[Jerusalem] Internet is about to get cheaper for Palestinians.
VIDEO: http://media.themedialine.org/media/snyder.wmv
Within weeks, the Palestinian Authority will be taking action which is expected to end the virtual monopoly held by the Palestinian Telecommunication Group PalTel over Internet services in its territory.
Palestinian Authority Minister of Telecom and Information Mashhour Abu Daka told The Media Line he will be issuing certificates shortly for telecommunications companies wishing to provide Internet services to the Palestinian market.
“I hope to finish the qualification of companies that will be able to offer such services next week,” Minister Abu Daka told The Media Line. “This will create competition, so we expect Internet prices to come down within a few weeks time.”
The Palestinian Telecommunication Group owns almost all telephone and Internet services infrastructure in the West Bank and Gaza. The company includes PalTel, which owns the land line telephone infrastructure; Hadara, the only Internet services provider; and Jawwal, the leading cellular company.
While the Palestinian Authority has a 7 percent stake in the PalTel Group through the Palestine Investment Fund, the company is publicly traded and a giant in the Palestinian economy. It makes up 50 percent of the worth of the Palestine Securities Exchange and 29 percent of the Palestinian Authority’s gross national product (GDP).
The ministry’s initiative will require PalTel to provide ‘Bitstream service’, allowing new Palestinian Internet service providers (ISPs) to use the PalTel broadband Internet infrastructure for an as yet undetermined fee. Such companies would then be able to offer Internet services to the Palestinian market at a speed and quality defined by PalTel.
“Basically the idea is to have a mechanism to allow other service providers to use the PalTel infrastructure for a fee and to provide the service to their customers,” Ahmed El-Farra, the CEO of PalInvest, a Palestinian trade group which promotes free trade told The Media Line. “They are still working out what the fee will be but they haven’t agreed with the ministry.”
“The problem in telecommunications is how you get to the end user and PalTel owns the infrastructure in the West Bank and the Gaza,” El-Farra said. “[PalTel’s Internet services provider] Hadara is basically monopolizing the entire Internet structure. This is part of liberalizing the market but it’s more complicated than it seems. It’s not just a plan; it’s the implementation on the ground which will put it to the test.”
The ministry’s initiative is based on a model very similar to Israel’s Internet market, which has a number of Internet service providers competing with one another under a ‘Bitstream’ scheme in which they share access to two Internet infrastructures.
“Things have been very restrictive to just PalTel,” the minister said. “We are just moving in the same direction as Israel. Now the market will be open to other companies.”
A number of sources told The Media Line that the PalTel Group is planning to downsize so as to better compete under the new scheme for open competition in the Palestinian Internet services market. The PalTel Group is also believe to be planning to dissolve Hadara, the group’s Internet subsidiary and currently the only Internet service provider in the West Bank and Gaza, or to make it a separate company.
Tareq Maayah, CEO of Exalt Technologies, a Palestinian software development company, argued the ministry’s initiative falls far short of introducing competition into the Palestinian Internet services market.
“The ministry is falling short of the ultimate goal,” he told The Media Line. “Basically the ‘Bitstream’ scheme just requires PalTel to sell the rights to use their fixed lines to other Internet providers. This means that the competition is still under PalTel’s control and the quality of the Internet line is still controlled by PalTel.”
“It’s an issue of quality of service and pricing,” Maayah said. “We’d like to see much more competition. It would have been better quality, more reliable Internet at a higher speed at a much cheaper cost.”
But El-Farra, head of the trade group, argued that the PalTel group was simply protecting its interests like any other business would do.
“I don’t think they are directly resisting it, they are trying to go along with whatever the ministry is asking for so that they can keep their position as the market leaders,” he said. “They are being creative in how they are responding, for example by developing a ‘Bitstream’ model which would keep them as the market leaders.”
“The reality is that PalTel has this power and they want to exercise it and make money one way or another,” El-Farra continued. “As business managers they are trying to deal with regulatory changes in a way which keeps them in the lead. I don’t blame them for that.”
