Reimagining resilience

Abstract

Although Palestinian society is urbanizing at a rapid rate, the land and its people remain seeped in rural imagery and symbolism in the Palestinian self-imagination. Meanwhile, to accommodate real estate demands in Ramallah, the West Bank's cultural and political hub, an ambitious new satellite city is being built that markets itself as the ‘first planned city in Palestinian history'. I develop the position in this paper that Rawabi, situated 9 km from Ramallah in the central West Bank highlands, is a symptom of an emerging trend in which a new capitalist class is reimagining the Palestinian symbolic self-image in terms of an urban strategy that Henri Lefebvre (2003, The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 144) believed ‘can only proceed using general rules of political analysis', and that this political process relies on emulating successful Zionist models of state-building that Palestinians have observed for about a century. This reimagination transcends the existing status quo of the existential relationship between Palestinians and the land, generally understood as sumud ‘steadfastness', and brings into form a new ethics in Palestinian politics that is at once global while also particular to a distinctly colonial situation.

Key words:

• Palestine
• Ramallah
• Rawabi
• Israel
• urbanization
• modernity

Introduction

This paper addresses a movement within West Bank Palestinian society of a burgeoning modernity that is presented here through the allegory of Rawabi, a new planned city marketed as the first planned urbanization project in Palestinian history; an ambiguous campaign that flirts with historical memory in a region that is not particularly prone to amnesia. I see the lure of projects like Rawabi in terms of what Yiftachel (2009, 245) calls ‘new subjectivities among excluded groups, particularly in urban colonial situations in which such groups are out of the reach of hegemonic projects, yet within the economy and “ground” politics of their cities'. That is, urban development by Palestinians may be seen as a movement within greater Palestinian movements in which a particular vision of modernity is etching out a space within what Bourdieu (2000, 234) viewed as a ‘margin of freedom for political action aimed at reopening the space of possibles', while the greater population body enters into this opening with ambivalence. With the rural to urban transformation in the Palestinian territories now at an advanced state, I posit in this paper that Rawabi is an instance that serves to mitigate a temptation for the West in which Palestinians are themselves the agents of urbanization, modernization, etc., a veritable sea change for Palestinian identity at this historical conjuncture. Known as ‘convergence’ in the globalization discourse (Marcotullio 2003) and ‘planetary urbanization’ in urban theory (Brenner and Schmid 2012), rural to urban shifts are steadily unfolding anywhere the rural continues to exist, but Palestine makes for a particularly interesting case, bracketed as it is by cultural and political conditions necessarily contingent on the dynamics of the Israel/Palestine conflict.

Palestine, in its symbolic self-image, is not an urban civilization. The two visual symbols of Palestine are the checkered kufiyyah, a headscarf with roots in Arab folk culture, and the seemingly infinite olive tree. Palestinian movements, harbingers of modern Palestinian identity (Khalidi 1997), are rich with such rural imagery. Nationalist posters rely heavily on representations of sickles and stalks of wheat alongside Kalashnikovs, and early resistance leaders thematically aligned the Palestinian struggle with peasant guerrilla uprisings in Asia and Latin America in contextualizing the Israel/Palestine conflict in its early decades (Lybarger 2007, 22). Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine's greatest poet, embodied the Palestinian narrative with a lexicon of rural, pathos-laden metaphors. In Darwish's poems, Palestine is depicted as an idyllic peasant landscape uninterrupted by urbanity, and one in which Palestine's formerly great port cities are conspicuously absent (Nassar 2008, 195). Written in 1964, roughly coinciding with the rise of the Palestinian resistance (Collins 2004, 58), ‘Identity Card’ is perhaps Darwish's most reproduced poem:

‘My father came from a line of plowmen,

and my grandfather was a peasant

who taught me about the sun's glory

before teaching me to read.

my home is a watchman's shack

made of reeds and sticks

—Does my condition anger you?'

Yet, just as Brenner and Schmid (2012, 13) write that ‘the “non-urban” appears increasingly to be an ideological projection derived from a long dissolved, preindustrial geohistorical formation', the reality of urbanization in the Palestinian territories will soon confine their rural identity to realms of folklore. Sumud ‘steadfastness’ is a concept Palestinians proudly cite to celebrate their resilience and preservation of traditional cultural forms despite over six decades of living with restricted rights and movement. Meghdessian (1998, 41) sees sumud as a ‘means to protect the integrity of Palestinian society'; that is, to preserve it, to shield it from colonial corruption. Its practice is existential. Halper (2006) calls it ‘a strategy within non-strategy'. Yet, how nationalism as such expresses itself in Palestine is increasingly shifting away from symbolism rooted in the pre-colonial and being reimagined instead as laissez-faire economic growth, a new source of tremendous pride for members of the business and professional classes—the new architects of Palestinian identity. This is what I propose to be viewed as a still emerging response to a prolonged political equilibrium meaningfully untethered by resilience alone. It is also a radical departure from sumud as it has been lived, believed, reproduced.

Rural and urban populations in the West Bank are now approximately evenly distributed, while population density in Gaza ranks among the highest in the world. In accommodating these shifting demographics, Palestinian cities in the West Bank are experiencing a real estate and development boom that is curious, at best, when considering that it is a quasi-state perhaps best described as liminal, as traditionally imagined in anthropology to be an existential condition most commonly associated with Victor Turner's (1969, 1973, 1974) classic writings. Turner (1969) described liminal individuals as ‘threshold people … betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony' (95) and anthropomorphic liminal processes like rituals, pilgrimages, etc. as places and moments ‘in and out of time’ (Turner 1973, 214). I extend the metaphor to the concept of the quasi-state in the Palestinian context. Palestinian liminality at the state-organizational level may be imagined as functioning in three tiers, with an outer tier of international patronage under organizations heavily invested in Palestinian rights, economic and humanitarian development, and statehood—e.g. the United Nations, United Nations Relief and Works Agency, Médecins Sans Frontières, the International Red Cross and Crescent, etc.—an intermediary but totalizing tier of Israeli control of precisely the areas where these aforementioned organizations are active, and a final inner tier of autonomous Palestinian self-government in pockets of this area. This tiered organizational pattern of the Palestinian territories embodies a liminality, a straddling between an imagined quasi-state in the eyes of the world—in the words of Hage (2009, 66): ‘an anthropomorphically imagined affective political entity'—and a being-in-the-world as bantustans (see Abourahme 2009) within a colonial enterprise in which its existential condition is defined through its relationship with the Israeli-other both anthropomorphically and politically. Any discussion of development in Palestine must be framed within Palestine's existential condition as a politically liminal entity/non-entity. It is this politically uncertain habitus that facilitates the rise of a particular hegemonic vision.

This paper draws from research conducted over eight months of fieldwork in Ramallah between 2012 and 2014, a time during which Rawabi became increasingly common as a divisive conversation topic in the city and a prominent visual landmark in the hilly terrain of the central West Bank highlands.

