"Visitors to ramallah these days are often struck by its boom-town appearance. There are large-scale construction projects underway, a proliferation of hotels and nightclubs, Mexican restaurants, luxury cars, cappuccino prices on par with London or Brooklyn—jarringly at odds with prevailing notions of Palestinian life under the shadow of Israeli occupation. Arafat’s hilltop compound, reduced to rubble by Israeli shelling and bulldozers in 2002, has been rebuilt at vast expense and now houses his pharaonic tomb. The city’s ‘diplomatic quarter’ of al-Masyoun boasts quasi-embassies from the OECD countries, as if it were the capital of a real nation-state, while international dance and theatre companies regularly perform at its state-of-the-art Culture Palace. For some, Ramallah is Palestine’s Green Zone, as isolated from the rest of the Occupied Territories as the notorious US headquarters in Baghdad. It represents an enclave cosmopolitanism, a ‘Bantustan sublime’. The latest metaphor is the ‘bubble’, which manages to combine a sense of cultural insulation from post-Oslo realities with intimations of an over-blown credit system, ready to pop.
There is some truth to these representations. But to the extent that they imply a structural separation between the city and its hinterland, they miss the point. The Ramallah that has emerged over the past twenty-five years or so is not an escape from the Occupation, but the outcome of its dynamic of uneven development and purposeful fragmentation. The changes that Ramallah has experienced since 1994—or 2000, or 2007—are representative of a wider set of phenomena in historic Palestine. As Ramallah grows, in specific directions, along narrowing paths, Palestinian life and possibility are diminished elsewhere. At the same time, the consolidation of people and possibilities in Ramallah makes it a bellwether for the direction in which Palestine is moving as a whole. The city has become the site for huge quantities of foreign investment, fixed in durable structures, institutions and physical spaces that impose new forms of control even as they crystallize new economic-class identities, with their own political logic. Its development is best grasped in this wider context."
Remaking Ramallah
There is some truth to these representations. But to the extent that they imply a structural separation between the city and its hinterland, they miss the point. The Ramallah that has emerged over the past twenty-five years or so is not an escape from the Occupation, but the outcome of its dynamic of uneven development and purposeful fragmentation. The changes that Ramallah has experienced since 1994—or 2000, or 2007—are representative of a wider set of phenomena in historic Palestine. As Ramallah grows, in specific directions, along narrowing paths, Palestinian life and possibility are diminished elsewhere. At the same time, the consolidation of people and possibilities in Ramallah makes it a bellwether for the direction in which Palestine is moving as a whole. The city has become the site for huge quantities of foreign investment, fixed in durable structures, institutions and physical spaces that impose new forms of control even as they crystallize new economic-class identities, with their own political logic. Its development is best grasped in this wider context."
Remaking Ramallah
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