President Bush did not come to this oasis city of beige hills, lush green plantations and ancient ruins on his visit to the Palestinian Authority on Thursday. Given the apparent antipathy of the local population, it is probably just as well.
“It would be much better if he didn’t visit our land at all,” said Bashar Fadl Ahmed, 34, an orthopedic surgeon who was shopping in the town square early this week, echoing sentiments expressed by many here. “He won’t achieve anything. He is trying to do something in his last year, but where was he before?”
Jericho, a relatively tranquil town of about 25,000 Palestinians north of the Dead Sea, was on the short list of West Bank destinations for the Bush visit, with Bethlehem and Ramallah, the site of the Palestinian Authority headquarters.
Arif Jaabari, the governor of Jericho appointed by the Palestinian Authority, said members of the American security and diplomatic staff had been to his compound twice. But Jericho was not included in the president’s final schedule, causing little disappointment among residents.
“He’s the worst, Bush,” said a 64-year-old man who identified himself only as Abu Muhammad. “He supports Israel and mocks and deceives us.”
On his official visits to Ramallah and Bethlehem, Mr. Bush is likely to be received with the utmost respect. After all, the Palestinian Authority led by President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah has received significant American backing as a bulwark against the rise of the militant Islamic group Hamas, which seized control of the Gaza Strip last June.
For Mr. Abbas, Mr. Bush’s visit is an honor and an opportunity that he hopes will advance nascent Israeli-Palestinian talks on the outline of a Palestinian state. The visit will be “historic and important,” said Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for Mr. Abbas.
By contrast, many Palestinians are angry with Mr. Bush for, among other things, going to war in Iraq and spurning Yasir Arafat, their former leader. They point to the many checkpoints and the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and they say that Mr. Bush’s support for Israel comes at their expense.
Ghassan Khatib, the vice president of Birzeit University, in the West Bank, said Wednesday, “The Palestinians are in agreement that in the history of the United States, Bush is more biased than any other American president toward Israel.”
Consequently, the Palestinians are deeply skeptical about the goal of a deal on statehood by the end of Mr. Bush’s term.
“He has destroyed everything, and now he is coming to see the results,” said Moussa al-Hilou, 63, who owns a clothing store. “What Palestinian state is he talking about? What he says is nonsense, even our leadership knows that.”
The same skepticism seems to prevail throughout the West Bank and Gaza. In a December poll of 1,270 Palestinians conducted face-to-face by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, an independent institute based in Ramallah, 23 percent of those surveyed expected that the sides would reach a permanent agreement before 2009, and 72 percent expected that they would not. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus three percentage points.
But the criticism is all the more pointed from Jericho, the location of significant Christian, Muslim and Jewish archaeological sites and the first West Bank city to have been handed over to the Palestinian Authority in 1994 as a result of the Oslo peace accords.
For a time, Jericho was best known for its highly profitable casino, which opened in 1998 and was mostly frequented by Israelis. But the casino closed after the outbreak of the intifada in 2000.
Today, Jericho, a Fatah stronghold, is the hub of the authority’s Western-backed efforts to rebuild and train the Palestinian security forces, one of the foundations of a future state.
“I follow the security situation hour by hour,” Mr. Jaabari, the governor, said in an interview. “There is full security control here.” The goal was for “everyone to live in peace in two states, next to each other, in love, security and stability,” he said.
“Unfortunately, from 1967 until this moment, there has been no real progress,” he said.
In October, an Israeli security chief told the Israeli cabinet that a plot to assassinate Prime Minister Ehud Olmert during a planned visit to Jericho in June had been foiled. The visit was canceled. The suspects, two of them still in detention, were Jericho residents affiliated with Fatah, the security chief said.
Mr. Jaabari said the plot was never more than idle chatter.
Jericho’s flagship institution, the Palestinian Security Sciences Academy, opened in October. At the academy, 150 officers from various security organizations all over the West Bank are studying Hebrew, communications and information technology.
Mr. Bush would be welcomed here, academy officials say. “We are trying to build the institutions to manage our country in the near future,” said the academy’s president, Nour Eddin Abu al-Rub. The Palestinians’ future “depends on the United States, and especially on President George Bush,” he said.
“We hope he will see our suffering, and how the Israeli occupation deals with the Palestinian people and land,” he said. “I hope he is sincere and honest and will do something.”
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