Ramallah
Ramallah (Arabic: is a Palestinian city in the West Bank of approximately 57,000 residents. It is located about 15 kilometers (9 miles) north-west of Jerusalem.
Early history
Although mentions of Ramallah can be found throughout historical texts, modern Ramallah was founded in the mid 1500s by the Hadadeens, a tribe of brothers who were descended from Yemenite Christian Arabs. The Hadadeens, lead by Rashed Haddad, arrived from east of the Jordan River near what is now the Jordanian town of Shobak. Although the reasons for the Hadadeen's migration is attributed to fighting and unrest among tribes in that area, a more common rendition is as follows: Rashed's brother Sabri Haddad was once hosting Emir Ibn Kaysoom, the head of a powerful tribe in the region, when Sabri's wife gave birth to a baby girl. According to tribal customs, the Emir congratulated Sabri and asked for the infant's betrothal to his own young son once they both came of age. Sabri believed the request to be in jest, as Christian-Muslim intermarriage was not customary, and agreed to the request in what he likewise considered a joke. Many years later, the Emir came to the Hadadeens and demanded they fulfill their promise, which they refused to do. Many clashes ensued during the following months, with assassinations occurring on both sides. To avoid further bloodshed at the hands of the more powerful Kaysoom tribe, the Hadadeens fled west, and settled on the hilltops of Ramallah, which was only very sparsely populated at the time by a handful of Muslim families. Subsequently, the Hadadeen family elders (along with heads of a few other Christian tribes that arrived in Ramallah afterwards) each became the head of eight clans to whom modern-day Ramallah natives can still trace their ancestry.
Religious influence
Ramallah grew throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as an agricultural village, thus attracting more (predominantly Christian) inhabitants from around the region. In 1700, Yacoub Elias was the first Ramallah native to be ordained by the Jerusalem Orthodox Church, the dominant Christian denomination in the Holy Land at that time. In the early 1800s, the first Arab Orthodox church was built, and a larger replacement church, The Church of Transfiguration, was built in 1850 and remains the city's sole Orthodox Church to this day. During that same decade, the Latin (Roman Catholic) Church established its presence in Ramallah, and its church and adjoining compound remain home to the second largest Christian denomination in the city. The Catholic Church also established the St. Joseph's Girl's School in Ramallah which still enjoys high enrollment; and Al-Ahliyyah high school for both sexes. Throughout the later decades, and with the influx of Muslim and Christian refugees and internal migration, numerous mosques were founded throughout the area, as well as a few churches. The Jamal Abdel Nasser mosque is one of the city's largest. A Melkite Catholic Church that also runs a school was also established, as well as other churches and schools including the Lutheran Church and high school, the Arab Episcopal (Anglican) Church and high school, and the Ramallah Baptist Church. [2]
Among the most noted religious groups that were to arrive and establish a presence in Ramallah was the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). The first Quakers to come to Ramallah established a number of small schools for girls in 1869 after what they saw as a dearth of education for girls and women. A clinic was also opened by the Quakers in 1883, with Dr. George Hassenauer serving as the first doctor in Ramallah. The first major Quaker institution was the Friends Girls School (FGS), established by Eli and Sybil Jones in 1889. As the FGS was also a boarding school, it attracted a number of girls from surrounding communities, including Jerusalem, Lydd, Jaffa, and even far away Beirut. In 1901, the Friends Boys School (FBS) was founded, and together with the Friends Meeting House for worship established in the city center in 1910, the three Quaker sites are famous landmarks in Ramallah. Though no longer boarding schools, the two Friends Schools have since become co-ed and renamed as the Ramallah Friends Schools, with the FGS campus housing K-6 classrooms and the FBS housing grades 7-12. According to the schools' official website, most high school students do not elect to take the traditional "Tawjihi" university matriculation exams as is the norm in Palestine, but opt instead for the "International Baccalaureate" exams that are more respected internationally. The schools also encourage students to take the American SAT exams. [3], [4],[5]
Twentieth Century History
By the beginning of the twentieth century Ramallah was an active agricultural town. It was declared a city in 1908 and had an elected municipality as well as partnership projects with the adjoining town of El-Bireh. In World War I, a few locals joined the Turkish army, a number of whom were killed in battle. The Friends Boys School became a temporary hospital during the War. The British Army occupied Ramallah in December 1917, and the British Mandate in Palestine began in April 1920 and was to last until 1948. The decade of the 1920s was a period of social developments, and many two-storey houses with enclosed gardens were built during that time with the influx of money from residents who had moved to the United States. The Jerusalem Electric Company brought electricity to Ramallah in 1936, and most homes were wired shortly thereafter. In 1946, the British authorities inaugurated the "Palestine Broadcasting Service" in Ramallah, the staff of which was trained by the British Broadcasting Corporation to perform daily broadcasts in Arabic, Hebrew, and English. The Hebrew name of the station became known as "Kol Yerushalaym", or "The Voice of Jerusalem". [6],[7]
Emigration and the 1948 Refugee Influx
The busy foreign church activity in Palestine in the late nineteenth century had alerted many citizens to the riches and opportunities of the West, especially the United States. In both Ramallah and Bethlehem, a few miles south, story-telling foreigners (mostly from religious groups) inspired residents of these towns to desire to visit and maybe settle abroad. Men from Bethlehem journeyed first to the United States and, upon return, told stories of riches they had earned and the money they had sent back to their relatives in Palestine. In 1901, the first men from Ramallah began to emigrate to the US. Many left their families behind and lived in the US for some years to return as wealthy merchants with US citizenship, while others took their families with them and did not return. People from other towns and villages around Palestine, particularly Hebron, began to buy and take up residence in the houses left behind by the natives. By 1946, about 1500 of Ramallah's 6000 natives (or about a quarter) had moved to the US.