I arranged with Rawabi staff to interview a dozen families in the summer of 2013 who have purchased flats in Rawabi with formally structured questions, and I intersperse their stories into my analytical framework to provide an ethnographic dimension from precisely the social actors whose agency will constitute Rawabi's anthropomorphic reality, but who are also themselves interesting for being in a liminal state of zigzagging through a rapidly changing Palestinian habitus. I also draw from unstructured interviews with Rawabi sales representatives, Ramallah-based real estate agents and architects, and from many informal conversations with Palestinians. My own experience living in Ramallah during fieldwork was to a great extent dependent on the people in my life, namely, members of the Palestinian urban middle class. I know their struggles with the confluence of modernity and Palestinian identity, both personal and collective, to be quite real. I see it is as the task of anthropological writing to shape these anxieties into critical theory.

Ramallah's colonial present

By the time I first visited Rawabi in the summer of 2012, the project had already become a household name in the West Bank. I caught a ride in a pickup truck from the service road at the entrance of the township, then heavily under construction, to the showroom and office up the hill. My driver was Ahmed, a cheerful young man from a village near Ramallah who works in construction in Rawabi, a new city being built 9 km northwest of Ramallah. ‘There's no money in Ramallah', Ahmed complained. I pointed out to him that Ramallah is enjoying something of a consumer boom in which hotels, restaurants, malls and new European cars are defining life in the city, but he merely frowned. When I asked him what he thinks of Rawabi, he told me, ‘I will live here. It will be very nice, very modern.’

We were arriving at the showroom, overlooking bright red cranes and steel building frames against a backdrop of purplish hills. In the distance, I could make out the Tel Aviv skyline. ‘And Ramallah is not modern?’, I asked.

He frowned again, his determination to buy a flat in Rawabi unshaken. ‘Ramallah is also nice, but it's not like this.’ This paper, to a great extent, is an attempt to understand this inconsistency.

Ramallah, until relatively recently, was a small Christian town known primarily as a holiday getaway for wealthy Jerusalem families (Taraki 2008a). Through the dramatic demographic transfiguration of the Palestinian lifeworld after Israel's conquests in 1948 and 1967 (Abdulhadi 1990; Abu Helu 2012), and after the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995 articulated a political base for Palestinians in the West Bank (Tamari 2009, 58), it is today the undisputed cultural and political hub of Palestine. Local and international non-governmental organization (NGO) workers crowd the city's many bars and cafés, in an ambiance evoking Rick's Café American from Casablanca. Pedestrians stroll the lanes off Rukab Street, Ramallah's vibrant shopping thoroughfare. Visiting corporate executives stay in luxury hotels in al-Masyoun, a high-end neighborhood that aims to recreate the lazy affluence of West Jerusalem lost to Palestinians. Among the city's cosmopolitan residents are a handful of Israeli dissidents who, in perhaps the ultimate political statement, have decided to live in Ramallah. Partly a sophisticated outward-looking city but still partly an archaic Arab market town with an underlying foundation of traditional kinship-based power, Ramallah continues to be an anomaly. The combined population of Ramallah, its twin municipality al-Bireh, and nearby refugee camps and villages, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (2014, 26), is estimated to be 338,000, a number that can only be stated but rarely experienced, given that this population is one of the least dense among West Bank governorates. Its sparseness preserves the quaintness of a village in places.

On the other hand, Ramallah is surrounded by Jewish settlements on all sides. Jerusalem, only 16 km away, is cut off from most Ramallawis by a walled Israeli military checkpoint that doubles as a kind of intranational border crossing. Travel to the nearest accessible airport in Amman is a grueling and unpredictable adventure of about five hours, while passengers arriving at Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion Airport will almost certainly be denied entry if they declare their intention to visit the Palestinian territories. Its seemingly booming economy is, in fact, artificially stimulated by foreign aid and remittances from the Palestinian diaspora in Europe and North America, who maintain close ties with Ramallah and color the local culture with a worldview that is increasingly apolitical and consumption-driven (Abourahme 2009, 505). In many ways, as sociologist Lisa Taraki (2008b) has observed, Ramallah is an ‘enclave micropolis', in which certain classes are better connected financially and culturally to the Palestinian diaspora and to the Arab metropoles Cairo, Beirut and Amman than to other Palestinian cities, which have seen their bourgeois and middle classes majorly shaken by over six decades under Israeli rule.

Ramallah, of course, is only one among numerous Palestinian cities and its challenges are only a few among many in the lifeworld of Palestinians, but Ramallah and its environs make a compelling case study for the protracted Palestinian state of emergency as, in the words of one Jewish Israeli friend who visited me in Ramallah during the course of my fieldwork, ‘It's amazing that this place even exists.’ As Abourahme (2009, 508) emphatically writes:

‘How we plan and articulate Ramallah has much to do with how we construct and articulate ourselves. The design of this city and its relation to Palestine's other urban spaces is inexorably linked with, not only how we confront an inescapable “colonial present”, but also with what kind of society we end up living and dying in.'

Rawabi in context

Thomas Leitersdorf, the Israeli architect who headed the planning of the Ma'ale Adumim settlement near Jerusalem, writes about Palestinian vernacular architecture (in Segal and Weizman 2003, 160):

‘A man builds a home, a son is born, the son gets married and they need to add something, so they add it on to the area of the street. But so long as there is still room enough for the donkey, there is no room for the car and all that it entails. But if you look at this process logically, by today's standards, you can't build a city this way. You can't pass up the necessary infrastructure or traffic and you can't provide a minimum level of services. But in terms of beauty they are way ahead of us!

Architecture without architects—this is the Arab village, and this is its beauty. It is always better than when an architect comes in; the architect only spoils things because the architect has to work logically, and they do not.'

This statement has been derided for reinforcing orientalist stereotypes of an archaic and monolithic ‘Islamic’ architecture (Hertz 2012, 105; Weizman 2007, 44) but in comparing Jewish settlements to Palestinian villages and cities, a visible distinction is readily perceived. Jewish settlements, with their orderly rows of houses with red tiled roofs, lawns and supermarkets, are often described by visitors as resembling California suburbs. Palestinian cities, by contrast, are organic spaces that very much resemble overgrown versions of the Arab village described by Leitersdorf—in the Chicago School discourse: ‘natural areas’ determined by unplanned, subcultural forces (Sassen 2010, 5)—with archetypal features like densely built centers, houses with shared walls and narrow alleyways (Slyomovics 1993, 33). With available land for purchase diminishing in Area A, the archipelago-like 18% of the West Bank under Palestinian quasi-autonomy, new construction tends to be vertical rather than horizontal (Abu Helu 2012, 135). Furthermore, because of the confusing amalgam and often contradictory set of laws set in place by the successive regimes that have ruled over Palestinians in recent centuries—Ottoman, British, Jordanian and Israeli—it is not difficult to bypass or reinterpret building codes and erect new structures in cramped spaces where families already own land and, thus, avoid having to purchase or rent new land elsewhere (129). Meanwhile, and perhaps paradoxically, sprawl is emerging as a major observable phenomenon in Ramallah due to the same confusion, as it is, to a lesser extent, in the Bethlehem–Beit Sahour–Beit Jala conurbation. Most of it is a result of housing constructions to accommodate the arrival of internal migrants from within the West Bank, as well as second homes for returning members of the Palestinian diaspora (Al-Houdalieh and Sauders 2009, 2). Unfinished housing constructions are ubiquitous in the outskirts of Ramallah, many of which are either structures that were abandoned during construction in the violent times of the second intifada, or projects initiated but not completed by real estate speculators in anticipation of a post-conflict housing boom. In Ramallah's old center, a Haussmannization unfolded over the years, replacing some of the city's oldest buildings with apartments and broad streets with commerce in mind. Riwaq, a conservationist group working with heritage sites in Palestine, identifies a mere six heritage buildings remaining in the vicinity of the old center. Since 2005, there has been a renewed interest in the city's heritage, mainly through the initiative of Riwaq. In 2014, bricks were laid on the neighborhood's streets to evoke a feeling of antiquity; a sign of changing attitudes.