TRANSCRIPT:
JAMES SNYDER
Director,The Israel Museum
In conversationwith
FELICE FRIEDSON
Presidentand CEO of The Media Line News Agency
When legendary Jerusalem MayorTeddy Kollek inaugurated the Israel museum in 1965, his vision was thatthe Jewish State offer a world class repository of art and archaeologyprominently featuring its culture. In 1997, the Israel Museum acceleratedits climb toward becoming a world class institution when James Snyder,then the deputy director of Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, wasgiven the reigns. Innovative exhibits from all over the world beganappearing in the museum bolstering the Israel Museum’s own exhibitsand unique collections, while Israel’s own treasures began to visitthe world’s premier museums.
Snyder is about to re-launchthe Israel Museum following a three-year, $100 million facelift andreconstruction program.
The Media Line’s FeliceFriedson discussed the Museum’s re-launch and the vision behindit with James Snyder as final preparations for the gala were underway.
TML: So,James, which came first: The $100 million vision or the$100 million budget?
Snyder: Well,I’ll tell you something: the first time I came to see the campus ofthe museum was when I was asked to become director. I knew the museumbecause of its world reputation. In a very short period of time—31years—the museum had become one of the strongest encyclopaedic museumsworldwide and with a very strong and active program in modern and contemporaryart, which are my own fields. When I came to Jerusalem and I steppedon the campus, I was just astonished at the beauty of the place andthe way that art and archaeology and landscape and architecture synthesizedto create a place that said, “this is about culture”; was somethingthat I felt was really special. Oddly, I had a vision that day to takethe museum from the potential it clearly had to a higher level thatwould really be about showing how here, perhaps more than any othermuseum setting anywhere else in the world, you could make a statementabout universality and material culture, starting from the beginningof time and coming to the present. And in a way, the project that weare completing now is the realizing of what that first spontaneous visionis about.
TML: What does$100 million get you?
Snyder: That’s alsoa good question. We are at the tail end of an age where museum expansionsor museum redevelopments or new museum development projects have costmany multiples of that number and in a way, we set out to demonstratethat you can make a complete and transforming change to the public faceof the museum and only spend $100 million. In our case, whatthis will do is allow us to double our collection galleries from 100,000square feet to 200,000 square feet and then add approximately100,000 square feet of new construction devoted to entry, visitor servicesand movement through the campus.
TML: Whenyou arrived on the scene in 1997, I suspect you knew that much of whatyou inherited had to go at some point. What was your tipping point andwhen did your vision become a work in progress? What were the prioritiesin creating that new plan?
Snyder: It’svery amazing. Teddy was a visionary. On the other hand, Teddy was nota long-range planner. Teddy actually pulled together all the piecesof the museum in a kind of serendipitous way and it worked. The maincampus designed by Russian-born, German-trained Bauhaus-trained émigréto Palestine, Al Mansfeld; combined with the Shrine of the Book, designedby Frederick Kiesler, an Austrian émigré to the U.S.; and the BillyRose Art Garden, designed by Isamu Noguchi, a Japanese émigré to theWest Coast of the U.S. Three different kinds of modernism all informedby sources in different parts of the world, all brought together onthis campus in 1965. So for us, it wasn’t about throwing anythingaway. It was about realizing the amazing quality of the original bonesof the original architectural heritage of the place and building onthat legacy. So in fact, our project is much about we call a “renewal.”We call it that because the project isn’t about taking everythingdown and starting from scratch. It’s really about building upon thevision of the bones of the original.
TML: How did yourwish list take shape?
Snyder: I wouldsay in a kind of organic way. We didn’t do this immediately. I arrivedin 1997 and we spent five or six years—we really passed the museum’s40th anniversary pushing the pre-existing campus to its limits.At that point, we saw what the real strengths of the campus were; whatthe real quality of its original architecture was all about. It’snot that there was a “wish list” per se. There was just an ideato redress the campus, to reorder the way you move through the beautyof the pre-existing place. So that you could bring out the strengthof character of that place and reorder its interior so that you couldreally experience the unfolding of material culture from the start oftime until today.
TML: Give me avisual example.
