Dignity?
Notes from a short visit to Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Bethlehem
Over the brow of the hill, the dusty track narrows with parked cars and soon enough is blocked altogether by six rough concrete cubes and a phalanx of iron spikes. The driver slows and stops. There’s no guard at the checkpoint. On the other side of the barrier, a taxi is reversing. The familiar shape of Aftan appears, his beard fresh and shades glinting in the midday sun. He signals me to step out and come over. A little nervous, I grab my bags and thank the driver. Following Aftan, I pick my way through the concrete blocks and into the air-conditioned taxi.
Soon we’re on our way, the smooth modern road snaking through dry desert valleys. Aftan is talking non-stop about weddings, cars, shisha. My tired legs sink a little deeper into the warm leather seat. My eyelids are heavy. Aftan’s voice tunes out, the faintly pleasant hum of tyres turning endlessly on asphalt. Shapes are melding, merging, mellowing. I’ve been in Palestine for just five days. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was on my way to one of the last flights out of Ben Gurion airport before it closed overnight following Israel’s escalation with Iran.
I arrive in Palestine on the last day of the Eid al Adha holiday. The hotel is packed with families from other parts of the West Bank, come to spend time with relatives in Ramallah. I’m the only business traveller there. I shed the suit I’d worn to ease my way through airport security and break free from the hotel. It’s a hot day, late in the afternoon. Sweet birds hop down to the street from jacaranda trees rich with purple blossom. I find my way into the centre of town. It’s busy. On recommendation from friends, I head to Rukab’s ice cream and order a pistachio and vanilla chocolate chip cone. It’s creamy and sticky and delicious with crunchy pieces. I eat it in the street, a little self conscious.
Later on I meet Aisha and her sister Maryam to be shown around the city. We head first to the Mahmoud Darwish museum, on a hilltop set against a burning orange sunset. A sleek stonework complex with sloping pathways, the museum is dedicated to the poet once described as “the essential breath of the Palestinian people, the eloquent witness of exile and belonging”. There are lazy splashing fountains and rose bushes and a huge Palestinian flag. An exercise track curves around the hill, with a banner over the entrance: “embrace a healthier lifestyle”. We join families doing just that, toddlers on tricycles, a famous TikTokker with camera at the ready.
I stop and point to the urban sprawl on the hills in the distance. “Is that Jerusalem?” Some uncertainty from Aisha. “Yes, yes I think so.” She scrunches her nose and looks at the ground. “It always makes me sad to see Jerusalem. Because I can’t go there”. The holy city, just a few short miles away, is accessible to Aisha just once a year. “And look — there’s the wall! And that’s a settlement. And so is that. And that.”
As night arrives, street lights glow, the streets fill up. We drive around the city listening to Saint Levant. There are so many expensive looking cars. Everyone happy to be seen. “Jaguar Land Rover”, a diplomat tells me the next day, “has more sales in Ramallah than anywhere in the Middle East. Ramallah is not a real place”.
Thinking back to Hebron six years earlier, I can understand the sentiment. Back then, it was a different time. I remember the day well. It was the day the good weather returned, the sun making everything glow and a breeze passing through the open windows of the sheroot. It was the hardest day of the trip — Martha and I were visiting Josh while he was in Jerusalem on a semester abroad. We arrived in a bustling city and made our way through a crammed soukh where everyone wanted our attention. We started chatting with a man who invited us into his home. We met his wife and seven children and drank tea together. The house was actually three adjoining rooms, a living room, kitchen, and bedroom. The walls were covered in pencil marks, the kids busy watching TV and playing on phones. “I have high hopes for their education”, the man said. “They learn English and are in school for many more years than me”. He showed us pictures of soldiers in his house and the kids hiding, before leading us to the rooftop. The roof was littered with rubbish and stones he said settlers had thrown. There were cameras in all directions, settlement buildings on three sides, and a bored-looking soldier in a watch post.
Later, we crossed into the settlement. It was empty. There were verses on the walls I recognised from a childhood shaped by the Bible: “The children have returned to their own border” (Jer. 31:17). The only people we saw were groups of soldiers and the occasional hurrying resident. In the end we needed to sit down on a bench and talk about everything that had happened until we felt hollow and impotent and privileged and confused all at the same time, before making our way back to Jerusalem in the back of someone’s car.
I tune back into Saint Levant, Ramallah, 2025, Maryam clicking her fingers and bopping her head. Nowhere else in the West Bank is so clean, so comfortable, so glitzy as Ramallah. The downtown streets are lined with Dubai-style bars, cafes, restaurants. It’s warm and pleasant in a shirt and shorts at night, the city smells faintly fruity and fresh like after rain. We stop for mansaf — rice and meat with almonds and a creamy yoghurt sauce that you eat with your hands, then go to a hillside and look at the stars. “We come here often to pause, to be, to witness”, Aisha says quietly, and we share stories from our different lives until we reach a long, shared silence. As midnight approaches we load up on sweets at another cafe, mountains of knafeh. They take me back to the hotel. In the car, we’re full of bittersweet joy and break into song.
