Enclave micropolis: The paradoxical case of Ramallah/al-Bireh

Journal of Palestine Studies

Volumn 37, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 6-20

  Taraki, Lisa ^a  

^a BIRZEIT UNIVERSITY   (Palestine)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CULTURAL INFLUENCE; ENCLAVE; METROPOLITAN AREA; MIGRATION; POLITICAL IDEOLOGY;

AFRICA; ASIA; BEIRUT; BEYROUTH; CAIRO [EGYPT]; EGYPT; EURASIA; ISRAEL; LEBANON; MIDDLE EAST; NORTH AFRICA; OCCUPIED TERRITORIES; PALESTINE; WEST BANK;

EID: 50249119685     PISSN: 0377919X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/jps.2008.37.4.6     Document Type: Article

References (31)

1. John Dugard, the Special Rapporteur on human rights in the OPT, has noted that the number of checkpoints, including roadblocks, earth mounds, and trenches, increased from 376 in August 2005 to 540 in December 2006. These checkpoints divide the West Bank into four distinct areas: The north (Nablus, Jenin, and Tulkarm), the center (Ramallah), the south (Hebron), and East Jerusalem. Within these areas, further enclaves have been created by a system of checkpoints and roadblocks, while highways for exclusive Israeli use further fragment the OPT into 10 small cantons. Cities are cut off from each other as difficult-to-obtain permits are required for travel from one area to another. See United Nations Human Rights Council, "Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, John Dugard," A/HRC/4/17, 29 January 2007.
2. Ramallah and al-Bireh continue to be two administrative entities, each with its own municipality and municipal council. However, the social and physical boundaries between them have all but disappeared, and attachment to distinctive town identities survives only among the "original" natives who today constitute a small proportion of the population. Al-Bireh has a somewhat problematic relationship with Ramallah, having been marginalized and sidelined both culturally and politically. In current usage, the term Ramallah generally subsumes al-Bireh.
3. Ghazi-Walid Falah, "The Geopolitics of Enclavisation and the Demise of the Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict," Third World Quarterly 26, No. 8 (2005), p. 1343.
4. Leila Farsakh, "Independence, Cantons or Bantustans: Whither the Palestinian State?" The Middle East Journal 59, No. 2 (Spring 2005), p. 245.
5. Jeff Halper, "The 94 Percent Solution: A Matrix of Control," Middle East Report, No. 216 (Fall 2000), p. 19.
6. Falah, "The Geopolitics of Enclavisation," p. 1344.
7. Sari Hanafi, "Targeting space through bio-politics: The Israeli colonial project." Palestine Report 10, No. 32 (February 18, 2004), p. 4.
8. For a vignette of Nablus under siege, see Beshara Doumani, "Scenes from Daily Life: The View from Nablus," Journal of Palestine Studies 34, No. 1, pp. 37-50.
9. A survey conducted in Hebron's city center by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) and B'Tselem in 2006 found that at least 1,014 Palestinian housing units (representing almost 42 percent of the units in the area) had been vacated, of which 65 percent had been abandoned since the start of the second intifada. The survey also found that 1,829 of the area's Palestinian businesses (nearly 77 percent of the total) were closed. See ACRI and B'Tselem, "Ghost Town: Israel's Separation Policy and Forced Eviction of Palestinians from the Center of Hebron." Jerusalem: ACRI and B'Tselem, May 2007 (see Settlement Monitor in JPS 144).
10. Azeez Shaheen, Ramallah: Its History and Its Genealogies (Birzeit: Birzeit University, 1982);
11. Naseeb Shaheen, A Pictorial History of Ramallah (Beirut: Arab Institute for Research and Publishing, 1992);
12. Khalil Abu Rayya, Ramallah: Ancient and Modern (Ramallah: American Federation of Ramallah, n.d.);
13. Yusif Qaddura, The History of the City of Ramallah [in Arabic] (Ramallah: Rafidi Printers, 1999).
14. I am indebted to Saleh Abdul-Jawad for sharing with me these insights and his knowledge of and documents pertaining to the social history of al-Bireh in an interview in February 2007 in Birzeit.
15. Diala Khasawneh, Memoirs Engraved in Stone: Palestinian Urban Mansions (Ramallah: Riwaq and Institute of Jerusalem Studies, 2001).