Syder: Well, it’san amazing thing. Jerusalem is a unique city in that it’s built fromits own bedrock, as we all know. So the Israel Museum, clad in Jerusalemstone but built of glass, steel and other materials, sits on a hilltopthat is Jerusalem stone and we actually excavated 1,000,0000 cubic feetof Jerusalem stone so as to order the plan and reengineer the plan withinthe original and preexisting envelope of the campus. The changes, ina way, that we made are surgical. When we are all finished, you willsee and feel the aura of the essence of the original modernist ideaof this place as a modernist that is modern backdrop for showing thehistory of material culture from the start of time to the present moment.It’s a curious thing. It’s a thrilling thing. Now, as you arrivehere, we have formalized the entry. We have made a more clear path fromthe front of the campus to the heart of the campus. But now, unlikebefore, you will stand at the heart of the museum and you will be ableto turn around 360 degrees and you will see the entrances to our collectionsfor archaeology; Jewish art and life; the Western fine art traditions;the non-Western fine art traditions; our main auditorium; and our maintemporary exhibitions galleries—all in a main 360 degree turn fromthe heart of the museum, from a place we now call the Cardo.
TML: How manyvisitors enter the museum on an annual basis?
Snyder: It’sfascinating. Prior to the start of the second intifada, our attendancewas moving up toward 1 million visitors a year. The second intifadachanged that dramatically and we fell to about 300,000 visitors a year.Now, I would hasten to add that a city with 700,000 residents in a countrywith 6 or 6.5 million residents, that’s not a small number of visitors.And yet, post-intifada, our attendance was primarily local andon the order of 300,000 to 400,000 a year. In the last two years, duringwhich 90 percent of the campus has been under reconstruction, we’veactually had an average of 500,000 visitors a year, which is remarkable.
TML: Canyou break down the demographics of where these people are coming fromfor the most part?
Snyder: I wouldsay 50 percent are local and we have a very, very loyal local audiencefrom Jerusalem and its surrounding environs; and 50 percent is worldwide.
TML: Israeli-Jewand Israeli-Arab?
Snyder: Absolutely. The museumis really about intercultural resonance and inter-communal engagementand our audience reflects that. Our audience is really a mirror of that,not just in our local attendance where it is as much as about everycommunity that lives and works around Jerusalem, but we see it in ourinternational traffic. It’s great.
TML: What do youanticipate in terms of traffic with this new renovation?
Snyder: We’llsee. We are not about politics but our attendance is, of course, influencedby how the country sits in the eyes and minds of the rest of the world.So if we are in a calm, international environment, our attendance shouldcontinue to grow dramatically the way that tourism in Israel has continuedto grow in the past few years.
TML: Youhelped personally to grow MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art, and you hada vision: a $60 million campaign to help enhance what they built there.How has that experience helped you in this current experience, thisthree-year $100 million renovation?
Snyder: It’sfunny—that experience is now almost a quarter of a century ago butwhat it did teach me was the importance of creating cultural placesof strength, of soul and of spirit. When you build a cultural place,it’s not just about making a building. And in a funny way, our projectisn’t about making a building. Our project is about strengtheningthe power of the character of this place and making sure it radiatesa message of culture. I did learn that at MOMA. MOMA is really the fountainheadof modernism in my own field—my academic field is modernism—andreally even here, where of course we are dealing with cultures thatare ancient and are part of a continuum that begins in prehistory, beforeancient times and comes to the present. But it’s still about modernism.It’s about our own moment in time. When I was at MOMA, my focus wasat beginning at the origins of modernism and looking ahead, and nowwhat I realize is that if you take modern and contemporary moments,they really sit on the crust of a long history of material culture,which is what this place is all about.
TML: James,it wasn’t long after you arrived in the nineties that the Israel museumwas clearly expanding its horizons so that the art, archaeology andculture of the region was supplemented by exhibits on loan from othermuseums. How were those selections made?
