Ramallah’s Al-manara Square in 2007. (Photo: FLIckr)
In the small, dimly lit Archeological Museum of Ramallah, a timeline of the city and its surrounding villages is pasted on the wall. It runs through all of the major periods in ancient and modern history. On display in the three-storey museum are brittle artifacts dug from the nearby hills—bowls, tools and statues.
Firas Aqel, the thin, clean-shaven Palestinian director of the museum, acts as its curator, too. “We’ve been through many stages of history, different people ruling the land, as you can see,” he says and points at the timeline.
“The Crusaders, then the Turks, then the British were here. The Jordanians and now we have Israel,” he says. “Through all of this, the Palestinians have been in this area. People have been living in these hills. We’re in the land.”
There may have been people here, but Ramallah of the past was very different from today’s overcrowded, bustling city; there wasn’t too much here. For most of its history, Ramallah has been a small, pastoral town, nestled in the quiet hills to the north of Jerusalem.
Ramallah’s size, with a municipal population of around 30,000 and a regional population of nearly 300,000 is a recent development. Its principal status, as the cultural and economic center, and political capital of the Palestinian West Bank, is also new. It wasn’t always this way.
A Place of Refuge
To understand the character of the city, we have to go back in time, to the 16th century, when a group of Christians settled in Ramallah from present-day Jordan.
They were fleeing religious strife—sectarian disagreements between Muslims and Christians—and came west looking for peace. They found it here. This is the folktale that is told (in a few different variations) by older residents, and it’s become an important narrative for the city, commemorated by statues in the city’s central square. Ramallah’s first residents were exiles.
They built their new homes on the ruins of old, crumbling crusader castles and worked as farmers, shepherds and blacksmiths. Their town grew, slowly and steadily. Powers shifted, but Ramallah stayed free of regional politics and strife.
In the 19th century, the British came to Ramallah and occupied the city by military force, but also brought electricity, modern infrastructure and jobs to the small city. When the British Mandate ended, Israel declared its statehood and life in Ramallah changed again.
“In 1948, the population of Ramallah doubled,” says Khaldun Bshara. Bshara is the author of a number of books and articles about architectural restoration and cultural preservation in the West Bank, including an essay called “The Palestinian Spaces of Memory’s Role in the Reconstruction of New Collective Narrative in the Nation Building Process.”
“The birth of this city as we know it,” Bshara says, “was a result of the Nakba.” Al-Nakba, or “The Catastrophe,” was the exodus of over 750,000 Palestinians.
Palestinian refugees, many coming from coastal cities like Jaffa and Haifa, Bshara explains, made their way to Ramallah. Refugees set up camps on the outskirts of the town or moved into homes in the city. There are four official refugee camps in the Ramallah area, Ama’ri, eir Amma, Jalazon and Qalandia, formed in ’49.
Following the creation of Israel, the West Bank went under Jordanian rule. That changed in ’67, after the 1967 War, when the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, were occupied by Israeli troops.
“In 1971, Israel redefined the borders of Ramallah,” Bshara says “And at the same time there was a strategic limiting of Ramallah’s growth. They defined where and how the city would develop. During occupation, growth of the city came to a halt. You had to apply for building permits and jump through hoops,” he says.
“A lot of other things changed, too,” Bshara continues, “We lost a lot of our fundamental freedoms. Moving from place to place became harder.”
Close Enough to Touch
Ramallah means “God’s Hill,” or “The Heights of God,” and is a mixture of Aramaic and Arabic. Ram is an Aramaic word for hill, and Allah is the Arabic name for God. The city is built on a cluster of small hills, bunched together. The city is at a higher altitude than Jerusalem and the air is always slightly cooler.
If you stand on one of the taller hills, you can see far into the surrounding landscape. Rolling, rocky hills spread in all directions, dotted with low, gnarled trees.
Israel’s seperation wall is nearby, too, and settlements crouch on high lands in the distance. Some days, you can see Jerusalem’s skyline. On clear, crisp nights you can also see all the way to Tel Aviv, where the coastal city’s lights fall away into the expanse of the Mediterranean. Few Palestinians in Ramallah have been to the ocean or Jerusalem, but from here, these places feel close enough to touch.
