Ramallah: The Suburban Homes of the New Palestinian Middle Class

In the West Bank, between Ramallah and Nablus, air-conditioned tour busses carry groups of American investors up and down a winding, unpaved road to view the birth of a new Palestinian suburban town called Rawabi. This master-planned town, they are told, represents the promise of a new Palestine. As an editorial in Israel’s largest-circulation newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth stated, the city of Rawabi, is a “bourgeois, well-kept, demilitarized island free of politics.” Indeed, Rawabi is the spatial embodiment of the neoliberal incarnation of Israeli occupation, a project to employ urban development in the cultivation of a new depoliticized Palestinian subjectivity.

The initial plans for Rawabi were introduced at the first Palestinian Investment Conference, held in 2008 as part of the Palestinian Authority’s attempt to attract foreign direct investment. Though the conference was held by the private sector, it was part of a broader push toward neoliberalization undertaken by then-Prime Minister (and, importantly, former IMF economist) Salam Fayyad, and largely continued by his successors. The prime minister’s letter to participating investors read, “We are throwing a party, and the whole world is invited. This conference is a chance to show a different face of Palestine: A Palestine conducive to economic growth and international investment.”

Rawabi fit well with the Conference’s focus of creating public–private partnerships to facilitate market-based economic growth in Palestine; the PA contributes infrastructure to the project, which itself is financed by the Bayti Real Estate Investment Company, a Qatari company founded by Palestinian–American entrepreneur Bashar al-Masri. More importantly, Rawabi fit into the PA’s emerging neoliberal agenda. Fayyad’s administration established a development paradigm that seeks to build state institutions in the absence of a Palestinian state and to facilitate economic growth regardless of the occupation. Pursuing short-term economic benefits is intended to encourage Israel to engage more productively with the PA as a state body. Israel has encouraged this neoliberal transition since the Oslo Accords, recognizing that the concentration of governing power within a narrow elite pursuing short-term, profit-oriented objectives would ensure that a certain class of Palestinians would be politically and economically invested in occupation. This economic framework actively builds the occupation into Palestinian development, creating an economy whose very structure is built upon a foundation of continued occupation and settler colonialism.

Thus, Rawabi emerged as the embodiment of a neoliberal project to marry two powerful regimes of control; reinforcing the disciplinary power of the soldier with the persuasive power of the capitalist, in order to produce a new Palestinian subjectivity that is invested in the maintenance of the status quo, rather than resistance to it. Cities and urban spaces are symbolic of the needs, aspirations, and culture, of the people who live in them, as well as the social order that they are a part of. That Rawabi’s financing and architecture are shaped and molded in the image of the occupier — and funded in part by Israeli investors — begs the question of what implications it carries as a symbolic space.

As Eyal Weizman writes, the cultivation of a more moderate political subjectivity has long been the motivation behind Israel’s periodic attempts to upgrade Palestinian infrastructure and living standards and “bring about a process of forced embourgeoisement, which was meant to create the very vulnerabilities that may reduce the motivation of the urban population to support active resistance” (Hollow Land, Verso, 2007). This tactic can readily be observed in the city of Ramallah, de facto capital of the Palestinian Authority. Ramallah is simultaneously hailed as a cosmopolitan oasis and criticized as a bastion of normalization. The neoliberal brand of urbanism that is allowed to flourish in Ramallah cultivates an individualistic, consumerist subjectivity that seeks to remove the unsightly politics of occupation and resistance from its daily life. This contrasts drastically with the culture of collective national resistance born out of the Palestinian struggle, which often scrutinizes development projects as attempts to normalize the occupation.
Often articulated as sumud or ‘steadfastness’, this ethos discourages the flaunting of wealth and privilege, and promotes an ascetic culture of resistance informed by collective values. In contrast, the new middle class ethos cultivated by neoliberal development wedges a divide between those Palestinians who are invited to perform middle-classness and those who are not. By doing so, it fractures notions of national resistance and shared struggle, and erodes the foundation of solidarity between Palestinians. The occupying force has thus permitted Ramallah to grow precisely because of the role it plays in utilizing “urban development as political subjectification.”

However, if Ramallah was the birthplace of this new, moderate middle class ethos, then Rawabi is the much-anticipated product of its growing pains. In Rawabi, Palestine’s new global middle class can distinguish itself, both demographically and aesthetically, from the outdated and out-of-touch. This need is apparent in the documentary Rawabi: The Promised City, which is used in Rawabi’s official marketing. In one scene, a Palestinian woman named Ruba Barghouthi explains that when her family visited Rawabi for the first time, “We forgot the chaos of Ramallah. Ramallah is too crowded, with so many people and buildings. If we can get away from that, the peace and quiet will do us good.” As she speaks, the audience is presented with images and sounds of Ramallah: ambient traffic noises, a current of people streaming down a crowded sidewalk, a slightly disheveled young man sweeping trash alongside a busy road. Barghouthi’s comments call attention to this difference and communicate a self-conscious desire to distance her and her family from the masses.

By juxtaposing the chaos of the street with the calm of the Barghouthi family home, a fundamental difference between the future residents of Rawabi and the masses of Ramallah is communicated. The desire of the middle classes to isolate themselves from the chaos of the working class is well understood by Rawabi’s proprietor, Bashir al-Masri, who said in regard to Rawabi’s lack of low-income housing; “No one would move to the city. It’s an ego issue, no one likes to be associated with low-income housing.”

