5. Ramallah; the graves of Yasser Arafat, Muhammad Edwan, and Mahmoud Darwish.

5).  Ramallah: the tombs of Yasser Arafat, Muhammad Edwan and Mahmoud Darwish.

On the third day we went  in the minibus to visit the secondary school and orphanage in Abu Dis, where we were greeted warmly by some of the teachers who showed us some of their pupils’ art work.  Then we were driven out to the east of Abu Dis near to the gates of a large settlement, Ma’ale Adumim.  We took the road to Ramallah, passing on its southern edge through Qalandia refugee camp, where a young man of 23, Muhammad Edwan had just that morning been shot multiple times whilst driving his car by Israeli forces on a house-arresting raid,  and left to bleed to death.  The main road had been closed for a while but was open when we went through, though  all the shops were shut as people were preparing for the funeral.

We went first in Ramallah to the tomb of Yasser Arafat, which was guarded by two soldiers in decorative uniforms, in a stone mausoleum; I found this rather surreal in an offensive way, given that he was responsible for signing the Oslo agreement in 1993 and undermining the Palestinian negotiators at the time.  The Israeli government in the end did not respect the Oslo agreement which was supposed to be about creating a system of self-government, the Palestine National Authority, and during the second Intifada in 2002 the Israeli army re-occupied much of the territory and made a Palestinian autonomous state even more unviable.  However, the agreement set in place the zoning of the West Bank whereby Jerusalem is considered completely separately and governed effectively by a Municipal Authority as part of Israel, and the West Bank is fragmented into numerous enclaves with Palestinians banned from 60% of the land area.   The rest is zoned - Zone A consists of a few cities, which nominally are controlled by Palestinian authorities with their own soldiers and police, but the Israeli army is allowed into the zone when supposedly in ‘hot pursuit’ of an offender.  Zone B, consisting of villages and land around the Palestinian cities, is nominally controlled jointly by Israeli and Palestinian authorities, but in effect the Israeli army has a free hand there; and Zone C, the vast mass of the land, which increasingly is given over to Israeli settlements, is completely controlled by Israel.  It is this imprisonment in enclaves, which can never be economically viable units, which has determined the situation of the West Bank as we were seeing it, creating a geography of suffering, a prescription for abuse and systematic domination.

The triumph and the complete military supremacy of the US in the 1990s left Palestine resistance to the Israeli/American settler-colonial project more or less impossible, but in that situation to engage in negotiations that could be given and were given the false appearance of a settlement between two at least notionally equal parties was perhaps to compound and to exacerbate the failure - though I suppose the deception and the self-deception involved is no different from that of any worker when he agrees to work for an employer.  It is the way of the world, under capitalism, for brute force to be obscured by the victims as well as the perpetrators.  Nevertheless I found the celebration of Arafat, whose face was recognisable on many walls, particularly in Abu Dis, perplexing.   It seemed to me that the Oslo accords had enabled the formation of a class of collaborators, often using EU funds, who could thrive despite the defeat, a class which Ramallah as a whole, as a place, seemed to represent.  

It was the military ritual of the performance of the guarding of Arafat’s tomb that seemed to me particularly painful, given that the military might is all on the side of the Israelis.  The only hope for Palestinians can never be through military confrontation with the US/Israeli military industrial complex, but through some coming popular internationalist undermining of military domination generally as an abusive and destructive way for humanity to determine its way forward, faced with the existential threat posed by militarism, extraction and capital accumulation.

Behind the tomb was an instructive museum giving a history of the struggle against Zionism, from the early 20th century to the present, albeit a history from a Fatah perspective. There was also an exhibition of the living quarters in which Arafat lived with his guards under siege by Israeli forces from December 2001 until shortly before his death from Plutonium poisoning two years later.

I would have preferred to visit the tomb of the poet Mahmoud Darwish, who died in 2008, which is also in Ramallah, according to his friend the late John Berger, near the top of a small hill called Al Rabwah, next to a rubbish dump on the western outskirts of the city.  (Mahmoud Darwish, Mural, translated by Remea Hammami and John Berger, Verso, 2017, p2).  His poems were the most moving exhibits in the museum, such as this one about intrusive surveillance, with an echo of Hegel’s master/slave myth in the last line:

They searched his chest

but could only find his heart

They searched his heart

but could only find his people

They searched his voice

but could only find his grief

They searched his grief

but could only find his prison

They searched his prison

but could only find themselves

In shackles.