NABLUS, West Bank — A mass wedding that took place here one recent balmy evening was the latest step toward the rebranding of this Palestinian city from a focus of chaos and violence to a model of stability in the West Bank.
A wedding of 47 couples last month in Nablus, a city once a focus of violence, was part of an effort to change the city’s image.
The 47 couples on the stage had not come together as a group before, and they were complete strangers to most of the 10,000 or so Palestinian revelers crowded into the amphitheater in the municipal park.
Yet the event, one of the most exuberant here in recent years, was a riotous, joyful affair, bringing together Palestinians from Nablus and its surrounding villages and refugee camps.
“We are a dispersed people,” said Hassan Assayes, 53, a sculptor and the oldest of the grooms. “This is a sign of unity.”
The communal wedding was paid for by the Palestinian Authority and held with the blessing of its president, Mahmoud Abbas. In some ways, the authority was emulating its rival, the Islamic militant group Hamas, which regularly holds mass weddings for poor people in Gaza, where it holds sway.
But the ceremony also reflected something of the spirit of entrepreneurship now reawakening in Nablus, a city of about 150,000 people that was once considered the commercial center of the West Bank.
The wedding was the brainchild of Muhannad Rabi, 37, the manager of a real estate development and investment company in the city, the fourth public event he has arranged. “I want to market Nablus,” Mr. Rabi said.
Struggling to make himself heard above the cheering audience and the singer belting out Arabic wedding favorites, Mr. Rabi said he started a year ago with a festival at which residents baked what he said was the world’s biggest knafeh, a sweet local pastry. A marathon was next, then a soccer match between authority politicians and residents.
He took his idea for a communal wedding to the Palestinian Authority governor of the district, who approved it and brought in the mayor.
Mr. Rabi said he wanted to “convey a message to the world that we in Nablus, and Palestine in general, can live as human beings, enjoy life and achieve our political goals.”
For years after the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000, Nablus was ruled by rival militias and criminal gangs, whose members roamed the streets.
Hamas won municipal elections in the city and parliamentary elections across the West Bank and Gaza in 2006. But in June 2007, after the Islamic group seized full control of Gaza, militiamen associated with Mr. Abbas’s Fatah party rampaged through Nablus, looting and burning offices and institutions affiliated with Hamas and storming City Hall.
That same year, the Palestinian Authority made Nablus the pilot for its law-and-order program, deploying hundreds of newly trained Palestinian police officers in the city. Palestinian officials said at the time that they wanted to deal first with the “head of the snake.”
Now some of the Israeli checkpoints that used to surround the city have been removed, while others are run in a relaxed fashion, if they are staffed at all. The city is open to visitors from all over the West Bank, as well as to Arabs from Israel. In the streets, new cars, including sport utility vehicles, point to growing prosperity. The Nablus Muqata, the authority headquarters destroyed by the Israelis during the second intifada, is being rebuilt.
The new mood is personified by people like Atallah and Khamis al-Sairafi, 49, identical twins and entrepreneurs who were born to refugees from Jaffa, now in Israel, and grew up in the Askar refugee camp on the edge of Nablus.
A somewhat comical pair — they say they wake up in their separate homes and telepathically end up wearing identical outfits — they started out in the scrap metal business. But just before the second intifada, they bought a disused Boeing 707 passenger jet and parked it in an amusement park they had built along a road east of the city. They had planned to turn it into a restaurant.
After the violence broke out, the amusement park became a makeshift Israeli Army camp, and the plane sat corroding next to a derelict Ferris wheel, birds flapping in and out of its broken windows and doors.
Now the Sairafi brothers say they are negotiating with the Nablus municipality to move the plane to a new park in the city, on the peak of Mount Ebal. They envision tables inside for more than a hundred diners, and singers performing on the wings. In the meantime they have opened a garbage recycling plant that they say is the “first in Palestine.”
Even in the city’s Balata refugee camp, once an infamous hotbed of militancy, there are signs of change. The camp’s 25,000 residents were given a questionnaire by Fatah asking them to rank the projects they most wanted to see built. Their first choice, a public garden, opened early this year.
The issue of improvement in the refugee camps has always been a delicate one. The Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war and their descendants are careful about impressions of permanence, sticking to their demand for a right of return to their former homes in what is now Israel.
But Ahmad Douqan, leader of the camp’s committee, said the refugees “never refused offers of help.”
“Being a refugee does not mean that I should live with unpaved roads and sewage running in the streets,” Mr. Douqan said.
The authority has also approved a major electricity project for Balata, and Mr. Douqan said the government wanted to help build the camp’s first wedding hall, to make marriage more affordable.
For the 47 couples at the communal wedding, finance was also a major factor. The city still has many poor residents, and a wedding can cost about $5,000. As well as the party in the amphitheater, the organizers paid for the wedding dresses and a three-day honeymoon in the Jordanian resort of Aqaba, and gave the couples gifts of furniture and cash.
Amid the dancing and fireworks, there were reminders of the more turbulent past.
The youngest groom, Mufid al-Aqad, 21, who was marrying his 19-year-old cousin, lost his brother, a militant, in an armed clash with Israeli soldiers in 2004. Mr. Assayes, the sculptor, spent several years in Israeli jails for what he described as “defending my home.”
Surveying the scene from the side of the stage, he said he felt proud.
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