Ramallah should not be the capital of the State of Palestine but it becomes so because the Mukata - headquarters of the Palestinian National Authority - is located here and a President, Mahmoud Abbas, resides, who was born 87 years ago, when these lands were under British mandate. and whom more and more Palestinians would like to retire. In the same way that Salam Soran did not plan to lower the blinds on Radio Street in Ramallah yesterday at one in the afternoon and had to lower them.
A woman covered in black, including a veil, carries a large laminated photograph of a child with a bloody head and the text: “Do not abandon Gaza.” The men who follow her and shout with her – and they shout a lot – look at the merchants. No need to say more.
–We will have to close. I am not very in favor, it would be smarter if they have lost a child in Gaza or their house has been destroyed to ask us for help.
In less than half an hour, the picket achieved other closures, including that of the Popeye's franchise, "Louisiana chicken", the Milano shoe store or a Kentucky Fried Chicken. No one wants to appear unsympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, 80 kilometers away.
And yet, the West Bank is and breathes differently: the old Palestinian guard rules here, the last of the PLO and Al Fatah, who renounced violence after decades of using it.
Ramallah can be reached in less than an hour and a half by road from Tel Aviv, two worlds. It has one tourist attraction but not two: the Yasir Arafat museum, where the only Palestinian leader rests who, in fits and starts, managed to unify a people very prone to fighting. “Israel is delighted with our fights,” says Salam Soran, the merchant, 56 years old.
Despite the demonstration, Ramallah lives peacefully compared to Gaza. There, in the 2006 elections, the voters gave a surprise - and broke the Western script established for Palestine -: Hamas, a split from the PLO founded in 1987, won, say the evil tongues that with the approval of Israel, delighted with the division. Something like the US when it created a monster – the Al Qaeda Taliban – to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan.
The leaders of Hamas expelled the leaders of Al Fatah from Gaza in 2007, and not with good manners, who moved to Ramallah, one of the few cities in this land without a millennia-old history. And since then, Palestine is like China: there is the People's Republic and there is Taiwan.
The massacre of civilians perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 was condemned by President Abbas, an increasingly residual figure, like every moderate these years. “He has been very soft on Israel. We urgently need a renewal of the Palestinian leadership,” estimates Khaled, 48 years old, an official – like one in three residents of Ramallah – who enjoys Louisiana chicken, in the same way that the journalist has passed an electric scooter nearby.
“We want to live in peace. And that Israel treats us like human beings. We need new blood, neither Hamas nor Abbas can bring us a future and the reforms we need,” says Salam Soran.
The West Bank has seen eruptions – more than 70 deaths in protests over the attacks on Gaza – but it has not burned, much less Ramallah, “narcotized” by the salaries generated by being the capital, although this month a cut has been announced... 50% of public payrolls.
Yesterday there was only one visitor to the Yasir Arafat museum, attached to the Mukata, where Mahmoud Abbas is unable to articulate a single voice of the Palestinian people. It is not new either and it is enough to tour the rooms where some of the wrong decisions of the Palestinian leader are reflected - with heroic words. “Of course they poisoned him. Arafat resisted an agreement with Israel without Jerusalem and with Jewish settlements in the West Bank,” says Khaled, an old, retired Fatah militant. And who poisoned him to death in Paris in 2004? “The Abas clique with the help of Isreal.” This is a land of plots.
