[Reader-list] On Ramallah - 1

[Monica Narula]

The writer William Dalrymple has been travelling in the middle east, 
and spent some time in Ramallah. He is writing pieces on his 
experiences and encounters for the Guardian. (which i shall post here 
as i get them!)

best
Monica

They came in their tens of thousands in the early 90s, selling up in 
the west to start afresh in the 'new Palestine'. Now daily violence 
and curfews are bringing them to the edge of ruin. In the second of a 
series of major articles on the intifada, William Dalrymple talks to 
some of the forgotten victims of the conflict - the Palestinian 
middle class

Tuesday October 1, 2002
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/>The Guardian

It is only 7pm but already there is loud Algerian rai - Youm Warra 
Youm - booming at top volume from the speakers in the Bethlehem Radio 
2000 Net Cafe. The remix drowns out the Eminem video on MTV which 
flashes from the widescreen TV over the bar. Tripping over the floor 
lights are some 40 middle-class Palestinian girls in tight T-shirts - 
all firm olive midriffs, fashionable flares and beautifully braided 
hair. They are dancing the dabkeh with hands raised, swaying as their 
clapping boyfriends look on. There could be few worse places in 
Palestine to try to conduct an interview. But this is Reem 
Abu-Aitah's favourite spot in Bethlehem, the place she says most 
reminds her of normal life - or at least her previous life in Europe 
- and she insists that we struggle on over the stamping and dancing 
and the bass boom.

"Just look at these babes," she says. "They've been under curfew for 
weeks now and this is their first opportunity to get out and have a 
graduation party. It only takes one day - just one day - without the 
Israelis locking us in our homes and things get back to normal." Then 
she adds after a pause: "Well, most things."

There are good reasons for Abu-Aitah's hesitation. The town is 
completely encircled by new Israeli settlements built during the past 
12 years, mostly on confiscated Bethlehem land. Israeli Merkava tanks 
are dug in on hilltops to the north and the south, their guns 
pointing out over Bethlehem's churches and mosques, bazaars and 
piazzas. And while the illegal Israeli settlers have free movement 
over the entire West Bank, indigenous Palestinians without foreign 
passports are prevented by the Israel Defence Force (IDF) from 
entering Israel or Jerusalem. The effect of this ban on movement - 
turning every Palestinian town and village into a vast open-air 
prison - has been economically catastrophic. Like many Palestinian 
business people, Abu-Aitah is now on the verge of bankruptcy.

It hasn't always looked this way. In 1998, after 10 years out of the 
West Bank, Abu-Aitah and her elder brother sold up their computer 
business in Birmingham, took out a loan and set up what they hoped 
would be the Palestinian answer to PC World:

"It was a great place. We did it up. It looked really good: we had so 
many accessories, a nice, open, spotlit place you could walk around 
and choose your laptops and desktops, printers, scanners, whatever. 
There was a web design place in the back. The business boomed - there 
was nothing remotely like it around here - and we had just gone into 
profit when Ariel Sharon went for his little walk to al-Aqsa [the 
contested religious site in Jerusalem]."

Abu-Aitah looks up over the dancefloor to the lights of the concrete 
phalanx of new Israeli settlements clearly visible on the hilltops 
through the cafe windows: "Within 10 days, our shop was caught in the 
middle of the crossfire between Bethlehem and [the illegal Israeli 
settlement of] Gilo. We just had to lie on the floor for hours on end 
watching the tracers shooting past the windows. It was horrible. 
Bullets were hitting the walls - if we stood up or ventured outside 
that would have been it. One of our immediate neighbours was killed 
just sitting in her house. Since then, of course, we have barely sold 
a single computer. No one has the cash for a new laptop in this 
climate, even if we could get them through the checkpoints and into 
the shop in the first place. Business is dead. We have big debts."

