Jericho roulette
On 15 September, the West Bank town of Jericho joined the ranks of Monte Carlo, Las Vegas and Atlantic City — three sacred cities of the international gambling fraternity — when a lavish new casino, The Oasis, opened at a cost of $150-200 million. This is not a corner café crammed with card players, but a huge, multi-facility complex that some are calling the biggest gambling center in the Middle East.
In addition to the huge gambling hall which can accommodate as many as 1,500 customers, The Oasis boasts swimming pools, tennis courts and exquisite restaurants serving all sorts of gastronomic delicacies from caviar to apple pie. A set of ancillary services and facilities are also planned along with a two-kilometre-long marbled promenade equipped with canopies and wooden seats.
The new venture is part of a high-risk game being played by the Palestinian Authority (PA). Because it has involved a shaking off the strict moral code that held sway during the Intifada years (1987-1993), its critics have dubbed the strategy “buying off the people”.
As part of their big-bucks-first policy, Oasis administrators claim the casino’s target audience are not ordinary Palestinians, but mostly wealthy Israelis, PA VIPs, foreign tourists and gambling addicts from around the world. And since Israel, and more recently Turkey, outlawed casinos for a variety of reasons, PA economic officials hope the Oasis will prove to be a gold mine.
Yet despite the rhapsodies accompanying the casino’s opening, it is political realities that will eventually decide the economic prospects of the Oasis.
On 23 September, the Israeli chief of staff, Shaul Mofaz, issued an executive order barring all “security personnel” from visiting the casino. Moreover, an influential parliamentarian is backing a bill before the Knesset which, if passed, would bar all Israelis from visiting the Oasis.
Needless to say, this would spell disaster for the casino since the decision to go ahead with it was based to a large extent on the premise that Israelis would make up the bulk of its potential customers.
The manager of the casino is an Austrian Jew, Alexander Tocheck, a director of the Casino Austria Company which operates as many as 67 gambling centres worldwide. Casino Austria, of which the Austrian government owns a third, will hold 15 per cent of the shares in the Jericho complex. Austrian banks will hold 10 per cent, and the remaining shares will be taken up by investors who prefer to remain anonymous.
The PA’s financial involvement is still murky. According to the Israeli Hebrew paper Yediot Ahranot, profits in the first 15 years will be split evenly between the PA and the Austrians. After that, all rewards will pass to the PA.
More to the point, it has been reported that the Al-Bahr company holds 35 per cent of the casino’s shares.
The casino, referred to in public as a hotel, is being built on land belonging to a waqf (Islamic endowment) — which is ironic given Islam’s implacable opposition to gambling. “Where in the world can you find a den of vice established on waqf land?” protested Sheikh Harb Jaber, an influential Jericho imam. Like others of his town, Jaber is furious at the PA for disregarding the sensitivities of the local people. “The PA establishment is trying to destroy our values,” he said. “These people are corrupt without limit, and for the sake of money they are willing to cross every red line.”
Another Islamist leader, Sheikh Nayef Rajoub (brother of Preventive Security Chief Jebril Rajoub) scoffed at the “den of vice in Jericho”, saying “it is lamentable that the PA believes that the liberation of Jerusalem from the Zionists could proceed from a gambling casino in Jericho.” Speaking before a congregation of several thousand people at the Grand Mosque of Dura, 10 miles southwest of Hebron, Rajoub further castigated the casino, saying that, with the money, the PA could have built 150 factories instead, creating jobs and enabling impoverished workers to end their dependence on the Israeli labour market.
Mohamed Rashid, Yasser Arafat’s enigmatic economic advisor who oversees the PA’s secret bank accounts in Tel Aviv, retorted, to the pious horror of Islamist critics, that the venture would create as many as 400 jobs (a highly disputed figure since the bulk of the casino operatives are foreigners and Israelis living in the nearby Jewish settlement of Ma’al Adomim).
In June, Rashid said in an interview on the Qatar-based Al-Jazira satellite TV channel that “he would crush any person or persons seeking to undermine this economic edifice.”
He lambasted what he called “the forces of darkness” for “raising questions and suspicions about anything we do”. He argued that if people are to take that view of the venture, “all our life would be haram [sinful], since our people work at Jewish settlements and we trade with the Israelis. So why the big fuss about the casino?”
Oasis has not received a license from the Jericho municipality. It has, however, obtained clearance from the ministries of treasury and justice.
Not only are the gamblers pleased, but the Israeli government and intelligence services are lauding this “progressive social culture”. “The PA’s openness is probably the greatest achievement in combatting Islamic fanaticism and extremism in 30 years,” said Shmuel Goren, Israel’s former Coordinator for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. “We should support these positive developments on the part of the PA,” he added. “They work in our favour since Islamic fundamentalism is our common enemy.”
The last time Israel tried this sort of “realpolitik” was in the mid-1980s when it tacitly encouraged religious forces as a counterbalance to the secular nationalistic PLO. Ten years later, it is still attempting to weaken the Palestinian cause, but now it’s putting its money on the other side.
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