Ram'allah: under construction

Walking around Ram'allah has been interesting from a number of perspectives. First, to give you a brief narrative snapshot of Ram'allah, it's a city of about 60,000 people roughly 20 kilometers north of Jerusalem, and is the de facto center of Palestinian politics and international aid efforts. The Palestinian National Authority is headquartered here, and Yassir Arafat lived here when he was President of the PA. All that said, it's still a pretty small town, and in many ways is a bit of an idiosyncratic provincial backwater--30% of the population is Christian, although the city has a long history, that history is basically based on Ram'allah being a stop on the way from Jerusalem to other places (Nablus, Jenin, Damascus, etc.) that are bigger and/or more famous.

All that said, it's an interesting place. It's very hilly, and so walking just about any distance means going up/downhill as much as 150 meters. The hills that aren't full of big, expensive houses or spiffy apartment buildings are terraced olive-tree groves, and in the morning a chilly fog rolls up out of the valleys and is burned off by 8am or so. All in all, it's a pretty peaceful place.

Except that everyone is busy, and one word exemplifies the place: construction. I got a little lost my first day walking around, because the street that I should've been walking on was so torn up (they're re-trenching sewer lines) I thought it wasn't even a street. There are high-rise office & apartment buildings being built, and though there is plenty of the type of trash you expect to see accumulating around a developing-world countryside, there is a lot of construction rubble, too (i.e., cinder blocks, chunks of re-bar, tile, etc.). Right now I hear a little yap-dog down the street barking its little yap-dog head off (this is a Christian area), and then in the distance I hear bulldozers, dump trucks, and jackhammers. Last night, after sunset, I heard someone using a masonry saw down the street.

The people of Ram'allah strike a stark contrast to those people in other places I've been to; here, everyone is either shopping (in the center of town), making something, or going somewhere. In Damascus, there were lots of people just hanging out--as if they were waiting for something to do. In Jerusalem, it was similar, except the waiting was "waiting for tourists." In Istanbul, people were scheming and scamming and going places--but everything had already been built. Amman was full of people who seemed to have nothing to do, too. I could go on, but instead of belaboring the point, I'll just sum up by saying: Ram'allah is moving, and its people are industrious.

A couple other observations about the place: one, you can't go very far without passing a Palestinian government office, a UN compound, or some international aid organization project--Ram'allah is certainly the nexus of Palestinian development. Two, security is pretty tight. At major intersections, and every couple hundred yards near the center of town, is a soldier in camouflage and beret, holding an AK-47 at the ready. The soldiers are friendly, though. When I was out this morning, a few struck up a conversation with me, and seemed most impressed that the population of Chicago was about the size of the population of all of the West Bank.

More later, but for now I'll share a few leftover pictures from the other side of the wall:

P.S. my internet connection here at the guest house is woefully slow, so I'm using a different format for the pictures that results in a smaller file--at the cost of lower image quality. If you like any of the pictures and want better reproductions, let me know and when I get back I can get you full-resolution copies.


One last photo of the Dome of the Rock, at night.


Early morning in the Garden of Gethsemane. This is one of the 2000+ year-old olive trees.

Lots of flowers & flowering vines in the Garden. Took a quick shot of these viney flowers, and spiffed up the shot using the Viveza plug-in for Photoshop.

16 NIS ($5) gets you a ticket to walk all around the Old City of Jerusalem on top of the city walls. This was the view on the South Ramparts walk near sunset; south of the Old City is the Franciscan Monastery, and at sunset it made a very pretty sight. This is a 3-photo HDR composite of the scene.

A little further along the South Ramparts, there's an unobstructed view of the terrain to the south. Bethlehem (Bayt Laham) is just a few miles south of Jerusalem--that's it on the hilltop in the background of this shot.

Here's a zoom/crop of that prior photo, focused tightly on the hilltop & Bethlehem. You can see the security barrier (aka "Apartheid Wall") snaking over the landscape. The Israelis built the wall in this area because of the continued building & expansion of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank.

The South Ramparts wall-walk ends right next to the Western Wall plaza, and so I cut through there on my way back to the Mount of Olives. As I've mentioned previously, when Israel captured the Old City in the Six Days' War in 1967, there were apartment buildings standing here. The Palestinian residents of those homes were evicted and the buildings bulldozed to make the plaza. On this evening, there was some sort of IDF induction ceremony being held, with a bunch of new recruits standing at attention.

The officer in charge--the woman near the center of the frame--was pacing back and forth, giving some sort of lecture in Hebrew. The guy to the left of center was translating into English for the non-Hebrew speakers in the crowd. It was some rambling speech about how much of an honor it was to hold the ceremony here, and how important this place was to Israelis. It made me wonder what Palestinian Muslims--whose homes had been bulldozed on this very spot, just 50 yards or so from the Haram ash-Sharif and one of the holiest places in Islam--might think about the military ceremony being held there.