16. Many buildings in Ramallah from this era are documented by Ju'beh and Bishara in their architectural history of Ramallah. Nazmi Ju'beh and Khaldun Bishara, Ramallah: Architecture and History [in Arabic] (Ramallah: Riwaq and Institute of Jerusalem Studies, 2002), p. 26.
17. Shaheen, Ramallah, p. 27.
18. Shaheen gives the following figures for the population in Ramallah in the twentieth century until just before the Nakba: 3,214 in 1905; 3,104 in 1922; 4,286 in 1931; 5,000 in 1941; 6,300 in 1944. He also notes that by 1946, approximately 1,500 of Ramallah's original 6,000 residents had emigrated to the United States. This migration accelerated after 1948, and by 1960 there were over 4,000 Ramallah-born people in the United States. By 1975, the number had exceeded ten thousand, while less than two thousand remained in Ramallah (Shaheen, Ramallah, pp. 28-29).
19. Some of the more intriguing and little-investigated questions pertain to the variable experience of these two groups of refugees. Which refugees ended up in refugee camps in the Ramallah area and beyond (most notably in camps in the Jordan valley), and which were absorbed into the social fabric of the towns? What kinds of capital enabled some refugees to move out of the camps and neighborhoods in which they eventually settled, and what was the temporal and spatial trajectory of this movement? What were the avenues for social mobility available to refugees? In interviews conducted during a research project with which I have been involved, middle and upper-middle class refugees in Ramallah and al-Bireh have invariably stressed the fact that they arrived in Ramallah with nothing; however, studying their life stories, one is struck by the social mobility experienced by some of them. Others remained locked within the confines of the refugee camp or other poor neighborhoods.
20. Shaheen, Ramallah, p. 27.
21. Ramallah natives established three important organizations in the United States, which, in addition to providing a sense of community in the diaspora, were instrumental in maintaining contacts with the home town. Al-Bireh's emigrants to the United States, about whom less is known, established the al-Bireh Palestine Society. Their philanthropy is a source of pride to Birawis both in the United States and in al-Bireh. Several of the town's institutions, most importantly its schools, were established and maintained by this society.
22. Jamil Hilal, The Palestinian Middle Class: Research into the Confusion of Identity, Authority and Culture (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies and Muwatin, the Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy, 2006);
23. Lisa Taraki and Rita Giacaman, "Modernity Aborted and Reborn: Ways of Being Urban in Palestine," in Lisa Taraki, ed., Living Palestine: Family Survival, Resistance, and Mobility under Occupation (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006);
24. Lisa Taraki, "Urban Modernity on the Periphery: A New Middle Class Reinvents the Palestinian City," Social Text 95, forthcoming.
25. Joseph Massad, "Pinochet in Palestine," Al-Ahram Weekly Online, No. 819 (9-15 November, 2006). weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/.
26. Khalid Mansour, "The Night of Ramallah and the Night of Jenin," Al-Watan Voice, 17 August 2004. www.alwatanvoice.com/arabic/ (in Arabic; accessed 1 September 2007).
27. Figures from the 1997 census indicate that 32 percent of the city's population was Christian; if we include the al-Bireh population in this count, the percentage would be considerably lower. See Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Population, Housing, and Establishment Census, Final Results: Ramallah City, City Reports Series 005 (Ramallah: PCBS, 2000).
28. A returnee intellectual's defense of the dream of a secular and liberal Ramallah in the face of populist and Islamist currents expresses this sentiment well. See Hassan Khader, "Such a Dream Deserves to be Defended," Sueddeutsche Zeitung (Munich), 1 January 2006 (translated from the German). www.kibush.co.il/.
29. Zakaria Muhammad, On Palestinian Culture [in Arabic] (Ramallah: Muwatin, the Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy, 2002), pp. 43-49.
30. Quoted in Omar Barghouti, "Dancing Tragedies and Dreams," the Daily Star, 27 October 2004. www.dailystar.com.lb.
31. Omar Barghouti, "Dancing Tragedies."