In the near absence of planning, parks and green spaces have been excluded from new developments and neighborhoods, creating dense, claustrophobic environments surrounded by vast expanse that is under the jurisdiction of the Israeli military. Ironically, some features of Jewish settlements are diffusing into Palestinian vernacular architecture. New Palestinian structures adopt the red tiled roof that was once the ‘ubiquitous symbol of Jewish settlements', as outlined by architect Weizman (2007, 126) in his landmark book on Israeli settlement architecture. Palestinian developments are also beginning to be built in the outward-facing style of settlements, but with the crucial difference of being settled on low hilltops or along canyons while Jewish settlements almost always occupy the highest available hills. The two often resemble dueling townships.

The tiered liminality of Palestinian being-in-the-world is reflected in the liminality of Palestinian development. Writing about urban ‘gray spaces', Yiftachel (2009, 242) posits that ‘though still weak, the subaltern are shifting their strategies by partially (if not completely) disengaging their behavior, identity and resource-seeking from the state, and by developing an alternative vision to civil integration as citizens in an inclusive state'. But this alternate vision is dominated in scale and efficiency by hegemonic subjectivities within Palestinian liminality, namely, a rising capitalist class with the resources to shift the Palestinian symbolic self-image away from the village house and olive grove—as I will show later in my discussion of sumud—and to markers of modernity like high-rises, condominiums, glass-façaded banks, etc.

Let me stress here that a majorly overlooked factor in the anxieties stemming from a disrupted habitus of rural to urban transformation aside, the kind of sprawl occurring in Palestinian metropolitan areas is itself an expansive process, the inverse of rural to urban, of urban to rural. Henri Lefebvre (2003) asserted, now already half a century ago, that the term ‘city’ itself is antiquated and that it is the urban fabric that ‘grows, extends its borders, corrodes the residue of agrarian life’ (3). The hard version of this is highlighted in Anthony Leeds’ (1994) claim that ‘all rural people are urban people’ (56), though I advocate a more moderate view myself. ‘Rural', for Leeds, refers ‘simply to a subset of specialties of an urbanized society and rural people as referring to part of subsocieties of urban societies’ (56). This, generally speaking, is ‘planetary urbanization', as observed by Brenner and Schmid (2012, 12):

‘Even spaces that lie well beyond the traditional city cores and suburban peripheries—from transoceanic shipping lanes, transcontinental highway and railway networks, and worldwide communications infrastructures to alpine and coastal tourist enclaves, “nature” parks, offshore financial centres, agro-industrial catchment zones and erstwhile “natural” spaces such as the world's oceans, deserts, jungles, mountain ranges, tundra, and atmosphere—have become integral parts of the worldwide urban fabric.'

The major exception to the haphazard planning record outlined above and the clearest example of burgeoning hegemonic initiatives from a powerful new capitalist class is Rawabi, which transcends the problems of other Palestinian housing developments on virtually every level. Envisioned as a green satellite city to Ramallah, Rawabi will be built in stages (see Figure 1). Its two sections, including the fully planned town center dotted with parklets, opened with 200 families moving in as initial residents in late 2015, scaled back from earlier hopes of 40,000 residents, after many years of delays and difficulties in connecting the project to Israel-controlled water resources. Aiming to offer ‘affordable apartments to middle and upper-middle classes', as one sales agent informed me, prices range from $70,000 to $200,000 per unit, significantly cheaper than real estate in Ramallah. In the Rawabi showroom, all the major banks operating in the West Bank are present with cubicles and teller windows, ready to offer home loans to those ready to make the plunge.

Figure 1  Rawabi under construction in summer 2013 (Photo: Author).

Rawabi is the pet project of Bashar Masri, a Palestinian-American entrepreneur and head of Ramallah-based Massar International, who is partnering with Qatari Diar in building Rawabi's central 23 neighborhoods and commercial center before it is turned over to a municipality overseen by the Palestinian Authority, like any other city in Palestinian-controlled Area A of the West Bank. Hailing from one of the wealthiest and most elite families in the West Bank, Masri is an all around polarizing figure. Palestinian leftist activists decry Masri for his professional connections with his Israeli peers and the involvement of private Israeli firms in Rawabi's construction—tatbiyaa ‘normalization', in the activist discourse; a veritable taboo—while fellahin ‘peasants’ and other members of lower socioeconomic classes in Rawabi's vicinity also regard the project with suspicion, a cynicism that is unsurprising, as weaker members of Palestinian society are most vulnerable to being duped out of land by the Israeli legal system. ‘Rawabi is not for us', I am told by Abu Majd, a roofer from the village of Abuwen, near Rawabi. His daughter, an Arabic teacher in Ramallah, asks, ‘Do you think we Palestinians can build something like this?’ Walking downhill from Abu Majd's house to the village center, Rawabi appears, disappears and reappears between houses. It is the most prominent thing in sight.

Rumors about Rawabi range from Israeli involvement in its construction to the whole project suspected of being a cleverly disguised Jewish suburb of Jerusalem. Israeli buyers, rumor has it, are gobbling up units. Most provocatively, Palestinian leftists regularly decry Rawabi as a ‘Palestinian settlement', a sentiment that bridges the gap between the cynicism of the vulnerable lower classes, à la Abu Majd, and the equally cynical Palestinian leftist intelligentsia. Žižek (1989, 25) has made a strong argument for cynicism being a kind of ‘enlightened false consciousness', but my argument shows here that it can also be a mechanism to internalize and navigate through a rapidly changing lifeworld. Cynicism is not always analogous to an inadequacy of reason.

The local resistance to Rawabi, in my view, draws from emotions that I believe run deeper than the present political quagmire and from psychoemotional disorientation in the urbanization of the Palestinian lifeworld. Writing about planetary urbanization, Merrifield (2013, 911–912) posits that ‘the urban is now an ontological reality inside us, one that behoves a different way of seeing: it is a metaphilosophical problem of grappling with ourselves in a world that is increasingly urbanized'. Merrifield refers to the urban as ‘another “way of seeing”, another way of conceiving urbanization in our mind's eye … to grasp it as a complex adaptive system, as a chaotic yet determined process’ (912).