As a result of the events prior to and during the 1948 War, referred to as the Nakba or "Catastrophe" by Palestinians and the "War of Independence" by the Israelis, Ramallah saw a massive influx of the residents of Jaffa, Lydd, Ramleh, and some smaller villages who fled or were forced from their homes by Jewish militias who would later unite to form the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). By 1953, the population of Ramallah had doubled, but a full third of the original natives had left for the US and were replaced by the refugees. A number of refugee camps were also established around the city, including the Am'ari, Qalandia, Qadourah, and Jalazon camps. The Ramallah natives in the US became one of the largest individual Arab communities there, and in 1959 established the "American Federation of Ramallah, Palestine" (AFRP) in Detroit. The AFRP has several branches throughout US cities, and holds an annual convention every summer attended by a sizable number of Ramallah natives and their descendants. [8], [9]
Modern Times
Ramallah was relatively tranquil during the years of Jordanian occupation between 1948 and 1967, with residents enjoying freedom of movement between the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and elsewhere. Jordan had annexed the West Bank, applying its law to the territory. However, as Jordan was not a democracy, many Palestinians were jailed for being members of what the Jordanian government regarded as illegal political parties, including the Palestine Communist Party and other socialist and pro-independence groups. Jordanian law also restricted the creativity and freedom desired by many Palestinians at the time. During the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel captured Ramallah, and immediately imposed a curfew and conducted a census. Every person registered in the census was given an Israeli "Identity Card" which was the sole document that allowed the bearer to continue to reside there. Any persons who happened to be abroad during the war lost all right to return to the occupied territories and became refugees. For residents of Ramallah, the situation had now reversed itself; for the first time in 19 years residents could freely visit Israel and the Gaza Strip and engage in commerce there.
Contrary to the Jordanian occupation, however, Israel did not annex the West Bank (only East Jerusalem), and Ramallah residents had no rights to vote in Israel or to work or live there without prior approval. Certain services, like banks, were not allowed in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. For the next three decades, Ramallah was under Israeli military rule. The "Civil Administration" (CA), established in 1981 [10], was in charge of civilian and day-to-day services such as issuing permission to travel, to build, to export or import, and to have relatives from abroad come to the West Bank for temporary visits. The CA reprinted Jordanian textbooks for distribution in schools but did not update them since the 1966 edition until the 1990s when the Palestinian Authority was established. The CA was also responsible for taxation of Palestinians, and issued orders for confiscation of Ramallah area land for the purposes of building Jewish settlements. Thousands of dunums of Ramallah area land were confiscated for this purpose, including olive trees that had been harvested annually per local tradition for generations [11],[12]. According to the Israeli Human Rights Center B'tselem, the settlements around Ramallah, including Beit-El and Psagot, blocked Ramallah's expansion and also interfered with the city's contiguity with surrounding villages [13]. Resistance to Israeli rule grew, and many Palestinians from Ramallah and elsewhere were jailed or deported (i.e. had their Identity Cards withdrawn) to neighboring countries for belonging to the Palestine Liberation Organization, which Israel regarded as a terror organization [14]. This resistance culminated in an uprising, or Intifada, in December 1987.
