War is bad for tourism. But one Palestinian hotel owner remains optimistic about the future in Jerusalem
A sign for Azza Street (Hebrew for “Gaza”) with the name “Nova” — the party where a massacre took place in which hundreds of revelers were murdered Oct. 7 — taped on. Photo by Yahel Gazit/Middle East Images via AFP
By Laura E. Adkins October 29, 2023
JERUSALEM — Sami Abu Dayyeh, a prominent Palestinian hotel proprietor, is a contrarian — at least about this war.
Unlike most Israeli Jews, and in sharp contrast to the prevailing punditry around the world, Abu Dayyeh said he was not surprised by the scope and scale of the Hamas terror attacks on Oct. 7. Nor does he think the fighting will last much longer — or significantly change the contours of the conflict.
“It was a matter of time,” Abu Dayyeh said of the attack in which Hamas killed some 1,400 Israelis and kidnapped more than 200 others. “I’m surprised that the whole world, including Israel, was shocked at what happened,” he added. “Resisting occupation is something that will never stop.”
I met with Abu Dayyeh one morning last week to learn about the war’s impact on tourism. Instead, as we sat on the terrace of the Ambassador Hotel near the hotly contested East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah — one of four he owns in the West Bank and Israel — I got an earful about what he and a few other well-connected Palestinian businessmen with deep ties to Israel think about religion, politics and the possibilities for peace.
“There is nothing free in life,” he said. “The price could be financial, and we can divide the land. But the killing part, I don’t like. It will be bloody.”
Abu Dayyeh, who grew up in a Christian family in East Jerusalem, has been in the travel business since the 1980s. He owns this hotel, as well as others in Bethlehem, the Christian heart of the occupied West Bank. His company caters to Christians from North America and Europe, and also owns property and runs Bible-themed tours in Jordan, Greece, Turkey and Italy.
He is one of more than 300,000 Palestinians who are residents of Jerusalem but not citizens of Israel. While many well-off Palestinians focus their businesses in the West Bank to avoid paying taxes to Israel or otherwise engage with a government they consider illegitimate, Abu Dayyeh said he operates in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel because that’s where the money is.
“I accept things as they are,” he said. “I’m not going to go anywhere. So I keep on investing.”
War is terrible for tourism
Israel’s ministry of tourism says visitors pour about $5 billion into state coffers in a typical year, accounting for 2.8% of the economy. About half the visitors are Christian, and the area’s most visited city is Jerusalem.
“Israel is part of the vision of Christ coming back,” Abu Dayyeh explained. “It’s a strange marriage between the Evangelicals and the Jewish state.”
The industry was just beginning to bounce back after all but disappearing during the pandemic lockdowns. Nearly 2.7 million international visitors came in 2022, according to the tourism ministry, nearly seven times the 400,000 in 2021 but nowhere near the 4.5 million in 2019.
War wipes out most tourism, though Abu Dayyeh said the Ambassador, where rooms go for about $200 a night, has been at 65% capacity thanks to the influx of some 2,000 foreign journalists. Several of them lingered over a late breakfast on the terrace, where the fragrance from the pink and white blooms in the garden mingled with the smoke from Abu Dayyeh’s half-finished cigar.
You have to be an optimist to make it in this industry, Abu Dayyeh told me over coffee. He and his business have survived the Gulf War, two Palestinian intifadas and a global pandemic. This war, despite its devastating death toll and expert predictions about its length, does not faze him.
“Business will come back,” he said. “So we will wait.”
Plenty of blame to go around
Abu Dayyeh said he has been arrested twice by the Israeli authorities — first in 1990, for what he described as a problem with his taxes, then in 2021, during a political event at his hotel.
He sees Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an egomaniac lacking in principles. He uses profanity to describe President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority.
He is also no fan of the mainstream media, which he said highlights the suffering of individual Jews but speaks of the Palestinians as one homogenous group.
As for Hamas, Abu Dayyeh said he opposes their Islamist extremism and wanton killing of civilians, but sees the group as a “national movement” that is “asking for what everyone was asking for. Liberation. Freedom.”
Abu Dayyeh called the Arab nations that normalized relations with Israel over the last few years “idiots” and blamed the current crisis in part on Israeli settlers in the West Bank, who “think that they are cowboys.”
Back in the early 2000s, Abu Dayyeh said, he took part in numerous Israeli-Palestinian coexistence conferences. Now, he thinks Israelis should talk about peace among themselves. “How could you have a conference for the future with an occupier?” he asked.
Like many Palestinians, Abu Dayyeh sees the whole of Israel, not just the territory it captured in 1967, as occupied. But he said he supports a two-state solution roughly along the pre-1967 lines, and insisted that even Hamas — whose charter explicitly calls for the destruction of the Jewish state — would be amenable to it.
“We are not against the Jews, definitely not,” he says. “The Jews are definitely smart,” he adds. “But when it comes to the land here, they are too greedy. Selfish.”
Abu Dayyeh said he does not think Israel can afford — economically and psychologically — to continue the war much longer.
“They were strong, and they were hit hard on this occasion,” he said, referring to the Oct. 7 attack. “As revenge, maybe they will hit another 10,000 people.” But, he added, “the issue is the same. What will happen after? Why should we keep on hitting each other?”
‘We have to share the land’
After we’d been speaking for about an hour, a couple of Abu Dayyeh’s friends joined us on the terrace. One was a lawyer for Marwan Barghouti — an architect of the violent Second Intifada now serving five life sentences in Israeli prison. He and Abu Dayyeh both said they think Barghouti will be released in exchange for some of the Israeli hostages now being held in Gaza.
They add that he’d make an excellent head of a future Palestinian state, the only leader who can bridge the gap between Hamas and its rival, Fatah, which dominates the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority.
Analysts say Netanyahu in particular has been working to prevent this for years, limiting Israel’s assault on Gaza in order to keep Hamas in power there, and thus keep the Palestinians politically divided and weak. That is the paradigm that most experts see as having been blown up on Oct. 7.
Not Abu Dayyeh. He has a “this too shall pass” air about it all.
He understands that his future is tied up with this place — and all of the people who now live here. He’s worked closely with many Israeli Jews, including Nir Barkat, the right-wing former mayor of Jerusalem and current minister of economy and industry. He considers some to be close friends.
He also knows that war is bad for business. During our conversation, he fielded several phone calls about the construction delays on a new hotel he is building near Tiberias, a city on the Sea of Galilee popular with both Christians and Jews, due to the massive call-up of Israeli military reservists.
Even during relative calm, the occupation means that access to his hotel in Bethlehem is inconsistent and unreliable — the drive from Jerusalem can take 15 minutes or an hour, depending on traffic at Israeli military checkpoints and clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security forces in either city.
“We have to share the land,” he said. “On a good basis, not one side is superior to the other.”
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