I see the resistance to Rawabi on two fronts, the first being a resistance based on ‘folkloric particularities’ (Lefebvre 2003, 96) as in the case of roofer Abu Majd. Lefebvre argued that ‘the critique of the city on behalf of the older community (tribal, village, parish) is a critique from the right’ (95) and that protest ‘based on particularities, generally of peasant origin, should not be confused with an opposition to repressive bodies or with an awareness and acknowledgment of difference’ (96). On another front, members of the Palestinian leftist intelligentsia, still rooted in the revolutionary ethos of early Palestinian movements, are resisting Rawabi in terms of Lefebvre's second criterion. They are not exactly asking who has the ‘right to the city', as per Lefebvre, David Harvey, etc., but, rather, who has the right to build the city?

Taraki (2008a, 68) finds that this ‘unraveling’ of a hegemonic culture in Palestine is concurrent with a middle class that finds itself ‘thrust upon a changed world’ and ‘witnessing the collapse of the national project in its different variants, thrown to the vagaries of global markets, and forced to fend for itself’ (70). It is precisely in this unraveling that the new capitalist elite is reimagining resilience.

What is indisputable in our case is that there is a blurring of identities occurring among Palestinians at this historical conjuncture in which urbanization plays an indispensable role. But, in terms of what Bourdieu (1977, 37) called ‘official ideology', Palestinians are indifferent to such trends and continue to negotiate a cognitive space between rural and urban that is yet to find its full expression. Redfield (1947, 293) wrote in a classic essay that ‘folk societies have certain features in common which enable us to think of them as a type—a type which contrasts with the society of the modern city'. The distinction, he adds, ‘is ideal, a mental construction’ (294). Consider then the following from Palestinian essayist Raja Shehadeh (2008, 27–28), who tells the story of Abu Ameen, a farmer from the village of Harrasha who dwells bitterly in his cramped Ramallah house, dreaming instead of the rural life of his youth:

‘Every morning he emerged from the house feeling drowsy, close to being asphyxiated from the carbon monoxide fumes of the charcoal they burned on the small metal qanoon inside the house to keep warm. The toilet was outside the house and during cold winter nights the animals were brought inside and slept in the downstairs area. It was confined, stuffy and noisy. His cheeks would be flushed, his head so heavy that he would be surprised by the fresh air. He claimed he suffered headaches from the continuous chatter of the women. He could hardly wait for the end of winter so he could be out again in the hills, sleeping on the roof of his qasr under the starry night sky, waking up in the morning with his clothes wet from dew. It was the silence that he craved most of all. That unique silence of the hills where you could hear the slithering of a snake in the undergrowth.'

Abu Ameen dwells thus somewhere between a nostalgic memory of his village and a semi-rural urban lifeworld, replete with material traces of his formerly rural life in the form of livestock, qanoon heating, etc. but transposed to the center of Ramallah's Old City. This betwixt and betweenness is the Palestinian identity at this historical conjuncture. It is, as Tamari (2009, 49) describes, ‘a peasantized culture functioning in an urban context'. It is in this liminality that major urbanization projects like Rawabi are being constructed, much to the awe and bafflement of the likes of Abu Ameen.

Israel/Palestine as moieties

I do not want to minimize the importance of the asymmetry of power in Israel/Palestine. Nonetheless, I favor the view that there are deeper underlying cultural processes through which Arab and Jew in Israel/Palestine function as moieties. Literary critic Ammiel Alcalay (1993) has put forth an ‘ecological model’ for Israel/Palestine, advocating an ‘examination of how cultures produce themselves within the conditions in which they happen to exist and evolve’ (33). If there is one truism one can make about the Israel/Palestine conflict, it is that, despite the walls, checkpoints, state and private security apparatus, mutual hostility, intifadas, et al., Arabs and Jews live together in a single conceptual space in which members of a community are divided into ‘two parts which maintain complex relationships varying from open hostility to very close intimacy, and with which various forms of rivalry and co-operation are usually associated', as per Lévi-Strauss's (1969, 69) description of societies with a dual organization system. Individuals in such societies are defined in relationship to each other ‘essentially by whether or not they belong or do not belong to the same moiety’ (71). In a strict anthropological analysis, the outcome of two social groups living in close proximity is formulaic. Diffusion of ideas, culture, taste, etc. towards an increasingly homogenizing entity is what was called in early anthropology a ‘culture area', most famously by Kroeber (1939). This is perhaps outside the purview of what Bourdieu (1977, 37) called the ‘official version of social reality’ for the actors involved, but, for the world, there is no Israeli without Palestinian and no Palestinian without Israeli. Edward Said (1974) wrote of this inextricability in 1974, somewhat cryptically: ‘Each is the Other’ (3).

This mutual mimesis is true materially as much ideologically, and often the two are intertwined. Take, for instance, the earliest urban development project in modern Israel/Palestine: Tel Aviv. Founded in 1909, the vision for and choice of location of the showpiece city of Zionist modernism is linked inextricably to Jaffa, the center of pre-1948 Palestinian urban life. Rabinowitz and Monterescu (2008, 206) write that Tel Aviv, from its beginnings, ‘had a problematic and ambivalent relationship with Jaffa—its mother city turned rival. Like many cases of child–parent rivalry, this relationship focused on the complexities of separation and individuation'. Mimesis, then, is a condition of the Israel/Palestine rivalry from the beginning to the extent that urban development is concerned. In the dualities of Israel/Palestine, Zionist modernism is the other for the Palestinian rural self-image, Tel Aviv is the other for Ramallah—at least in the post-Oslo period—and Jewish settlements are the other for the Palestinian village landscape. In the case of the latter, and going further than the mere diffusion of red roofs, Weizman (2007, 52) writes of Palestinian villages:

‘The utilitarian modernist silhouette of their slab construction, supported over the hilly landscape by columns, was influenced by the modernist ethos of early Zionist architecture. Appearing as a local adaptation of modernist villas, they testify to a complete reversal, which the policies of Israeli domination have brought on the building culture of Israelis and Palestinians alike.'

It is because of this processual mimesis that the leftist critique of Rawabi, as per Lefebvre's opposition of difference, cannot be accurately understood solipsistically, and the Israeli-other must also be included in the narrative. As wrote Sartre (1956, 364): ‘Conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others.’

I return then, to the leftist critique of Rawabi as a ‘Palestinian settlement’ that is ubiquitous in the cafés and bars of Ramallah, where intellectuals crowded around clouds of shisha and cigarette smoke dismiss the project en absolute. The deconstruction of the ‘Palestinian settlement’ thus lies in the Jewish settlement and the mimesis that this duality implies.

I am reminded here of Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti's (2004, 34) lyrical memoir of returning to his hometown after three decades of exile:

‘The first morning in Ramallah. I wake up and hasten to open the window.