Ramallah and the First Intifada
As in most other Palestinian cities, Ramallah residents participated in the First Intifada from the very beginning. The Intifada Unified Leadership, an umbrella organization of various Palestinian factions, distributed weekly bulletins on the streets of Ramallah with a schedule of the daily protests, strikes, and other violent or non-violent acts against the Israeli patrols in the city. Demonstrations consisted mainly of burning tires in the streets and throwing stones and Molotov cocktails, although some sources cite instances of use of hand grenades, explosives, and gunfire that caused some Israeli fatalities. The IDF responded with tear gas or rubber or live ammunition, and over a hundred Palestinians from the Ramallah area were killed and many more wounded. Schools in Ramallah, including private schools such as the Friends Schools, St. Joseph's, and others, were forcibly shut down by the CA, and most K-12 students lost at least a year of school in 1988-1989 before schools were very gradually allowed to reopen for limited hours. House-arrest style curfews on the whole population were also commonplace, and the CA began to severely limit its services, making it very difficult to travel or export goods or register new capital property, in what Palestinians regarded as collective punishment. In response to the closure of schools, residents organized home schooling sessions: any teacher in a particular neighborhood would hold secret classes in their subject of expertise for students who lived nearby to make up what was missed in school; this became one of the few symbols of civil disobedience. [15]. The Intifada leadership also organized days of "tree planting" and other events designed to promote civil disobedience. However, the Intifada leadership also repeated some of the old tactics of pre-1948 Palestine, such as ordering general strikes in which no commercial businesses were allowed to open and no cars were allowed on the streets.
In 1991, the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid International Peace Conference included many notables from Ramallah. As the Intifada wound down and the peace process began to take hold, life in Ramallah became closer to normal, with shops opening all day long and schools functioning fully. On September 13, 1993 the famous White House handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Leader Yasser Arafat took place, and an unfamiliar sight was seen around Ramallah: school children presented olive branches to Israeli soldiers who were patrolling the streets of the city that day. In December 1995, as part of the Oslo Accords, the Israel Defense Force abandoned the Mukata'a, the CA headquarters in Ramallah, and withdrew its forces from the city center to the outskirts. The newly established Palestinian Authority took civilian and security responsibility for the city, which was designated "Area A" under the accords.
Ramallah and the Second (Al-Aqsa) Intifada
The years between 1995 and 2000 (known locally as the "Oslo Years") initially brought relative prosperity to Ramallah. Particularly, there was a significant surge in the number of new restaurants in the city. Many expatriates, particularly those who lived in the United States and had left because of the First Intifada (and even some descendants of long-emigrated natives who had never lived there ) returned to establish businesses there. There was immense optimism in the mid-1990s about the future of the peace process. However, many of the promises of the process did not materialize. As unemployment among the Palestinians rose from single digits in 1990 to 37% in 2000, the economy of Ramallah suffered greatly [16],[17]. The Israel Defense Force still controlled all surrounding areas, and freedom of movement for Ramallah residents to that enjoyed prior to 1987 (the start of the first Intifada) was never achieved. On the contrary, Jerusalem, less than 10 miles south, was off-limits without special hard-to-obtain permits [18]. Also, expansion of Israeli settlements around Ramallah increased dramatically, and the network of bypass roads for use of settlers that were built around Ramallah cut off more and more area residents from surrounding communities, as did more land confiscations for settlements [19],[20]. Many official documents previously handled by the Israeli Civil Administration, including the residency-requiring "Identity Card" and permits to travel abroad, were now handled by the Palestinian Authority but still required Israeli approval. For example, a Palestinian passport issued to a Ramallah resident was not valid until the passport serial number was registered with the Israeli authorities, who still controlled all border crossings [21]. The Oslo process was no longer popular by the end of the decade, and with the collapse of the Camp David summit in July 2000, optimism had diminished. In September 2000, a second Intifada known as Al Aqsa Intifada erupted.
Young men and women from Ramallah participated in demonstrations against the Israeli army almost daily in the beginning, with marches to the outskirts of the city where Israeli checkpoints were set up; 12 demonstrators were killed by Israeli gunfire in the first month alone and many more were injured [22],[23],[24],. Over time, the marches subsided and were replaced by sporadic use of live ammunition against Israeli solders. A number of Jewish settlers were also targeted, particularly on the bypass roads that crisscrossed the terrain to link settlements to Israel. The roads leading out of Ramallah were dug up by the Israeli army, and checkpoints were established to restrict all movement in both directions [25],[26],[27].
Ramallah became the site of the first Israeli air-strike against the Palestinians. On October 12, 2000, after many Palestinians had been killed or injured in the Ramallah area by the IDF or settlers, two Israeli army reservists were captured near Ramallah and taken to the main police station. According to the Palestinian police chief, attempts were made to shield the two from an angry mob just back from a funeral of a Palestinian killed by Israelis, but the police were overcome by the men who stormed the station and killed the two reservists, mutilated their bodies, and dragged them through the streets [28]. The IDF claimed that the two had taken a wrong turn into Ramallah, while Palestinians claimed that was unlikely because Ramallah was ringed with Israeli checkpoints, and they suspected that the two might have been an undercover assassination squad. Later that afternoon, Israeli army helicopters demolished the police station where the events had taken place, in the first of what has to be a common recurrence of air-strikes against Palestinian targets. In subsequent months, Palestinians resorted to increased use of firearms to target Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers, and suicide bombers began to attack Israeli civilian targets in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and elsewhere. Some of the bombers came from villages and refugee camps around Ramallah. In 2002, the Israeli army, which had already destroyed most Palestinian Authority police and security installations in Ramallah by air-strikes, re-occupied the city in what was dubbed Operation Defensive Shield.
