In Ramallah

I’ve never stayed for very long in Ramallah before. I generally preferred to stay in East Jerusalem and then as necessary traverse the ghastly Qalandia crossing point between there and Ramallah, sometimes staying with friends here in Ramallah for a night or two. But this time I decided to make Ramallah my first stop, and to stay here for a week or so, so I can catch up with everything that’s been going on here. It is, after all, three years now since I was last in town.
So yesterday morning, I took a car from Amman down to the Allenby/ King Hussein Bridge. There was almost no-one else seeking to cross– almost as bad a sign as if it had been jam-packed, I think. The deal is you do your Jordan-exit business first, east of the bridge, then take a Jordanian-provided and mandatory shuttle bus across the trickle of water known as the River Jordan, to the Israeli side. But it took nearly an hour for them to gather enough people (ten or so) to justify sending the bus across. I got a bit impatient. But in the bus I found that a fellow-traveler who’s a manager with the (Abu Mazen-controlled) Palestine Investment Fund was also hoping to head up to Ramallah, so we shared a taxi and split the cost of some $120.
Getting in to the West Bank through the Israeli-controlled side was the usual, extremely depressing experience. The Israelis have cadres of young women, presumably doing their national service, whom they use as the “front-line” in many border-control jobs. Many of them love to hang around with each other and with the beefy young guys who also work there, to chat on cell-phones, to stand around admiring each other’s make-up and hair-dos, and to really relish the power they have over all these exhausted-looking Palestinian families whom they have to deal with. The main power they have is to harrass and delay, but it’s backed up by other much more intrusive or fearsome powers, too.
When our bus with ten people rolled in, there were around 60-70 people in the passport-control waiting area, so some of them may well have been waiting since early morning. Just about all of them looked to be Palestinians, since of course just about every Palestinian family in the West Bank has half or more of its family members now living in Jordan. And guess what, people in these families like to get together!!! But to do so, they have to pass through these border-controls that are totally controlled by the cohorts of bored and faintly malevolent young Israelis. Well, that gives just a first glimpse of what then continues to happen to Palestinians inside the West Bank, any time they want to travel from one town or city there to another, I guess.
… If all the Palestinian communities in the occupied territories can nowadays be described as “open-air prisons”– and I believe they can– then Ramallah is probably the “Club Fed”, i.e. the top banana, in this extensive system. Provided you don’t actually need to go anywhere else, provided you have plenty of money (yes, this Club Fed ain’t cheap to live in), and provided you’re capable of completely disabling any sense of solidarity or connectedness you might have with family members, friends, or just plain compatriots who happen to live elsewhere, such as Gaza, you could possibly even live a pretty good life here.
Places that most Ramallah people can’t ever get to include even Jerusalem, which used to be just 12 minutes away by car along the hilltop road. Ramallah’s a historically Christian town, and just about everyone here has family members or close business ties with East Jerusalem. Tough luck. The Wall, with its horrendous– and oh so evocatively looming– watch-towers, stands between.
You are reminded nearly everywhere of the tight noose Israel retains around Ramallah. Like the rest of the West Bank, it is literally a captive market for Israeli produce. Many stores are filled with Israeli-produced goods or with other imports that, having come in through Israeli ports and middle-men give them a nice cut of the profits, too. You can get some great Palestinian fresh produce, and a few locally-manufactured products like Taybeh beer, or some Palestinian-processed foods. But even for those Palestinian industries, their scale is small and many or most of their inputs have to brought in from or through Israel.
… But having said all that, I also have to say that, just for now, I’m getting real pleasure from being here. One big part of that is to reconnect with old friends, which has already started to happen. And the other is just to experience the urban environment in this bustling but airy and beautiful Palestinian Arab city.
I’ve taken a couple of walks now, from my fairly central hotel here up to the “Manara” landmark, around some of the back streets there, and along Main Street a bit. For various reasons– including over the years the actual presence of Israeli occupation troops in the streets, the tensions of various intifadas, or the threat of either of them rolling in at any time– I’ve never really experienced Ramallah as a functioning and flourishing city-center before. I never realized there is a pretty sizeable big produce-market tucked in to the east of the Manara, filling up a number of whole streets with with push-carts piled high with riotously colorful fruits, veggies, and greens. Especially, at this time of year, greens. There are side-streets lined with little stores selling traditional (or made-in-China) housewares: brooms, loofas, knitted string back-scratchers, aluminum pots, etc. Between them are little store-fronts in which people make and sell the very best in Arab street food: felafel carefully made with a dusting of sesame seeds atop each one; kibbeh balls staright out of the deep-fryer; tall pillars of succulently rotating meat for shawerma; stacked rows of whole chickens browning slowly on their automated spits; little meat-pies or cheese-pies; kaak; kunefeh…
Oh, to walk down a street drenched in the smells from all these great foods is a pure delight. Or you turn a corner and the sharp tang of cardamom coffee comes in from somewhere. Or the rich, warm smell of thyme-coated mana’eesh…
There are a lot of cars– yellow taxis everywhere!– and quite a lot of honking that reverberates between the mainly solid stone walls of the city center’s buildings. However, one of the things Abu Mazen’s “Palestinian Authority” has done is put on the streets a large number of pretty well trained traffic cops. Their little whistles punctuate the noise in the city center– as do, too, in the most commercial portion of the city, the loudspeakers that many shop-owners have hung outside their stores, blaring repetitive messages about their “special offers” over and over into the street outside.
One of the best things about Ramallah– as was also true of East Jerusalem, back in the day– is that many of the farm-women you see either selling their produce in the streets or walking purposefully through the crowds to do their business are still wearing their traditional, hand-embroidered dresses. It always amazed me how these women, who spend many months sewing vast swathes and plateaus of these intricate, traditional patterns into their dresses before they get married, would thereafter wear these treasured heirlooms day-in-day-out as they proceeded about what was often very dirty work. Many of the younger women in the street are wearing a simpler, non-embroidered form of hijab. (In the whole broader district around Ramallah, Muslim Palestinians have been in a clear majority for some time now.) But you do still see plenty of women in the older embroidered thobes. That certainly brightens my day.
(I was telling my daughter Lorna a few things about my time in Ramallah in an IM exchange yesterday. She urged me to take and post some photos. I’m a bit reluctant. I feel there’s something a bit exploitative or objectivizing about photography of other people unless it’s as part of a pre-agreed or clearly understood transaction between equals… I feel much more confident about the nature of the transaction if I just write about my experiences, instead.)
I guess the other big observation I have is how generally pleasant the medium- and long-range views from and around Ramallah are. The city is built on a series of hills. Like Amman, which is where I came from yesterday, though the hills and valleys here crowd closer together and are even steeper than the ones in Amman. In both places, as you travel around the city you get many opportunities for pleasing, multi-curved vistas or sweeping views. But here in Ramallah there are many more mature trees interspersed between the buildings. And though there are many fairly undistinguished apartment buildings here of seven or eight stories high, there are still also many gracious older stone houses of two stories or so that are topped with the pyramidal red tile roofs that were once common in this city, as in Lebanon.
(Nowadays throughout most of the West Bank, a cluster of red-tiled roofs is a dead giveaway for an Israeli settlement, since the vast majority of the Palestinians towns and villages here are dominated by buildings that have flat roofs.. much more useful, historically, as additional storage space or a good place to dry your peppers or whatever.)
But the trees and the occasional red roofs here in Ramallah and its twin-city, El-Bireh, make many of the accidental vistas you see as you walk or drive around the place very beautiful indeed.
Club Fed, yes.
And then, there’s Gaza….