“What are these elegant houses, Abu Hazim?” I asked, pointing at Jabal al-Tawil, which overlooks Ramallah and Bireh.

“A settlement.”

Then he added: “Tea? Coffee? Breakfast is ready.”

What a beginning to my resumed relationship with the homeland! Politics confront me at every turn.'

The history of hityashvut ‘settlement’ and hitnachalut ‘squatting’ activity by Zionist pioneers in Palestine began in 1878, but after the formation of the Israeli state in 1948 and the systematic Judaization of the Galilee and other areas with previously minimal Jewish presence (Falah 1991; Halper 2006, 64), ‘settlement’ has come to describe only new developments in the territories occupied by Israel after the 1967 War. In Israeli politspeak, there is a tendency to avoid both labels and use, instead, yishuvim, a generic and ambiguous term originating in the early Zionist period that does not distinguish settlements from collective agricultural communities like kibbutzim or moshavim. In the case of the Jerusalem area, new settlements are euphemized as shhunot ‘neighborhood’ (Weizman 2007, 8). But the difference between settlements and squats is a political one and not at all universal. Settlement construction after the 1967 War is legislated by the state and seen by centrist and many liberal Jewish Israelis as a legitimate extension of Israel, while the establishment of hitnachalut squatter communities, known in English as ‘outposts', are seen as autonomous actions by renegade extremists (Newman 2008, 207–208). For settlers themselves, the difference is trivial. Gush Emunim, the religious-nationalist settler movement that emerged in the early 1970s and influenced virtually all other settler movements thereafter, embraces the inextricability between settlements and outposts as part of its foundational identity, recalling both the dual nature of activities by early Zionist pioneers, as well as Joshua's brutal but necessary conquest of Canaan, as per the Bible (Newman 2008, 208).

Jewish settlements in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, now number over 200, including outposts, and have a population of 400,000. Many settlers are now third-generation Israelis living in settlements, meaning they have known no other home. Connected to Israel's 1949 armistice borders by an exclusive road system that circumvents Palestinian traffic and served with a modern Western infrastructure by the Israeli state, many settlers have only the vaguest idea of where they're living and what it means to be there in global geopolitical terms. Driving inside Israel and on Israeli roads, one dips in and out of the West Bank many times without anything really happening.

The West Bank holds a special place in the Israeli national consciousness. Judea and Samaria, as it is known by Israelis, is considered an integral part of Israel, and even liberal Israelis who support disengaging from the West Bank generally frown upon removing larger settlements like Ariel and Ma'ale Adumim, which are, in all logistical reality, fully functioning towns indistinguishable from those within Israel's 1949 armistice borders. It is worth noting that these liberal Israelis never held a similar emotional attitude towards Gaza, from which Israel evacuated its settlements in 2005. The Gaza disengagement, though, was a particularly sensational moment for Israelis, as the televised coverage of the forced evacuation of 8600 dramatic, hysterical settlers clinging to their homes has set a precedent for precisely how not to disengage from an occupied territory (see Dalsheim 2011).

A growing body of writing on Israel/Palestine etches out a Judaization of the character of the land from the pre-state period to the present day that, above all else, establishes Jewish roots in Palestine by an active and systematic engagement with it. Examples include the institutionalization of ha'tiyul ‘hiking’ to manufacture emotions between Jewish youths and ha'eretz ‘the land’ (Azaryahu and Golan 2004; Ben-David 1997; Kelner 2010; Stein 2009), or stimulating a mythistorical memory of a distant but glorious Jewish past via selective archaeological practices (Abu El Haj 1998, 2001), or by planting forests to distinguish Jewish inheritance of the land from its appearance under the Arab predecessors. ‘For the Zionist settlers, trees were more than a visual or literary metaphor', writes Zerubavel (1996, 60). ‘The act of planting a tree was seen as a necessary ritual of connecting to the land.’ In the Ottoman and British periods, the success of a single settlement or an individual settler was a microcosm of the potential success of the Yishuv, the larger Jewish settlement in Palestine (63). More recently, the continuation of settlement construction and expansion acts as a lifeline for the existence of a Jewish Israeli state that relies on a demographic presence throughout the land to weaken calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state and to make a potential disengagement from the West Bank impossible. Jewish settlements, thus, can be seen to possess qualities that are active and not passive, ambivalent towards legality, and part of a perceived historical process that began in the biblical period and continues with the initiatives of both elected state leaders and non-state actors like Gush Emunim and succeeding movements.

Taking into consideration these notes about the history and ideology of Jewish settlements in Palestine past and present, I share the following words from Mazen. The director of a US-based NGO in Ramallah, he has just bought a flat in Rawabi with his wife. He explains his reasons for choosing Rawabi over new developments in Ramallah:

‘From a patriotic perspective, we are building paradise over these deserted mountains that might be under threat of being confiscated by the Israelis. We know how much the Israelis are expanding their settlements day by day since we signed the agreement at Oslo. The number of settlements are maybe 10 times what they used to be during Oslo. In time they are cutting and eating these mountains bit by bit. For a Palestinian company to come, like Masri and others who are building Rawabi, I think they are doing something good for Palestinians; first from keeping these mountains from being confiscated, and second, by allowing people a new chance of living a modern lifestyle in a city like this.'

Mazen's view of Rawabi reflects the embryonic stage of an initiative to resist Israeli dominance in the West Bank through active development and reimagination of the land, mirroring the ideology of Jewish settler movements of Judaization. This is, in fact, very different from the historical Palestinian approach to resilience, sumud, and is what I propose to be theorized as a new ideological frontier. It is a frontier that learns from an intimate acquaintance with Zionism.

Sumud and post-sumud

In the lexicon of Palestinian movements, two words stand above all others: muqawama ‘resistance' and sumud ‘steadfastness’ (Schiocchet 2012, 67–68). Sumud is a term used by Palestinians to politicize their most unremarkable activities—dwelling, consuming, laughing, loving, etc.—in lieu of an everyday violence resulting from Israeli military rule; a kind of ordinary violence that ‘occurs within the weave of life as lived in the kinship universe’, to borrow an expression from Veena Das (1998, 181). It is conceived as a passive form of political resistance that manifests in routine modes of being …. Halper's aforementioned ‘strategy within a non-strategy'. Lotte Buch Segal (2015, 42) offers an interpretation of sumud as ‘practicing patience', relating it to an ‘image of the Palestinian collective … supporting activities of resistance'. But where does sumud as a resistance strategy/non-strategy intersect with resilience? ‘We are all resisting', a Ramallawi friend told me. ‘The shopkeeper across the street is resisting by not closing down his shop and moving to America.’ This routine and often mundane maintenance of Palestinian integrity is sumud as an existential fact—a ‘descent into everyday life', to draw from Veena Das's work on the ordinariness of living with pain, trauma, hardship, etc. (see Das 2007). The shopkeeper's resilience is integrated into his being-in-the-world. It is here perhaps that we can see sumud an instance par excellence of the kind of ethics that Das (2015, 55) describes as ‘inhering in the quotidian rather than standing out and announcing its presence though dramatic enactments of moral breakdown or heroic achievement’. But a broader definition of sumud includes the continuation of traditional Palestinian cultural forms, like the dabke, an Arab folk dance autochthonous to the Levant normally performed in peasant costumes, and bodies of art and literature that integrate into resistance motifs. A 1989 collection of Palestinian folk tales translated into English and later French titled Speak, Bird, Speak Again, published in the tumultuous midst of the first intifada, is one example of the politicized preservation of traditional forms. A cumbersome anthropological project that fortuitously coincided with the arrival of a Palestinian political consciousness, the collection's foreword by folklorist Alan Dundes states (Muhawi and Kanaana 1989, xii):