From al-Manara Square, the central roundabout in downtown Ramallah, Jerusalem is exactly 14.63 kilometers away. This precise distance is printed on a blue ceramic plaque posted in the square, a reminder of how close we are to the old, sacred city.
Every morning, the military checkpoint at Qalandia is a congested mess, as Palestinians with proper Israel-issued identification attempt to pass into Jerusalem to either work or—on Friday—pray at Al-Aqsa Mosque. There are also East Jerusalem Palestinians who have jobs in Ramallah; they’ll attempt to pass through the checkpoint in the afternoons, retuning home after a day’s work. It can take hours to go through the checkpoint.
“Jerusalem is our original city,” Sameeh T. Hammoudeh, a professor of Political Science from Birzeit University, says.
“Israel has encouraged us to forget about Jerusalem and to think of Ramallah as our capital,” he explains. Palestinian institutions and political organizations are barred from East Jerusalem, he notes.
“But if we had any say—if we could choose our capital—of course it would be Jerusalem,” Hammoudeh tells me, “not Ramallah.”
Palestinians in Ramallah cling to their memories of Jerusalem, or Al-Quds in Arabic, “The Holy.” It’s always been a sacred symbol; here, it’s taken on a powerful nationalistic, significance.
There are four official UN refugee camps in Ramallah, and other, unofficial neighborhoods where more refugees live, too. On the walls of a camp to the east of the city center, there are spray-painted Palestinian flags, and one colorful wall-sized mural of the Dome of the Rock.
Handcrafts shops in Ramallah’s teeming city center sell traditional khaffiyehs, hand made dresses and embroidery. One wall hanging depicts Handala—the iconic young, barefoot, cartoon refugee drawn by Naj al-Ali—next to a Palestinian flag. “Home is Where the Heart is,” is embroidered in colorful letters.
“The West Bank was Choked.”
Almost every corner of the city is being developed. In downtown Ramallah, surrounding al-Manara square, shops are stacked on top of each other. Streets are cluttered and bustling. Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank in large part is what caused Ramallah to grow to its now-swollen size.
To some extent during the first and definitely during the second intifada, the West Bank “was strangled,” Dr. Adel Yahya says. Yahya is the author of “Palestinian Refugees: 1948-1998” and director of the Palestinian Association of Cultural Exchange, an organization that leads tours through the occupied West Bank (“We don’t deal with politics on our tours,” he says, “just cultural history. But inevitably we run into soldiers.”)
“Nablus was strangled during the second intifada. Hebron has since been strangled from within. The West Bank was choked. All of the business moved to Ramallah,” Yahya says. Conditions here are easier; there is a relative peace.
The construction of the separation wall in 2002 and the institution of military checkpoints put further strain on the West Bank economy. The regular growth of Israeli settlements—there are now officially 120 settlements in the West Bank, and another 100 unofficial outposts—has put a very real pressure on Palestinian cities. Bypass roads, open only to settlers and Israeli military, isolate the Palestinian West Bank into separate sections and further limit movement and growth.
Ramallah, thanks in part to international aid, quickly recovered from the damage done during the second intifada. There are still some parts of the city where you can tell the city was under military siege, but not many. The city is growing, but it is an uneven, untenable growth.
“When you look at the city, it looks like it’s developing. It looks good. But if you look close, Ramallah’s infrastructure is not suited for this,” Yahya tells me. “It’s crowded. It’s polluted. The economy cannot grow coherently. This isn’t sustainable.”
“Where’s the State?”
Despite U.S. President Barak Obama’s words of warning, and Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s rigid, uncompromising position about “indefensible borders,” Mahmoud Abbas, whose offices are located here in Ramallah, will likely go forward with a Palestinian bid for state recognition at September’s U.N. meeting. The State of Palestine, if it will be recognized, will be based on the ’67 borders and East Jerusalem will be the capital.
In Ramallah, some Palestinians remain hopeful, but wary. They have good reason to remain skeptical. They’ve seen this before. “How many times have we declared our statehood?” Bshara asks. Expectations are not high because “there’s a severe imbalance of power,” Hammoudeh explains.
“Israel has the sovereignty,” Hammoudeh goes on. “Even if the whole world acknowledges a Palestinian state, Israel is still occupying us. They have control over our land, our economy, our politics. The U.N. vote is a political move, a moral, ethical gesture—which we need—but that’s all.”