The next morning I finish a breakfast of eggs and humus and bread and salad and two coffees and wait for Aftan to collect me from the lobby. We drive to Jerusalem. He talks nostalgically about his cousin who cooks the best fish in Tel Aviv, miming licking his fingers. As we approach the checkpoint we’re stuck in traffic, surrounded more and more by concrete, guard towers rising. “Why are those people walking?”, I ask. Aftan coughs. “They’re crossing the pedestrian bridge. If they try to walk through where the cars go, they will kill them. People die here”. When it’s finally our turn to be checked, my hands are sticky with sweat. My passport is taken for extra inspections. “Why you scared?”, Aftan teases me, his chest puffed. “You have European passport. Don’t scare. They’re just soldiers. You’ll be fine.” On its return, Aftan is persuaded my stay permit has been changed from blue to green.
I have twenty minutes before my first meeting, so I get Aftan to drop me at Herod’s Gate and enter the Old City in search of tahini. At the bottom of an alleyway, I find the big green doors open, three old men sitting inside smoking and talking. They pause, eyebrows raised, surprised to see a customer. The sesame mill is turning in the back, boxes of seeds out front. This is the last place in the Old City where tahini is made. I buy two kilograms and rush off through market alleyways in search of my first meeting. I make faster progress than I did in these same streets six years ago. Back then I wrote about “bright and bustling East Jerusalem”. Now, the vibrancy and life I remember is a shadow. Stallkeepers sit on stoops scrolling on phones, not even looking at the occasional pilgrim or old lady passing by. I set these thoughts aside as it’s time to go from meeting to meeting until the end of the day, when I intend to make a quick trip into Bethlehem.
Aftan isn’t happy when he picks me up from Bethlehem. “You’re making problems for me! Already after one day and you’re making big problems!” I’m so glad to see him I grin until I realise he’s genuinely pissed off. “Why you didn’t answer me? Why are you late?” We’d arranged to meet on the other side of the checkpoint, but I couldn’t get through — none of the drivers would take a stray hitchhiker at night. The man selling nuts had tried to help, but it was starting to create a scene. Some kind new friends let me use the wifi in their compound, and I saw the missed calls from Aftan. In truth, I wasn’t late, he was early. But Aftan is a man whose shisha time is not to be interrupted, and the big problem was that driving through checkpoints from Bethlehem to Ramallah and then for him to get back to Jerusalem would take hours. He told me stories of the one road in and out of Hebron now being open for sometimes four hours a day, sometimes closed altogether, of four checkpoints in and out of Nablus, a journey of 50 miles taking as long as eight hours.
It was in Bethlehem that I started to appreciate the gravity of the economic situation now facing the West Bank. Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus and home to the Church of the Nativity, has an economy built for tourism in the heady hopeful days of the new millennium. Its hotels have always been less than full. But today, just three are open. The only activity in town is a market with locals selling to locals. Pilgrimage companies I talk to say they haven’t had a single group since October 2023. Outside the gilded halls of Ramallah, still somewhat protected through a cluster of NGO jobs, the presence of Abu Mazen and the Ministries, there’s a massive setback to livelihoods in the West Bank, not just Gaza. According to the United Nations Development Programme, in the past year, the unemployment rate in Palestine surged to 51.1 per cent, reaching 34.9 per cent in the West Bank and 79.7 per cent in the Gaza Strip. Almost 200,000 Palestinians have lost their jobs in Israel amounting for an annual income of more than $3 billion. With Israel in control of what goes in and out, and massive delays to shipments at the border with Jordan, imports and exports have been critically affected, too. At exactly the most crucial moment, the collapse of USAID has pulled millions upon millions in grants and programmes — and even now European governments are slowing down and paring back funding.
Yet against all these challenges, and with missiles flying daily, the strongest message of all my colleagues and partners is that there remain opportunities to act. We don’t have to sit about waiting for an elusive grand solution, nor get distracted by politicking or regional war. In the middle, in the reality, in the in between everyday, there are real people and real lives and real livelihoods, in the West Bank and Gaza. People who want to work, to learn, to earn a living.
It doesn’t feel right to talk call this “economic development”. Needed as it might be, “development” feels detached from the level of devastation and the years that patching up even the damage done so far would take. But neither does it feel sufficient to talk about “economic survival”. The atavistic connotations can get a little ugly and zero-sum. I see the need as a simple one. What I work towards is “economic dignity” for Palestinians. This really is about the bare minimum. Even accepting the enormous political constraints, there are things that can be done for the Palestinian economy at scale, to bring money and sustainable jobs to the people. Palestine Emerging is one example, its partnership with the International Chamber of Commerce a key turning point in connecting with regional and global markets, a step with so much potential. Another organisation that does outsized work is Gaza Sky Geeks, which continues to train thousands of young Palestinians, nurturing their companies, and finding sustainable employment. It’s these, and other efforts, that continue to make a difference to economic dignity, even when needs far outstrip capacity.
As well as dignity, the other word that swills around my aching mind as I close up my trip is “potential”. The potential of so many thousands of lives, so many enthusiastic and intelligent young people, colleagues, friends. I think back to the man in Hebron six years ago, full of hope for his children learning English, and wonder where that’s led them. Will the world abandon this potential? Or will we find creative ways to see it and step up?
The car slows and I open my eyes. Lampposts are passing rhythmically by, an enormous flag of Israel hanging from each. We arrive at Ben Gurion airport. Aftan, his chest puffed out and proud as always, lets a chink of vulnerability show. “Stay safe, yes?”, he implores me. I tell him I’ve already planned my next visit for a meeting later this summer. “See you next time”, I say. His eyes are inscrutable behind his shades. “Inshallah”, he replies. “Insha’allah”.
Very moving- thank you for sharing your experience
Dignity is right. Onwards as we fight for it. Thank you for writing.