‘It is perhaps a tragic irony of history that the Jews, who themselves have been forced by bigotry and prejudice to wander from country to country seeking even temporary sanctuary, have through the formation of a “homeland” caused another people to become homeless. Although this complex issue has engendered great emotion on all sides, one fact is beyond dispute: there was once an area of the world called Palestine, where the Arab inhabitants had—and have—a distinctive culture all their own. It is that culture that is preserved so beautifully in the magical stories contained in this volume.'

The existential antonym of sumud is muqawama ‘active resistance'; that Palestinians attribute to everything from throwing stones to the kind of more severe warfare seen in Gaza and previously in the West Bank and within Israel's 1949 armistice borders during the second intifada. But here there is a class divide that is esconded in the strategic essentialism of the Palestinian national movement. Class society in contemporary urban Palestine is marked by what Taraki (2008b, 7) describes as ‘growing social disparities and their normalization; and the globalized, modernist urban ethos articulated by a new middle class'.

Yiftachel (2002) pairs the cultivation of sumud as a resistance narrative with the rise of settler movements like Gush Emunim in the 1970s, replacing the earlier dichotomy of gola and galut ‘exile, diaspora’ for Jewish Israelis and manfah or ghourba ‘dispersion, estrangement’ for Palestinians. In fact, for Palestinians, concepts of steadfastness and dispersion are not unrelated. The conviction to not budge from the land is a conscious response to the exile of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948, known as the Nakba ‘catastrophe', and an acknowledgement that only roughly half the world's ethnic Palestinian population currently remain in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and Israel. Here the dual narratives of Jewish Israelis and Palestinians become nearly identical through a cultural ethos defined by what social psychologist Phillip Hammack (2011) calls a pattern of ‘descent and gain’ for Jews (117), referring mostly to the historical persecution of Jews in Europe that preceded the triumphant founding of the Israeli state, and ‘dispossession and resistance’ for Palestinians (122), and one in which both sides identify strongly with notions of exile, diaspora and estrangement. With time, and with questions of veracity and entitlement aside, the two narratives are becoming dual versions of one essential narrative. The importance and consequences of the Holocaust in the Palestinian national discourse is also worth considering here. The Holocaust features prominently in curricula in Palestinian schools (Adwan, Bar On, and Naveh 2012), and the persistence of the Holocaust on the global stage as a reference point for the tragedy of modernity utilizes its memory as the ‘cultural foundation for global human rights politics’ even by populations that have no direct connection to it (Levy and Sznaider 2002, 88). For Palestinians, with their extraordinarily close if unusual relationship with Jews, the principal victims of the Holocaust, the influence of Jewish responses to the Holocaust on Palestinian resistance movements and discourse, namely, an acceleration in nationalist statecraft, cannot be ignored. Narratives diffuse no less readily than architecture.

Shifting from the conventionally understood forms of active muqawama and passive sumud, Rawabi is a notable development that borrows considerably from Israeli experiments with settlement. In one sense, its self-fashioned modernity aims to transcend common misconceptions about Middle Eastern cities that are often bogged by idioms like ‘stagnation, traditionalism, and backwardness’ (Rabinowitz and Monterescu 2008, 195), while its architectural styling of uniform, almost garish high-rises moves Rawabi closer to satellite cities and townships in much of the global South and, specifically, the Gulf (see Figure 2). The involvement of Qatari firms in Rawabi's construction as an obvious factor aside, the persistence of the exuberantly wealthy rulers of Gulf cities to become an influence on Palestinian and other Arab populations as a marker for modernity pushes Doha, Abu Dhabi and Dubai to fill the void left by Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo of bygone eras, albeit with mixed results. Interestingly, after Israel's disengagement from Gaza in 2005, pro-Israel commentators sardonically challenged Palestinians to build a ‘Dubai on the Mediterranean', ignoring the spartan living conditions imposed on Gazans by Israel after its withdrawal of settlements (Roy 2005, 65).

Figure 2  Model set of Rawabi (Photo: Author).

On the other hand, the closest city with any kind of resemblance to Rawabi is Modi'in, a planned city pegged to Israel's 1949 armistice border along the West Bank. Designed by Moshe Safdie, a student of architectural giant Louis Kahn, Modi'in was founded in 1993 to much curiosity from the Israeli public, but during my visit to the city I sensed only gloomy late-Soviet decline. Could this be one of Rawabi's possible futures? While researching Rawabi's optimal options, Safdie was consulted by Masri and his staff on the successes and failures of planning a city in the region, and Rawabi's architects toured Modi'in up to four times a week during initial planning stages, visits that are cited by Masri's detractors as evidence of his collaboration with Israel. More interestingly, Israel's Civil Administration, the unit of the military that governs the West Bank, has permitted the planting of 25,000 trees around Rawabi. Not only is this noteworthy for being the first Palestinian forestation project approved by Israel, but also for being the first serious Palestinian attempt at forestation after observing Zionist forestation projects for about a century. The theme of mimesis in the Israel/Palestine moieties reemerges here.

But who are the Palestinians buying flats in Rawabi? My interviews with Rawabi buyers tell the stories of ambivalent social actors who are being ushered dreamily into a hazy future that as yet has not come into view. Abu Sami is from a farming family in Salfit, a village near Nablus, who works as a police officer in Ramallah:

‘I built my house over many years. My house is located between Areas B and C. I am very close to my other neighbors, who are fully located in [Israeli-controlled] Area C and are under the threat of being demolished by the Israelis. So even if I want to expand my house and make it bigger, I can't. So it's whatever I have now. I can't add even one room. The area I'm living in is very limited for land available for building. Forty percent of the houses there are under threat of being demolished. Expansion is not an option. I have kids and they're grown up. I'll need more rooms and a bigger house. As Palestinians we always suffer. Rawabi is a creative and ambitious city. It's a very creative idea.'

Abu Sami is choosing to buy a flat in Rawabi over Ramallah because Rawabi, located approximately halfway between Salfit and Ramallah, will allow him and his family easier access to his village (see Figure 3). The village is the center of emotional life in the Palestinian imagination. Asking Ramallawis where they are from, the answer will almost always be the name of the village of their parents, whether it be in the West Bank, inside Israel, in Gaza, or one of the 530 villages emptied or destroyed during the nakba. A Ramallawi journalist originally from a village near Jenin who is buying a flat in Rawabi tells me, ‘Emotionally all my connections are to Deir Ghazaleh.’ He pauses to select his words carefully, bemused by the anthropologist quizzing the journalist. ‘I make sure I participate in all the social events that happen there. I live in Ramallah because my work is in Ramallah.’