Snyder: When you’rean encyclopedic museum, the world is your oyster in a way because youcan think about how works of art from different cultures and from differentperiods of time and history can be juxtaposed in ways that are reallyresident or illuminating. I would say in years that we developedour exhibition program we were always in thinking about what we havehere and how that can be amplified, clarified or stimulated by bringingmaterial by other parts of the world. Then what happened here is quiteinteresting. Our collections comprise 500,000 things. The oldest objectis a million years old. We begin a million years ago. We come to thepresent moment with a very active program in collecting in contemporaryart. We collect the cultures of this region of the world, we collectthe cultures of all other regions of the world. We realized severalyears ago that more important than bringing loans from elsewhere wassurfacing the quality of the material we have ourselves. In the lastfive years, we have refocused our attention to making exhibitions—-major exhibitions—using our own material and then circulating thoseexhibitions worldwide. In the last two years while our reconstructionprogram has been ongoing, I think we circulated exhibitions to 19 venueson four continents worldwide from the Israel Museum. It’s reallya great thing to look at my table: I have a stack of exhibitionbooks from countries in South America, North America, Europe and Asia;in Portuguese, in Italian, in Danish, in Turkish. In this past year,which has been a challenging year in terms of politics and diplomaticrelations between Israel and Turkey, the Israel Museum presented anexhibition of Chagall from the Israel Museum collections at the PeraMuseum in Istanbul and it was a blockbuster.
TML: Do you thinkyou could do that today?
Snyder: I suspectthat we could. This was just within the last six months. And to haveon my table a book on Chagall from the Israel Museum in Turkish is areally thrilling thing. Our exhibition was Chagall from the Israel Museumfor the first time in Turkey. Chagall was not a familiar artist to Turkishaudiences.
TML: The one-million-year-oldoldest artifact that is housed at the Israel Museum: what is it?
Snyder: It’sa funny thing. Of course, archaeology here is almost entirely aboutthe indigenous archaeology of the ancient land of Israel. We have somematerial from other parts of the world, or that came from the marketplace,but most of what we have is documented to the source of excavation. The oldest thing we have, which is a million years old, is a set ofelephant bones, and the evidence of the implements that were used tohunt and dismember an elephant. It’s not so much archaeology as itis anthropology but it is an indication of the hand of man touchingmaterial culture. And then you jump to 325,000 years ago and we havein the collection a small basalt pebble-like fertility goddess thatwas carved with the flint that was considered not by us, but by theacademic world as the oldest object sculpted by the hand of man. Andthen you jump to 20,000 years ago, when the collections here reallybegin with the first objects that demonstrate the notion of existentialreflection and material culture. Beautiful river stones with faces carvedin them. From that point on, from 20,000 years ago to through the Ottomanempire, it’s a continuum of material culture reflecting man’s thinkingabout himself and about life and later about polytheism, about monotheism,about Judaism and then formative Christianity and Islam, and finallyto the flowering of Ottoman culture from this part of the world to theEast and the West.
TML: What newadditions are to be unveiled?
Snyder: Many.I can’t even begin to enumerate the amazing new things you’ll seethere.
TML: Give me anexample of what the public is going to see.
Snyder: We’ve doubledand reinstalled all of the collection galleries of the museum. In greatpart, this is really about surfacing the strength of what we alreadyhave but we also have amazing new highlights. In archaeology for example,you’ll see from the Crusader Period, a very rare fresco from the tombof St. Mary in Gethsemane. And you’ll see a magnificent, 17 th- century Ottoman period Mihrab, prayer niche from Isfahan. In JewishArt and Life, we will be displaying for the first time some of our greattreasures of illuminated manuscripts including the magnificent late15th– century copy of the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides (Rambam)that was written and illuminated in Northern Italy. As you know, wehave had in our collection, in Jewish Art and Life, synagogue interiorsfrom three synagogues: two in Europe and one in Asia. One from Italy,one from Germany and one from Cochin in Southern India. We’ve nowadded a fourth, which is from one of the earliest synagogue communitiesin South America in Paramaribo in Suriname, a magnificent early 18th-centurycomplete synagogue interior in Suriname. So now our synagogue collectionscover Europe, Asia and the Americas. It’s remarkable and unique. Inthe fine arts, we have works of art that we are adding in all categories.In contemporary art, which as I’ve said, is kind the crust of thislong timeline of material culture, we’re opening our galleries withan exhibition called “Still Moving,” which in a way is on the subjectof slow movement in contemporary art, but of course, it’s also a playon words because it’s about continuing to move ahead and the factthat we are still moving. That exhibition includes nearly 30 recentacquisitions in contemporary art which will be highlights of the exhibition,again, sitting on the crust of material culture.
