to Palestine and the area, the lack of unique and differentiated programs, the frail competitive advantage, and the instability of the political situation.

Based on the above, the way to move forward in Jerusalem tourism has to take into consideration a plan that is based on three strategies: protection, competitive capacity, and promotion.

Protection reflects the need to preserve Palestinian culture, identity, and existence in the city. This requires programs that help sustain the existing establishments, including those that focus on rehabilitation, furnishings, trainings, and institution and capacity building of both the individual business and the establishment or organization.

Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Photo by Shareef Sarhan.

Competitive capacity can be enforced with new packages and offers for discerning visitors. Jerusalem needs a set of new products to challenge the overwhelming seasonality that overshadows its tourism. Competitiveness is about differentiation. It is about a uniquely identified Palestinian product in the city. It is about how the Jerusalem community is able to utilize its human, cultural, economic, and social resources and capacities. Once achieved, competitiveness is a key for sustainability.

So what are the main sustainability elements the city should aspire to realize? Understanding these elements and decoding them into practical and genuine initiatives is pivotal to achieve success. The first is the ability of its various sectors to work together, based on the notion that tourism doesn’t belong to the tourism industry alone but to all sectors that are directly or indirectly linked to its value chain, such as the commercial, the cultural, the religious, the educational, and the IT sectors. The second is the role of the community not only as a beneficiary of the tourism, economic, and cultural action but also as an active participant in the planning process for the tourism package and development.

The third element is the need to diversify the tourism offer. It will be difficult to create a viable, developing tourism industry in the city if it confines itself to one product and one market. Finally, in order to create a unique Palestinian tourism offer in Jerusalem, it is necessary to enhance the supporting sectors, including culture, women’s and youth activity and production, and local handcrafts and artisan workmanship. Needless to say, the role of the various cultural festivals and exhibitions in attracting visitors is imperative, and it impacts both the domestic and the international. The domestic includes Jerusalemites, expatriates, and Palestinians from every location that has access to Jerusalem.

Photo by Shareef Sarhan.

The third strategy is promotion and branding. The Jerusalem community, through its organizations and coordinated efforts, has the ultimate responsibility of building its competencies, promoting its offer, and enhancing its well-being. There are two ways to accomplish this endeavor. The first is direct and requires that the community’s tourism leadership find ways and resources to position Palestinian Jerusalem on the international and regional tourism maps. The second is networked and is based on the establishment of a set of relationships with local, regional, and international organizations that are involved in activities similar to the ones being created in Jerusalem. Cultural production, for example, can be networked with similar offers and activities in other countries that aim to promote culture. People who are seeking culture can find the Jerusalem offer intertwined in the respective circles. The various Jerusalem activities can find their place in pertinent platforms throughout the world, based on a scheme of networking, synergy coordination, and partnerships.

♦ Palestinian civilization is a sophisticated, well-documented and enchanting reality that has its print on many of the surviving cultures and civilizations of today. There is no better place than Jerusalem to live and experience such a diverse cultural, architectural, demographic, and human mosaic.

To further address Jerusalem tourism competency, consider the cultural and demographic mosaic of Palestine, which can best be explored in the Old City of Jerusalem. This small area brings together a rich mixture of cultures, ways, and traditions. Jerusalem can best be understood through the eyes of this diversity. Gypsy, African, Moroccan, Afghani, Kurdish, Syrian, Egyptian, Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian, Greek, Assyrian, and Arab, as well as a multi ethnic Jewish community (just to name a few) all have a story of Jerusalem to tell and, when combined, provide a unique cultural identity that waits to be explored.

In addition, Jerusalem conceals an array of architectural-heritage medleys from Roman times through major empires such as the Byzantines, the Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Crusaders, the Ayyubids, the Mamluks, and the Ottomans. Women have built some of the best monuments and institutions in Jerusalem. Although Arab Islamic society was primarily patriarchal, some women had a clear role in many facets of life, particularly those who were close to the ruling authority, such as princesses, sultan’s wives, or mothers or wives of rulers or influential people.