This operation was characterized by extended blanket curfews in Ramallah, as well as loss of electricity and destruction of public property. Schools and businesses were disrupted, and there were also incidents of random attacks by IDF soldiers on civilians [29]. Many Ramallah institutions, including government ministries, non-governmental organizations, human rights institutions, schools, and shopping malls were vandalized, and equipment was either destroyed or stolen. Many residents reported missing items such as jewelry and computer equipment after IDF soldiers had raided their homes, and former soldiers did acknowledge that looting did in fact occur [30],[31],[32],[33]. The IDF also took over local Ramallah television stations, and allegations were made that they were responsible for broadcasts of pornographic material to residents. [34], [35]
Social and economic conditions in Ramallah have dramatically deteriorated since the Intifada began [36]. Most of the expatriates who arrived during the "Oslo Years" left, as did many other Palestinians who complained that the living conditions had become intolerable, largely due to the effects of the closure [37],[38], [39]. Recently, large sections of the Israeli West Bank barrier have been completed around the city, furthering its isolation.
In December 2005, local elections were held in Ramallah in which candidates from three different factions competed for the 15 seat municipal council for a 4-year term. The council elected Janet Mikhail as mayor, the first woman to hold this post.[40][41]
The Mukata'a
Ramallah is also famous for the Mukata'a which now serves as the governmental headquarters of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. The Mukata'a also recently became known as "Arafat's Compound". In December 2001, Yasser Arafat was at the Mukata'a in Ramallah for regular meetings that he sometimes held in Ramallah (Arafat usually held his meetings at his main headquarters in Gaza City, where he lived with his wife and daughter). Twin suicide bombings occurred in Haifa during Arafat's stay, after which the Israeli government decided to ground him, confining him to the Ramallah compound. In 2002, the compound was partly demolished by the IDF's bulldozers and Arafat's building was cut off from the rest of the compound. Israel showed pictures of illegal weapons allegedly found in the Mukata'a and said it proved Arafat's link to terrorism against Israel; the Palestinians countered that these weapons belong to the Palestinian security services. On November 11, 2004 Arafat passed away at the Percy training hospital of the Armies near Paris and on November 12, 2004 Arafat was laid to rest in the courtyard of the Mukataa. The site still serves as the Ramallah headquarters of the Palestinian Authority as well the official West Bank office of President Mahmoud Abbas.
Ramallah Culture
Ramallah is considered the most affluent and cultural, as well as the most liberal, of all Palestinian cities, and is home to a number of popular Palestinian activists, poets, artists, and musicians. One hallmark of Ramallah is Rukab's Ice Cream, which is based on the resin of chewing gum and thus has a distinctive taste. Another is the First Ramallah Group, a boy- and girl-scout club that also holds a number of traditional dance (Dabka) performances and is also home to men's and women's basketball teams that compete regionally. During the annual "Saturday of Light" religious festival (which occurs on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday to commemorate the light that tradition holds shone from the tomb of Jesus), the scouts hold a parade through the city streets to receive the flame from Jerusalem. (The flame is ignited in Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulcher and is passed on through candles and lanterns to regional churches.) A variety of mosques, as well as churches of many denominations, clutter the landscape. Many foreign groups, whether musical or dance troups, perform in Ramallah in usually their only stop in Palestinian territories, while some others (such as renowned Israeli pianist Daniel Barenboim) perform often. The Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre was founded in 1996 and is a popular local venue for various artists. The Al-Kasaba theatre is the venue for performing stage plays and also screens motion pictures. In 2004, a state of the art facility, the Ramallah Cultural Palace, opened in Ramallah and is the only venue of its kind in the Palestinian territories [42]. It houses a 736-seat auditorium, as well as conference rooms, exhibit halls, and movie-viewing rooms. It was a joint venture between the Palestinian Authority, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the Japanese government. Also in 2004, Ramallah held its first annual international film festival.
Reference
Most of the historical material for this article is based on the comprehensive work of Azeez Shaheen "Ramallah: Its history and genealogies", Birzeit University Press, 1982. Other sources which are based on Shaheen's book are also cited where appropriate.