Abu-Aitah is hardly alone in finding herself in this mess. In the 
early 90s, on the wave of optimism that followed the Oslo accords, 
tens of thousands of middle-class West Bank exiles sold up in the 
west and returned home to invest their life savings in the "new 
Palestine". They ranged from recent graduates, such as Abu-Aitah, to 
homesick Palestinian multi-millionaires who had built up fortunes 
working for the Saudis and Kuwaitis in the Gulf. There are no exact 
figures for how much private money flowed back into Palestinian areas 
during the 90s but it amounted to several billion dollars, with at 
least $300m (£192m) a year coming in throughout the decade. So many 
families returned from the US, bringing with them their exclusively 
Anglophone children, that Birzeit University and several other 
Palestinian colleges had to open Arabic courses to teach the children 
of the returning business diaspora their own language.

Overnight, the landscape changed. Bethlehem, Nablus and Ramallah all 
host the sprawling refugee camps we know from the news reports, 
places whose utter hopelessness breeds the apparently endless stream 
of ill-educated men willing to become Hamas suicide bombers. But 
alongside these places, featured far less frequently in the press, 
are large and well-to-do middle-class suburbs where wealthy, 
highly-educated US and Gulf returnees have settled down in what was - 
at least until the outbreak of the second intifada - great comfort.

Ramallah in particular has a lively middle-class cafe society that 
has doggedly survived the repeated Israeli incursions, closures and 
sieges, the roadblocks and dug-up highways, the seizure of much of 
the town's farmland and the systematic destruction of its olive and 
citrus groves, the bombing of Arafat's compound and everything else 
that, in Palestinian eyes, Sharon has done to strangle the peace 
process and make life as intolerable as he possibly can.

Even now, as you drive through the streets, beside pockets of real 
poverty and deprivation around the camps, you pass gleaming CD shops 
and art galleries, fitness clubs and a string of cappuccino bars. 
There is even a Mercedes dealership. There are large, sprawling 
villas with new extensions and satellite dishes, the obligatory 4x4s 
parked in the driveways. Many such places were smashed up and 
systematically looted by the Israeli army over the Easter invasion 
last April - new Russian immigrants in the IDF, many of them fresh 
from the war in Chechnya, behaved particularly brutally - but the 
people of Ramallah are a house-proud lot and, Arafat's compound 
excepted, the town has largely replaced its broken plate-glass 
windows and rebuilt the streets smashed by the lumbering Israeli 
tanks. (According to Palestinian National Authority figures, the 
Israeli army caused more than $545m [£349m] of damage last year.)

Yet, if some sort of normal life is possible between curfews, then 
profitable business is still unimaginable. The fruit and vegetables 
belonging to Palestinian farmers routinely rot at checkpoints, left 
waiting for days in the sun by bored and bloody-minded IDF officers. 
As no one can leave their towns, it is impossible for shopkeepers to 
supervise imports or orders coming in from Haifa or Tel Aviv. The 
shelves of many shops are empty as the IDF randomly refuses to allow 
non-essential goods through. According to Abu-Aitah, "Occasionally we 
get calls from our shippers and suppliers in Tel Aviv saying, 'Do you 
want an order?' They don't seem to understand that most days we can't 
even get out of our houses to go the 500 yards to the office without 
the Israeli army shooting us. Last month, the shop was only open for 
three or four days. The rest was curfew. Sometimes - many times - I 
think of emigrating again. You have to be crazy to live here if you 
have a choice. But the business keeps me here. We have invested 
everything. What can we do?"

Not everyone has found themselves stuck in this way. Many of the 
young, unattached middle-class Palestinians I met in Bethlehem and 
Ramallah already had their immigration papers with an embassy, while 
many more - especially those with young families - were considering 
doing so. Canada is now the destination of choice, the US being 
perceived as too hopelessly Arabophobic for even Christian 
Palestinians to settle in. Emigration rates are rising by the month, 
especially among Palestinian Christians who find their applications 
getting preferential treatment from western embassies. Either way, 
the people who are going are the young, the bright, the technocrats 
and the moderates: exactly the people both Palestine and Israel will 
count on in the future to bring prosperity and moderation to any 
future state if a peace solution is ever found.

Ironically, this exactly mirrors the situation over the battle lines 
in Israel, where there is also a steady drain of liberals emigrating 
from the country in an attempt to escape the rival fanaticisms of the 
conflict. In the long term, it sometimes seems as if it will just be 
the fundamentalist settlers left to confront their opposite numbers 
in Hamas, with fewer and fewer secular moderates remaining to keep 
the crazies from each other's throats.