Figure 3  Abu Sami and his family in the Rawabi showroom (Photo: Author).

The determination of Palestinians to maintain a link to the village is a dimension of the Palestinian self-identification with peasantry, but also an extension of the dominant themes of the Palestinian narrative—exile, estrangement, dispersion; themes that permeate to an understanding of the urban experience as unnatural and bound by temporariness. But to what extent is the village landscape held in the hearts and minds of Palestinians an idyllic lost past not only for its loss to Israel, but also to capitalism, globalization, modernity, etc.? Take, for instance, Salwa, an economist who dwells comfortably in an upscale neighborhood of Ramallah, regularly travels internationally and lives a life not dissimilar to those of practicing academics elsewhere in the world. In no way can she be seen to be in colloquy with the village lifeworld. Yet, in conversation with her regarding Palestinian identity, she uttered, decisively: ‘We have for centuries worked on the land.’ I was immediately struck by her choice of pronoun—the first person plural—which locates her belonging to within a peasant identity naturally suited to the Palestinian village. Is this a strategic choice to generate difference between colonized/colonizer, or a more depoliticized affiliation stimulated by the disorientation from rapid, planetary urbanization?

It is true that Palestinians from business and professional classes, in a disavowal of class and cultural incompatibilities, continue to principally see themselves as fellahin (Swedenburg 1990), but as younger generations are raised entirely in urban environments and memories of an idyllic pre-nakba national past recede to childhoods deeply shaped by two intifadas, barbed wire, checkpoints and modernity, it is interesting to postulate what significance the fellahin will maintain in the Palestinian identity of the future. This, in part, is the shift away from sumud as it has been traditionally practiced. Nonetheless, in the process of the urbanization of Palestine, the village house, like the olive tree, continues to symbolize roots and resilience. As villages grow to towns and towns grow to cities, and as internal migration of labor becomes commonplace, the Palestinian house becomes a material link between the imagined identity and the burgeoning reality. Emad, a sales agent at Rawabi, tells me:

‘For the Palestinian people, the houses and apartments they live in have a strong emotional connection to them. Most of the time they inherit these houses from their parents and grandparents, and by the time this house becomes a very important location in the city, its financial value goes sky high. So although these families are sometimes in need of financial help, or selling this house could make them really rich and turn their lives around 180 degrees, they still can't take the decision to sell it, because of the emotional connection with that location. Also, there's another social consideration. People, neighbors, and relatives consider it kind of a shame. It's not something people would like if you sell a house you inherited from your parents. All for emotional reasons.'

I am reminded of an anecdote from Susan Slyomovics's ethnography of Ein Hod in Israel. The Palestinian village of Ein Houd was evacuated during the nakba and later became an Israeli artist community by the name of Ein Hod, a Hebrew variation on the original Arabic. Palestinian villagers returning to Ein Houd after the hostilities of 1948 subsided were surprised to find their homes inhabited by Jews. In the confusion, the Palestinian villagers built a makeshift village on a nearby hill that has since attained a state of permanent limbo. Slyomovics (1993, 34) relates the only known instance of an effort by a resident of the new Jewish Ein Hod to compensate a resident of the former Palestinian Ein Houd for his house:

‘[ … ] Abu Hilmi always assumed he would return to his land and house, which had become the property of the artist Isaiah Hillel … Hillel tried to pay Abu Hilmi for the house, according to the architect Giora Ben-Dov … Ben-Dov's is the only known Ein Hod anecdote recounting such a gesture: after Hillel received ownership title he walked up the mountain to visit Abu Hilmi to offer financial recompense. Hillel, a fluent Arabic speaker, was graciously received and thanked, but with these much-quoted words Abu Hilmi refused: “Because it is a house and you cannot sell a house.”'

Returning to the factors motivating internal migration in the West Bank that attract buyers to Rawabi, legal and infrastructural difficulties in expanding existing homes is a recurring theme, as in the case of Abu Sami. This trend is also observable in Palestinian residents of Jerusalem, which is a compelling development in the saga of Jerusalem as a contested city and a political focal point in the Israel/Palestine conflict. Fadi is a construction worker from the Al-Tur neighborhood of Jerusalem, better known by its English name, the Mount of Olives:

‘We feel very tight in Jerusalem. The area we live in is very tight, very small. Even though we have land there, it's not easy to get a permit to build. When my father applied for a permit to build a house, they asked for 850,000 NIS [approx. $240,000], just as taxes and fees. For the time being, because my father is old, I will have to be between here and there. I will not claim that I live in Rawabi. My address will be in Jerusalem. Rawabi is one option. I want to buy outside Jerusalem because in Jerusalem I cannot. Even a small house I had in Area C has been demolished. So all the options available for Jerusalem are very limited.'

In the palette of color-coded identity cards issued to Palestinians by Israel, the blue Jerusalem identity card holds a privileged position for the freer mobility it allows in comparison to the green West Bank identity card or the dreaded orange Gaza identity card, and also for the sheer sumud in it being evidence of a Palestinian presence in Jerusalem. Fadi, by moving to Rawabi, invites the possibility of his Jerusalem identity card being revoked if Israeli authorities discover his purchase. ‘It's risky', Rim, another buyer tells me. She is a single mother from Jerusalem who faces the same dilemma. My friend Mostafa, a native of Jerusalem, had his blue identity card revoked when authorities determined that his confectioner's shop in Ramallah violated Israel's ‘center of life’ policy that requires Palestinian residents of Jerusalem to orbit their existence around the holy city in order to be permitted residency in it. ‘They're sick bastards', Mostafa tells me. His wife and two daughters, who were not stripped of their blue identity cards, are now obliged to make weekend visits to see him in Ramallah, where he lives in a micro-exile only 16 km away. In his newfound isolation, he has taken up writing short stories.

Much of the developments popping up in the West Bank sprawl are second residences for Jerusalemites preparing for the possibility of being evicted from Jerusalem at any moment. I cannot help but deduce a kind of fatalism in Jerusalemites buying flats in Rawabi. Fadi, the construction worker from the Mount of Olives, seemed fatigued from years of nursing his elderly father. Rim was between jobs. The struggle for Palestinians to maintain a presence in Jerusalem since the Israeli capture of the Old City and its eastern environs in 1967 has been a difficult one, as the Judaization, or, inversely, de-Arabization, of the city has increasingly forced Palestinian residents of Jerusalem to choose between jobs in Jerusalem and homes in the West Bank (Makdisi 2010, 177), or vice versa, through measures of control that include but are not limited to land expropriation, zoning regulations, denial of building permits, home demolitions and evictions, and refusal of commercial permits. Proportionate to the demographic decline has been the diminishing visibility of Palestinian culture in the city. This is observable in young Jerusalemites who prefer to drive to Ramallah or other Israeli cities for bars and bohemian life, but also it is a problem on an institutional level. For instance, Jerusalem's turn to host the UNESCO Arab Capital of Culture program in 2009 was a disastrous affair mired by Israeli police shutting down numerous events with arrests and road blockades. The Hakawati Theater, the only Palestinian theater in Jerusalem, is perpetually operating with fear of imminent seizure by the Israeli Enforcement and Collection Authority.