“Maybe they’ll recognize a state,” he shrugs. “But what state? Where’s the state?”
“It’s not likely that we’ll see immediate results,” Yahya adds, “but we’ll corner the U.S. and put pressure on Netanhayu.”
“We don’t have an airport, we pay taxes to Israel, we don’t have our own borders,” Bshara says. “Why announce our independence when we are still occupied? Our land is sliced up into sections; we are limited to our cities. We can’t move freely.”
Ramallah’s Deputy Mayor, Mahmoud Abdullah, wears a neat three-piece suit and is generally optimistic about municipal development. (Sidewalks are being widened in parts of Ramallah; gardens are being planted.) But he is worried that conditions in Ramallah and the West Bank could become worse after September. “Israel could choose to make life harder for us, not easier,” he says. “It’s up to them.”
“The Beacon”
Abu Suffiyan works in a men’s clothing shop near al-Manara Square. He’s lived in Hebron and Jerusalem, but now calls Ramallah home. He came here to work and to raise his family. Business isn’t great, he says, but it’s manageable.
“In al-Khalil, what the Jews call Hebron,” he explains, “the situation is too hard. So I came here.” Abu Suffiyan looks from his shop windows into the swarming al-Manara Square, the heart of Ramallah.
On the edges of the square there are two banks—a Bank of Palestine and an Arab Bank—a fresh juice stand and a popular shawarma shop. There are also a cluster of other stalls selling spices, soap, hats, sponges and sweaters; the goods sprawl onto the sidewalk. Shops are stacked on top of each other; every crevasse and alleyway reveals another storefront or business.
Over the bustle of the square, the call to prayer sounds from the Jamal Abdel Nasser Mosque, one block away. The mosque is one of the biggest in the West Bank, after al-Aqsa.
The six main arteries of the city converge at al-Manara. One block away you can catch buses to Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nablus, Jericho, Hebron and all of the villages in between.
During the British Mandate, Ramallah’s electricity was distributed from al-Manara, and this is how the square got its name. There used to be a small iron box sitting in the middle of the square with a light bulb mounted on top “about the size of a watermelon,” Naseen Shahen writes in “A Pictorial History of Ramallah.”
When the light was turned on, the entire square was illuminated. If you were walking in the dark, the light from the square could guide you, from blocks away. People started calling it al-Manara, “The Beacon,” and the name stuck.
A sculpture of lions, said to represent one of Ramallah’s founding Christian families, was put up in the ’50s. It was removed in ’83 when the city was under full Israeli-control, but a new, bigger set of sculptures—again of the same symbolic lions—was put up in ’93.
From Abu Suffiyan’s shop, he has a clear view of the traffic circle around al-Manara, where boys climb on top of the faded, stone lions and pose for pictures. Abu Suffiyan’s looking for better work, he says. His job doesn’t pay too well and the hours are gruelingly long.
“I need a better job. Really. The pay is too small, even here in Ramallah,” he says.
He’s standing in the doorway, on the street, during a lull in the workday. It’s late afternoon, almost dusk. “But it won’t go on forever. Something will come up for me,” he says. “Things will change, little by little.”
Abu Suffiyan lives in sight of Jerusalem—where his brother and sister live—but can’t go there himself. He also spent one year in prison, for defending himself against an attack from extremist, West Bank settlers. His life, like many here, has been directly affected by the conflict.
Ramallah’s citizens, like Abu Suffiyan, share something with the original 16th century refugees. They’re leaving conflict behind, and on top of yesterday’s ruins, hoping to move on and make a new life. And maybe, eventually, a state.
Someone comes into the store and Abu Suffiyan greets them. “Salaam alaykum, tfadal,” Peace be with you, welcome.” It’s Saturday night, and in al-Manara, the stream of traffic is steady.
Lights from coffee shops shine around the square and the smell of argilla wafts through the air. Evening prayer has begun at the mosque and three of four stories above, someone has pushed their windows open wide. Their radio is on, playing an Arabic dance song, and the pulsing melody lifts into the night.
Sam Kestenbaum is an American writer and editor based in the West Bank. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Jerusalem Report and The World of Chinese. He is a regular contributor to The Palestine Monitor and Tikkun Daily.
