Munib Masri, a US-educated, Nablus-born oil tycoon, has repeatedly been mentioned in some quarters as a possible prime minister of Palestine and his most recent move might well see those rumours true. Last month the influential billionaire launched a new political movement, Palestine Forum, to rival Fatah and Hamas. The 73-year-old inaugurated his Palestine Forum with meetings in Ramallah and Gaza, linked by video conference. Supporters said he would convert the new group into a political party and field candidates in the next Palestinian election. No date for an election has been set.
Masri joined a dozen other Palestinian expatriates in seeking to build up a national economy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The group formed the holding company Padico in 1994, created following the 1993 interim agreement that gave Palestinians a measure of self-rule, which Masri is now chairman of. The group helped establish the aspiring state’s first stock exchange and privately-owned phone company and invested in hotels, industrial estates and other projects.
Padico and its holdings stand as the biggest private employers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Nevertheless, that status is really only an achievement by default: few other private investors have been willing to risk their money in the territories. Many Palestinian businessmen who arrived after the Oslo meetings have long since returned to their homes in the US, Europe, the Gulf states and elsewhere, disillusioned by the collapse of the peace process and the eruption of the second intifada, or uprising aimed at ending Israel’s military occupation, in September 2000.
Even Padico wasn’t left unscathed. Its US$60m, five-star Inter Continental Hotel in the biblical West Bank city of Bethlehem, which opened on the eve of the intifada, stands open but virtually empty after five loss-making years. The company’s Gaza Industrial Estate is equally unprofitable – half its 40 factories have shut down in the past five years.
Masri insists that patriotism, not profit, should lure the Palestinian diaspora to the national cause.
The trained geologist has invested more than US$20m of his own money in the Palestinian economy and was also involved in establishing the Al Quds University Investment Fund and the establishment of the Engineering and Technology College at An-Najah University which is named after him.
Follow us on
