Municipalities and Councils - Australians for Palestine

Sunset over the Jericho mountains. Photo by George Azar.
of surviving adobe houses is of
crucial significance in relation to the
preservation of the city’s heritage. The
buildings can be used as community
and cultural centres, art galleries, or
museums.
8. Establish an ethnography museum:
The Jericho culture, customs,
manners, and way of life can be
ethnographically recreated using
restored adobe cottages to recreate
the traditional way of life.
9. Create a winter resort for the elderly:
The dream of many is to spend the
winter away from the cold of the
mountains. Not only the expense
but the strenuous effort required for
the upkeep of a home in Jericho is
forbidding. Adobe-style cottages can
be dispersed in landscaped gardens
and serve as a retirement community
that provides food, recreation, and
general medical services for the
elderly.
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Jericho is the ultimate Palestinian
challenge. Time changes and rearranges.
We can neither stop progress nor control
the vicissitude of time. We can neither
hold onto the “times of yore” nor can
we expect Jericho to be preserved as a
museum. Yet the past can be vindicated
in modernity. Forging a “new” beginning
whose constituent elements are inspired
by socio-cultural ethnographic research
and a multidisciplinary team of lawyers,
architects, landscape and street
designers, museum curators, etc., who
agree to work together will lead to the
revitalisation of Jericho.
Updating Jericho on the aesthetic and
economic levels requires a modernist,
aesthetic visionary approach. The bucolic
magic of the sleepy pastoral town
that had transpired at a certain socioeconomic
political conjuncture cannot
be replicated. Time cannot be regained
except in a museum, but life cannot be
hostage to memory. The magic we recall
was a product of a lifestyle that has long
passed away. “It” simply happened. The
semantic memory of the place merely
provides the point of departure for the
redesign of Jericho as a pastoral familyfriendly
city accommodating seasonal
tourism without falling into the caveat
of gross overdevelopment that would
destroy its rural simplicity.
Jericho should forever shimmer in our
consciousness as the green Oasis of
Peace.
Dr. Ali Qleibo is an anthropologist, author,
and artist. A specialist in the social history
of Jerusalem and Palestinian peasant
culture, he is the author of Before the
Mountains Disappear, Jerusalem in
the Heart, and the recently published
Surviving the Wall, an ethnographic
chronicle of contemporary Palestinians
and their roots in ancient Semitic
civilisations. His filmic documentary
about French cultural identity, Le Regard
de L’Autre was shown at the Jerusalem
International Film Festival. Dr. Qleibo
lectures at Al-Quds University. He can be
reached at aqleibo@yahoo.com.