Tourists visiting Jerusalem. Photo by Tarik Bakri.

The Mamluk era, with its characteristic stability and calm, saw clear activity by women, represented by the establishment of public and private buildings and structures. The largest house or palace representing civil architecture in Jerusalem is attributed to a woman, al-Sitt Tunshuqal-Muzaffariyya. Also, the largest and greatest social charity organization from the Ottoman era, known as Al-Emara al-Amera is attributed to the wife of Ottoman Sultan Suleiman al-Qanuni (Suleiman I or Suleiman the Magnificent). She was famously known as Khassaki Sultan, and her building structure houses what is considered one of the greatest organizations, not only in Jerusalem, but also in Palestine and the Levant.

This uniqueness is what Jerusalem tourism needs. These elements can be integrated in the main current tourism offer, and they can be promoted individually in order to attract niche markets that might fancy the new potential to explore a city such as Jerusalem. Is the Jerusalem Palestinian community up to the challenge?

Raed Saadeh

Greece as a World Heritage site

Meteora, Thessaly

Because of its geographical position, Greece was a crossroad of civilisations that had left their traces everywhere: the architecture of the museums and settlements, miniature art, daily life, nutritional customs and in all forms of popular art in the various regions of the country. The visitor can come into contact with this multihued and impressive mosaic through trips into historical, cultural, artistic and folkloric traditions.

According to the UNESCO’s official website:

"The monuments included on the World Heritage List are selected and approved on the basis of their value as the best examples of human creative genius. They exhibit an important interchange of human values and bear a unique or at least exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilization which is living or has disappeared. They are directly linked to important stages in human history and for this reason they have outstanding universal significance and are a part of mankind’s common heritage".

 

Shared heritage, central of local culture in Bled Friguia (Tunisia)

A trip within a Mediterranean trilogy: olive, vine and wheat

According to Magon, (the father of husbandry as a rural science)  the Carthaginians grew wheat and barley, vine, olive, and fruit trees, and reared horses, mules and oxen, but favored fruit trees and breeding.

Magon’s treatise in twenty-eight books, includes practical indications on pre-Roman agriculture and bears witness about the growth of the rural economy.

Country of cereals, Tunisia ancient Africa, has also well deserved its very flattering nickname assigned by ancients: Granary of Rome. Pliny recorded that the soil of Africa ' was adapted for grain’ The ‘Empire of Ceres’, providing Rome with wheat and barley.

Tunisian wheat has a great gustative and continues to those days giving to the Italian pasta, the prestige that has acquired all along its history.  It's the durum wheat, that when ground, gives semolina for making couscous, the Tunisian’s emblematic traditional dish.

The most cultivated kind of wheat in Tunisia is called Gamah, particularly in the north, in lands of Beja, Bled friguia (territory of Bled Friguia) ….  The soft wheat or farina, is a recent introduction (nineteenth century) and it’s used mainly as breadmaking trade.

The territory of Bled Friguia is located in the North-west of Tunisia, between the northern coast of the country and the prosperous valley of the Majerda, in Arabic: واد مجردا known as Bagrada in ancient times. It’s  also a strategic river in North Africa, it was fought over and settled many times in history by the Berbers;  local population, Phoenicians, Punic, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines , Arabic, Spanish, Italian, French.

 The extension of the Atlas mountain range, characterizes these lands: the Kroumirie mountains, is peaking at 1000 meters, and the highest Mogods reach 500 meters.

This region receives the greatest amount of precipitation and extra supply of water from the Majerda River, was suited to agricultural development and provides important water resources to the whole country. 

The various flora, including the coastal areas, is similar to the southern Europe plants and includes meadows, scrubland, especially oak forests and cork oak.

The countryside is characterized by a dense hydrographic network and a wide range of landscapes: hills covered by forests and extensive vales with fertile alluvial soils suitable for growing wheat and barley.