‘I forget the houses that inscribed my narrative', wrote Mahmoud Darwish (2009, 153) in his twilight years. ‘And I remember my identity card number.’ As with all other Palestinians, the identity card is shorthand for the Palestinian experience in Jerusalem. Jerusalemites crossing the Qalandia checkpoint from Ramallah to Jerusalem carefully unwrap their identity card from layers of plastic, as if it were a piece of jewelry. It is the tangible physical substance through which the abstract relationship between Palestinians and the invisible apparatus of state power is mediated (Tawil-Souri 2011, 82). To risk losing the blue Jerusalem identity card is to risk becoming further stateless. For these and other Palestinians voluntarily leaving their homes, the lure of Rawabi and the modernity that it promises, perhaps, is acquiescing with dignity to a superior power.

Discussion: reimagining resilience

This paper is, in one part, an attempt to understand the significance of Rawabi as an ontological fact, but I also use Rawabi as a vehicle to understand a larger movement, still emerging, that departs from sumud as it has been traditionally understood. If sumud has, for decades, been strategy within a non-strategy, then this new ideological frontier uses active initiatives to stake a claim on the land through engagement. What is at stake in this engagement is not only what may be called a ‘neoliberal turn’ in Palestinian politics (see Dana 2015), but, ironically, a political/ideological orientation that puts Palestinian identity greatly in conversation with the Zionist legacy in Israel/Palestine. Rawabi is an instance of this inheritance reimagined in purely capitalist terms.

It is important here to consider the class reality in the West Bank. The fate of the dominant classes in Palestinian society is a rare instance in our world where the wealthy are, in many ways, as powerless as the poor. As colonial subjects in the West Bank, no amount of social status, buying power, Western education, foreign language acquisition, etc. leverages the upper classes over lower ebbs of society against Israel's policy towards Palestinians in the West Bank. There is a social ladder to climb, but it does not lead to Israel. In terms of political activism, there is also a disparity in which members of the dominant classes restrict themselves to spheres of knowledge production like advocacy, writing, scholarship, politically motivated art, etc.—Bourdieu's (1985, 731) ‘production of common sense'—while it is the subaltern youth from urban peripheries, refugee camps and villages who engage in muqawama and suffer the fatal pitfalls of clashing with Israeli soldiers. Stone-throwing Palestinian subaltern are a classic case of what Žižek (2012, 53) describes as ‘those outside the organized social sphere, prevented from participating in social production, who are able to express their discontent only in the form of “irrational” outbursts of destructive violence, or what Hegel called “abstract negativity”’.

Can we employ the same language of rationality/irrationality for the problematic of urban development in Palestine? ‘Absurdity’ is the term Marx used to describe what he called the ‘epidemic of over-production' (Marx and Engels [1848] 2008, 42). Is this what critics of Rawabi mean? That there is, to quote Marx again, ‘too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce?' (42). This conflict between an overproductive modernity and the yearning to maintain traditional cultural forms—the pre-colonial, real or imagined—is another way to frame the emergence of a new ethics that departs from sumud; the major source of what I describe in this paper as disorienting.

Many of the emerging trends in Palestine, and particularly in Ramallah, are coated in laissez-faire glitz. I speak here of high-rise hotels, a taste for expensive European cars and other markers of modernity that Ramallawis are quite proud of. This is interesting given the socialist ethos and rhetoric of early Palestinian movements, the persistence of strong support for communist parties in areas of the West Bank and, again, the insistence of Palestinians to continue self-identifying with peasantry in spite of steady urbanization. Rawabi's critics are an audible voice in the Palestinian leftist intelligentsia, but this criticism tends to be restricted to the involvement of Israeli firms in the project as a breach of the boycott movement against Israel. ‘Normalization', an ambiguous term with many possible interpretations regarding the Israeli occupation of the West Bank—never positive—is brought up incessantly. But the no-holds-barred capitalism, as private sector real estate development projects tend to be, is unquestioned. Writing about the Palestinian nationalist program in the late 1980s, Bowman (1988, 35) warned that ‘even when a potentially nationalist community has developed national consciousness, there is no necessity for that population to develop politically separatist programs'. He suggests that there are ‘other routes for it as a whole to follow—into assimilationist ameliorism, into revolutionary internationalism, or into despair, fragmentation, and anomie'. This paper suggests that the rise of the laissez-faire glitz within a Palestinian gray space presents a separatism of a hegemonic capitalist elite within a nationalist consciousness, and everyday Palestinians—they who are ultimately the agents of change—are entering into what Bourdieu (1990, 53) called a ‘structuring structure’ (etched out by this powerful new class). That is, as my interviews with Rawabi buyers show, Palestinians who are moving to Rawabi are doing so because of practical difficulties in their lives and not the grand vision of modernity of those constructing it. But hegemonic discourse, of course, is only equipped for the dominant narrative and not the multitude of connections in the makeup of a social reality.

The inevitable imitation of the global North by the global South in its path to modernity, known as ‘global convergence', is a conversation I borrow here from the globalization discourse (Marcotullio 2003; Myllylä and Kuvaja 2005, 228). At a glance and on a superficial level, Rawabi is a planned city in the developing world envisioned by enterprising private sector investors that fits squarely within this formula. In these plain terms, Rawabi offers the consumer a planned, green city in a region where all other urbanization is unplanned, arguably unsustainable and chaotic. But in any discussion of development and planning in Palestine, it cannot be ignored that the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza are politically liminal, still occupied territories by international law, and that the whole of Israel/Palestine, in some circles, has currency as the quintessential colonial project in the contemporary world (see Visweswaran 2012). I cannot surmise another instance where the colonized have built great cities within the colony.

Ultimately, the story of Rawabi will be told in the decades to come. It will almost certainly never be a Dubai in the West Bank highlands, but it could very well be a model for how urbanization is managed by Palestinians in the future. It could also be a total failure, or fall into bland nothingness like Modi'in. In the meantime, for many Palestinians who are most affected by the difficult nuances of the conflict, particularly Palestinians from areas where housing options are veritably challenging, like Jerusalem and Area C of the West Bank, the Rawabi option is a kind of resignation in the guise of modernity. By accommodating the departure of Palestinians from places where they are unwelcome, ventures like Rawabi, inadvertently, help accelerate the Judaization of parts of Israel/Palestine that as of yet have not succumbed to this fate. Perhaps this is the criticism against Rawabi that the Palestinian left intuits, dismissing the project as a ‘Palestinian settlement', but is not able to articulate.

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Arpan Roy

Arpan Roy is a Graduate Student in the Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University.