Ironically, this middle class impulse to insulate itself from loud, dirty, crowded urban centers mirrors the same middle-class flight that fueled the spread of Israeli settlements during the 1980s. In fact, in their effort to brand Rawabi as modern, and to mimic the perceived sophistication of the colonizer, Rawabi’s engineers and designers visited a nearby Israeli settlement called Modi’in for inspiration. As Weizman notes, Palestinian middle-class flight has in fact resembled its Israeli counterpart: “reproducing many of its urban and architectural typologies — and similarly responding to the anxieties that drive the middle class everywhere to seek privacy and security away from the congested and potentially dangerous city centers” (Hollow Land, 2007)

The occupation hovers over Rawabi as an additional source of anxiety; an inescapable limit to the upward mobility of the new middle class. On the Rawabi website, this anxiety manifests itself in the diligent absenting of any reference to the occupation or its penetrating effects. The absence of any reminders of the occupation represents an important mechanism through which the new middle class protects its aspirations and copes with the limits imposed by the occupier. Revealingly, the Rawabi website boasts, “Rawabi lies 25 km to the north of Jerusalem and 25 km south of Nablus. The view west from Rawabi’s hilltops offers a panorama of the Mediterranean coast.” For most of Rawabi’s residents, however, Jerusalem and the Mediterranean are entirely inaccessible, as access to those iconic locations is expressly prohibited to Palestinians without a permit. This spatial disciplinary regime is gestured toward but never explicitly mentioned in the website’s “Access and Movement” page, which displays a map of the roads connecting Rawabi to neighboring towns and cities. Because roads are so stringently policed under Israel’s regime of spatial control, accessibility is a major issue for Rawabi. For months, the project faced delays because Israel refused to grant permission for the construction of a new road to service the town. The map and accompanying text make no mention of this obstacle, but their very inclusion on the website demonstrates that accessibility would be a primary concern for residents whose everyday lives are so often disrupted by limits on their movement and mobility.

The special attention paid to the absence of rooftop water tanks in Rawabi marks another subtle attempt to erase aesthetic reminders of the occupation. The elimination of unsightly rooftop water tanks is a key selling point for Rawabi. The significance of this absence becomes apparent on any drive through the West Bank. Israeli settlements and Palestinian towns are easily and unmistakably distinguished from each other by the black rooftop water tanks that sit on nearly every Palestinian building — necessities because of Israel’s tight control on water resources in the West Bank. In fact, the first round of Rawabi buyers have been prevented from moving into their new, empty apartments precisely because Israel has refused to provide water to the city unless Palestinian Authority officials agree to participate in a Joint Water Commission that would approve water infrastructure projects for Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

These deliberate acts of omission or resurfacing function to depoliticize the occupation and erase its visual, spatial, or emotional cues — without actually solving any of the problems associated with it. If spatial forms are productive our collective conceptions of reality, what does it mean to create a built environment that renders the occupation invisible? These omissions are illustrative of the new middle class’ desire to escape politics — or rather, transcend it through modernity and consumption — and they carry weighty implications for Palestinian collective resistance.

Rawabi’s marketing strategies actively seek to supplant discourses of Palestinian collective national struggle with those dictated primarily by identification as private consumer subjects. According to this discourse, the occupation has deprived Palestinians of their right to participate freely in the consumer market and Rawabi bravely returns this right to a young, upwardly mobile, and modern middle-class Palestine. Resistance is thus redefined as economic cooperation. However, even Palestinian consumers remain marked as occupied bodies by the Israeli state. In fact, restrictions imposed by Israel practically cut Palestine off from world trade, ensuring that Israel profits from any economic growth experienced in the West Bank. Ultimately, Rawabi will contribute an estimated $85 million to the Israeli economy. This has led the Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement to condemn Rawabi as a project of normalization, and it speaks to the inherent contradictions of neoliberal development in Palestine.

However, as they seek to define themselves as modern, productive, and moderate, one cannot deny that the new Palestinian middle class in Rawabi actively contests the orientalist view that Palestinians are extremist and backward in comparison to their democratic occupiers. Importantly, the middle-class shift away from traditional discourses of peasant values, steadfastness, and austerity should not simply be dismissed as mimicry of the colonial power. Doing so would deny the distinctly Palestinian urbanism that was thriving before the Nakba of 1948 dispersed cosmopolitan Palestinians into refugeedom. The articulation of a new middle-class ethos through the built environment of Rawabi represents an understandable attempt by a certain segment of Palestinian society to make their lives legible to a brutal occupier. Still, this new middle-class ethos must also be critiqued as a tool that serves capitalist elites on both sides of the Apartheid Wall.

In embracing neoliberalism, Rawabi’s new middle class may temporarily succeed in inscribing their private space as nonthreatening, but ultimately, Palestinian space is always defined by Israel as a site of terror. Israel’s geopolitical power is dependent on its ability to delegitimize and destroy Palestinian space and Palestinian claims to land and sovereignty. Thus, regardless of the media’s infatuation with Rawabi, the emergence of this new city does nothing to radically transform the geopolitical dynamics of the conflict, as the belligerent occupier will never acknowledge the integrity of Palestinian space or of Palestinian bodies.