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February 1, 2002/19 Shevat 5762, Vol. 54, No. 20
Jerusalem city center struggles to survive
AARON LIGHTNER
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Eight recent terror attacks in the heart of downtown Jerusalem have reduced a bustling economic zone to an economic no-man's land.
On Jan. 27, a Palestinian woman exploded a bomb near the crossroads of Jaffa Road and King George Street, killing an elderly man and injuring more than 125 people.
The force of the blast shattered the glass storefronts of 60 shops and sent merchandise ranging from diapers to diamond rings flying across shop floors.
As usual in Jerusalem, life returned to a tense normality on Jan. 28. Pedestrians crunched on glass as they made their way past police barricades and battered stores that looked like beaten, toothless boxers.
Whatever bloodstains and bits of flesh remained after the cleaning crew's sandblasters had passed were washed away by the heavy rains.
In an effort to revive downtown Jerusalem's economy, Mayor Ehud Olmert held discussions Jan. 28 with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Finance Minister Silvan Shalom on possible rescue plans for Jaffa Road, the city's main thoroughfare.
Olmert demanded that businesses in the city center receive discounts on property tax or sales tax exemptions.
But for many with businesses in the heart of the city, the effort comes too late.
"For many of us, business is no longer profitable," said Zion Barsheshe, leaning heavily on the counter of the Coffee Time cafe. Barsheshe used to employ more than 60 people in his three stores near Zion Square, at the bottom of the Ben Yehuda Street pedestrian mall.
"Now I have five people working here. I've paid $350,000 out of my own pocket to keep these places afloat since the intifada started" in September 2000, he said.
Filling in for his boss, Micky Levy - who suffered a massive heart attack after the bombing - Jerusalem's deputy police commander, Ilan Franco, tried to soothe shopkeepers' frayed nerves on Jan. 28.
Undercover and regular police are "maximally deployed in order to prevent another attack in this hard-hit area," Franco said on a visit to downtown.
Due to continued warnings of attacks, there seemed to be more border police patrolling the streets on Jan. 28 than customers. Soldiers armed with M-16s and wearing neon yellow winter gear prowled the rooftops of buildings, looking down upon what has become known as "the terrorists' intersection" at the corner of Jaffa Road and King George Street.
Like many of his competitors, Barsheshe invested huge sums in his stores in the midst of the peace process euphoria and in preparation for the year 2000, expecting hordes of tourists to descend upon Jerusalem.
But that gamble failed when the Palestinians turned to violence and streets once packed year-round with tourists became deserted.
The damage to the 60 stores in the attack amounted to some $2.5 million, said Mashiach Yazdi, head of the Finance Ministry's Department of Hate Crimes. Cleaning and construction crews, paid for by the government and insurance companies, will require at least a week to "get this street back to normal," a task that normally takes just one day after a terror attack. It will take longer this time because the bomb used was so powerful and because it exploded in an open area.
It's not only businesses whose storefronts are blown apart that are affected by terror here.
According to the daily Yediot Achronot, fully half of the tourism employees in Jerusalem have been fired, hotels are at less than 30 percent occupancy and store owners have seen income plummet by more than 80 percent since the intifada began almost a year and a half ago.
So great is the damage done to Jerusalem's tourism industry that a group of 55 Israeli hotels decided to sue the Palestinian Authority for hundreds of millions of dollars for intifada losses. The group's lawyer, Yehuda Raveh, believes the hotels have a good chance of winning the case - and obtaining the damages from P.A. tax money frozen by the Israeli government.
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