Yet despite the gloom, and the growing conviction on both sides that 
the Palestinians have lost this round, many Palestinians refuse to 
give up hope. Zehi Khoury is a 50-year-old Christian Palestinian 
financier from a leading business family: his uncle George started 
the Jaffa orange brand name in the 30s, before being turned into a 
refugee and losing everything at the creation of the State of Israel 
in 1948. After decades running a Saudi multinational, Khoury returned 
from New York in 1992 and made what he calls "a multi-million dollar 
investment" in his homeland, starting its first mobile phone network 
and taking a major share in Palnet, the main Palestinian internet 
service provider; he also bought the Coca-Cola franchise for the area.

It took several days and a couple of failed attempts to get into 
Ramallah to see Khoury's creations: curfews are declared by the IDF 
late at night or early in the morning, on an apparently random basis; 
you usually learn this only on arrival at a two-mile tailback leading 
up to the checkpoint. But on our third attempt Khoury got us into the 
creation he is proudest of: the gleaming offices of his phone 
network, Jawwal. Although it is only five minutes from the dusty 
wreckage of Arafat's compound, Jawwal looks as if it is from a 
different planet. The style is chrome and plate glass; new PCs gleam 
on every desktop. As the staff cannot get to Gaza to see their 
colleagues, they communicate via widescreen video links. Everything 
is set up so that the team workingin the company'scall centres can 
operate from their homes at a moments notice if curfew is declared. 
In contrast to Arafat's poor and ill-educated PA police force, the 
young technocrats who staff Jawwal are chic and, if anything, wildly 
over-educated for the work they do: the chief executive, for example, 
is ex-Nasa.

"For me it was a dream that the minute Oslo was signed I would come 
back here from the US to help found the state," says Khoury. "I went 
for broke and invested everything. Sure, there is a cloud hanging 
over us at the moment, but it is definitely not over. A safe Israel 
is a must for stability in the Middle East. But an independent 
Palestinian state is as important to the Israelis as to the 
Palestinians if that stability and safety is to be achieved. It's as 
simple as that. All the Israelis I meet in the business community 
agree with me. It is a must if there is to be any future for the next 
generation. So no, I haven't written off my investment yet. No way."

Many of the young Ramallah techies who staff operations such as 
Jawwal and Palnet feel the same. Marwan Tarazi is the son of 
Palestine's leading neurosurgeon and is himself one of the top 
Palestinian webmasters and software designers: he helped design 
Arabic MS-DOS. Five years ago he returned home from an extended spell 
in Canada intent, like Khoury, on rebuilding his ravaged and occupied 
country. "I earn about a quarter of what I used to in Canada and of 
course it is irritating not being able to travel around and go 
windsurfing and mountain biking like I used to in Montreal," he says. 
"But this is my home. My duty is here."

Tarazi is developing software for Birzeit University to allow all the 
courses to be taught interactively at home over the net, so that 
students can continue their work when under closure or curfew: 
"Education is the most important thing - it's the building block of 
any nation. You can have all the curfews in the world, but if you 
have a well-educated people, you have the basis for a developed 
country.

"At the moment, the Israelis have closed down the schools and are 
preventing our children from taking their exams. Whole generations of 
kids are coming out with compromised educations, and it's going to 
have a catastrophic effect on society in the long term. Thanks to 
this programme we already have Ramallah kids bedding down in the net 
cafes doing their courses while the IDF rampage outside. It's working 
and it's a fantastic feeling."

Tarazi shrugs his shoulders: "You've got to understand we are living 
in a horror show here. It's very easy to go nuts. You just have to 
keep believing in the future. You have to dream. It's when you stop 
dreaming that you die."

William Dalrymple's book, White Mughals: Love & Betrayal in 
18th-Century India is published next week by HarperCollins, at 
£19.99. He will be lecturing on the book at ArRum, 44 Clerkenwell 
Road, London EC1, tonight at 6.30pm. Tel: 020-7490 8999.
-- 
Monica Narula
Sarai:The New Media Initiative
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054
www.sarai.net