TML: Glad youbrought that up—looking ahead, kids come from schools from all overthe country to visit the Israel Museum. Is there anything innovativethat you have envisioned specifically for children?
Snyder: For children,we are of course developing programs, guidelines and ways for them toexperience and put their arms around the notion of the history of materialculture, all in one site and setting. I have a little bit of a dreamthat children will start to come here once a week and every week for52 weeks of the year; that they’ll tackle a different moment alongthat timeline. So that over the course of the year, they can start atthe beginning and end today. And year after year, they can comeback and cut that sequence of experiences in many different ways andover time really come to have a sense of the roundness of world culture.
TML: The IsraelMuseum has almost an equal number of volunteers as the number of thosewho are employed by the museum. To what do you attribute this number?
Snyder: I’dsay several things. First, I’d say that our 350 volunteers are treasuresof our collections, the way that our collections are treasures of thecollections. A lot of people retire to Jerusalem from all overthe world and they have time and energy and it’s really great andwe’re a magnet for them. And they do everything. They are our faceto our public. They work at the information desk. They work as guides.They work in the offices and it’s really a great resource.
TML: Howmany workers did you employ during the three-year reconstruction periodand where did they come from?
Snyder: Well,we kept our own staff very busy publishing books, making exhibitionsand designing and installing the new galleries. The construction project,probably at its peak, employed about 400 workers who came from a totalof seven countries. It was really amazing. We feel that we sit at thecenter of the universe here so when you do a project like this and yourconstruction teams come from all over the world, it’s really a greatreflection of what our essence is about.
TML: AndI’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about the funders. Where are theyfrom and how do you raise $100 million?
Snyder: The museumis really supported by the world and we have an international councilwhich is just a remarkable enterprise worldwide. We have organizationsformally in 14 countries and we have friends all over the globe. Everythingthat happens here happens because of what all of those friends feelabout the museum and about the extent to which they believe in the museumand are committed to what we do. Our campus project is funded in aninteresting way. Again, we didn’t build a building. We renewed a campus.We decided to make it a collective initiative and I think 21 friendsand family and foundations from all over the world contributed giftsof $5 million and $10 million to make possible this transformative changeof this place.
TML: Withyour three-year renovation complete, what does James Snyder have athis command which he didn’t have between 1997 and 2010?
Snyder: We don’tthink in those terms. We always think that we have the resource thatis the great potential of this place. Perhaps with this project we havetaken ourselves one step closer to realizing the potential of this place.We hope we have given it a bit more clarity, made it a bit more beautifulbut really what this place is about is all of that richness. If we saton a landscape of beauty and cultural concentration and cultural intensity,hopefully we are sitting on that landscape with the sense all the moreso of the power of that place.
TML: Whenyou think of all of the great art institutions of the world, The MetropolitanMuseum; MOMA; the Louvre; the Prado—where does the Israel Museumtake its place and how do you compare it to the museums of the MiddleEast?
Snyder: I’mnot sure I’m the one to answer that question but I must say there’ssomething quite special about being an encyclopaedic museum that isbeing a universal museum that sits on a hilltop surrounded by the majestyof Jerusalem. It really does make us stand apart from all of thoseother great museums by virtue of universalism that we have and by virtueof the location of where we sit at the heart of the universe.
TML: Isthere any encounter over the current years that you have been at thehelm of the Israel Museum in the political arena that has been problematic?
Snyder: I thinkwe really demonstrate the point that culture is exactly not about politics.We are fortunate in that respect but really what I want to say is thatwe are really not about politics. Our 20 acres are the state ofthe Israel Museum and it’s just remarkable in how the worldrespects that and that what we do is really about the message of interculturalconnection, inter-communal connection and universal connection and it’sreally what makes us great and what makes us special.
TML: What do youdo in your spare time, James?
Snyder: I run the IsraelMuseum and it’s a pleasure and a privilege.