The economic activities in the area were developed and deployed all along the local network of routes. the program of Roman agricultural restructuration of the countryside into ager and saltus, wasteland put under cultivation (olive, vine, wheat, and fruit trees) by the distribution of plots of lands to army veterans regulated by agrarian laws promulgated by the Antonines and Severi and engraved on stelae uncovered near imperial estates in Beja region.

And since the territory of Carthage itself had been declared ager publicis, domain of the Roman people, a first wave of 6,000 Italian colonists who were settled in the Lower Majerda Valley (Bagradas) on the initiative of the Gracchi.

Important Cities were installed surrounding these fertile lands. They were well connected to the road networks and along the both sides of the major axis connecting Carthage   with Theveste in the Roman Colonia of Africa Proconsularis  (Tunisia).

In the Roman period, the cultivation of the olive has developed considerably in connection with the general improvement of living conditions and with its commercialization. The imperial initiative aimed to insure supplying Rome with agricultural produces. The ‘booming Mediterranean olive oil market’ had its acme thanks to a vast urban and military trade network of agricultural products.

Nowadays, the numerous wine and oil presses and small oileries, latin inscriptions, pottery, stonework, mausoleum,  and various places of worship (temples, churches and marabouts ..) have also been discovered last years, strengthening the expert opinion specifically Dr. Muhamed Ben Jedou, in GIS and  Landscape Archaeology in Northern Tunisia;  that at the era, the country attend its economic heyday  and an  important part of the local production was exported  to the majority of Mediterranean countries but it was also treated on site to reduce transport costs.

The agricultural prosperity of Provincia Africa under Pax Romana, gave rise to important internal exchanges which developed thanks to a well-organised road network. Several towns at crossroads grew into regional market towns draining the agricultural produce of the countryside from a surrounding ‘zone of influence’ or ‘territorial zone’, the Roman pagus or colonial administrative district.

From Early Antiquity the vine was grown in North Africa, favored both by the geographical location and the optimum conditions of soil and climate. Notably Magon’s treatise, talk about African viticulture.

in the IV century BC. Wine-growing has insured a significant role in the agricultural production of Africa Proconsularis.

 Pliny describes bunches of grapes that ‘exceeding the body of an infant child in size’ and explains that because of the bitterness of African grapes, the wine was frequently sweetened with plaster or lime.  As regards quality, according to Pliny , African ‘straw wine’ was second in rank to Cretan wine.

Initially planted on slopes, the vines were spread to the plains. At the end of the nineteenth century, the recurrence of viticulture crises in France brought about the intensification of vine-growing in North Africa cities to their ‘territorial zones’.

The European who settled in Tunisia during the French Protectorate (1881-1956) used the Roman precedent as a model, in particular establishing farms on the same locations as villae on the plains and plateau on a zone corresponding to fertile soils best suited to the cultivation of wheat and the planting of fruit trees.

The city of Beja, is situated on the sides of a mountain facing the greening meadows. Its white terraces and red roofs are dominated by the imposing ruins of the old ancient fortress. Beja is among the most important rural centre in all Tunisia, and also a centre for crafts.

 At the entrance of the city, three storks, birds associated with its famous fertile soil, that drew all the masters of the Mediterranean, welcome visitors.

Because of the key position of Bled Beja, leading to the roads of Tabarka, Mateur, Bizerte and Algeria, the World War II broke the long period of peace that had known for many centuries.

On November 1942, Commonwealth and American troops made landings in North Africa especially on the northern hills of countryside of Beja. The Germans responded immediately by sending a force from Sicily to northern Tunisia, that checked the Allied advance east of Beja.

The War Cemetery contains Commonwealth burials of this Second World War, notably from The Sidi Nsir battlefield in Beja

The countryside remains a picturesque town with wide horizons, a healthy climate,  rich and fertile soil. Another distinctive feature is its family life, its traditional friendliness and hospitality towards foreigners.

 The sister city of Tunisian Beja is a Portuguese city and called also Beja. It’s a municipality which is located in the Alentejo region.