Ramallah:: From my Palestine Diary

Ramallah: One Town in the Conflict of Contrast

It has been forty years since Ramallah became the de facto capital of the West Bank. It has been forty years since Israeli tanks first crossed the green line and the occupation began. Since that time Ramallah has witnessed Refugee camps, curfews, casual bombardment from the Israeli defence force, the construction of Yassar Arafat’s governmental compound and the subsequent destruction of that compound by his nemesis, Israeli Prime minister Ariel Sharon. Today both warlords are dead, replaced by their respective deputies and from where I sit Ramallah seems like a different town from the one I watched being reduced to rubble on BBC dispatches. It seems more like a suburb of Damascus or Cairo then the centre of the West Bank, home to an oppressed and occupied people. “Seems” is the appropriate phrase because in this Gordian knot of international politics linguistic camouflage is deployed alongside smoke and mirrors so that little is actually what it seems.

As I write I sit mere yards from the newly constructed “palace of art and culture”, I can see newly constructed flats alongside a modern looking mosque, all indications that Ramallah is a town moving forward. In reality, whilst there is money flowing into the town it is all foreign aid with the aim of providing temporary stability. The palace of culture was built by the EU, Germany funded the reconstruction of roads, the UN is building a local school whilst each refuse truck has the words “donated by the people of Japan” proudly emblazoned on the side. This is not to say that there is not affluence, a relative term for the West Bank, but that affluence is used in a very specific way. In the centre of Ramallah Coca-Cola logos appear next to Fatah propaganda posters whilst Fatah fighters wear Gucci sunglasses and posters for Nike hang alongside those of the latest Martyr. Children from refugee camps may be dressed in cheap designer clothes rather then rags but this does not mean that there is no poverty. In the large Palestinian towns there is a poverty of frustration, of waning hope rather then the absolute poverty of Sub-Saharan Africa. The refugees still long for the day they can return home, back to the houses they lost, back to the lives which were shattered forever by the Nackab or tragedy of the 1967 invasion. This is why foreign aid will only do so much, the EU et al can aim to make Ramallah inhabitable by providing culture and cola but if the refugees were to leave the camps and settle here that would be an admission of defeat and the extinguishment of the hope that has carried them through the horrors of the past forty years.
The situation in Ramallah epitomises the wider picture of complexities and Rhetoric. Ramallah, lies in the heart of the occupied territories or “Palestinian semi-autonomous zone” or even the “western managed area” to borrow terms from Israeli road signs and guidebooks. It is a land occupied by Israel, a nation which aims to attract tourists to the plush resorts of Tel Aviv, and Eliat but upon arrival informs those same tourists not to take photos from the plane and threatens interrogation and cavity searches on the return journey. Israel is a nation founded upon moral principles and religious guidance yet from the very heart of the nation, Jerusalem the contrast could not be greater. Cast your gaze over the skyline of the old city of Jerusalem and amongst the Wailing Wall, the church of the ascension or the Dome of the Rock one can make out the partition wall cutting a deep scar into the nation. The wall is three times the height of the Berlin wall and cuts through Palestinian homes, schools, fields tearing lives apart. These clashes converge in the town of Bethlehem, a town ingrained into our collective memories, a town besieged by military fortifications, saturated with religious significance and invaded by tourists ready to part with their sheckles. In Bethlehem religious scripture stands alongside graffiti calls for Resistance and no one bothers to notice. No one that is except the Palestinian people ready to tell their tale.

Yet throughout this series of vivid contrasts, propaganda and symbolism there is one icon which stands out to unite both Palestinians and Israelis, one symbol which shows that these people aren’t so different. From the Stars and Bucks coffee shop which stands above two intersection main roads of Ramallah I can see a mural of a large golden key. The key has become a popular symbol in Palestinian culture; many refugees from both 1948 and 1967 still have the keys to their old homes and cherish them in order to keep the hope alive that some day they shall return. This is not the first time in history that this symbol has been used in defiance, to enshrine hope. There is a small museum in the Israeli port of Haifa which shows the history of Jewish immigration into Israel following the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Palestine was the colonial possession of Britain and in order to deal with the thousands of dispossessed flooding into the tiny mandate British troops detained thousands of refugees in detention camps in Cyprus. The immigration museum shows Jewish refugees carving and painting Keys to symbolise the return to their promised land. Today those refugees have returned home and now it is their decedents who drive Palestinians into camps whilst it is the people of Ramallah, of Bethlehem, of Hebron and of Jericho who are left painting keys, and clinging to a hope that refuses to die. Perhaps it is one of history’s great ironies that the suffering of both peoples can be epitomised in the same symbol, or perhaps it is a sign that despite the past forty years these two people have more in common then they realise.

Today forty one years after the six day invasion, or “re-unification” if we are to use the official tourist board lexis, the people of Ramallah have witnessed little but cosmetic change. True, tanks no longer pound the buildings but only because the petition wall provides a strangle hold. It is time for real progress, time for the heirs of the warlords, both bloody from their own wars with the Hezbollah and Hamas, to negotiate and come to a just settlement if the gunmen and Martyr posters are to ever disappear from Ramallah.