Welcome To Ramallah, The De Facto Capital Of Palestine

Instead of East Jerusalem, Ramallah is beginning to look like the de facto capital of Palestine:

A building frenzy that is transforming Ramallah's skyline is also consolidating its position as the de facto Palestinian capital.

Once a village outside Jerusalem, the West Bank city increasingly appears to be assuming the role marked out for East Jerusalem in the Palestinians' statehood plans.


Smart hotels and apartment blocks are rising from the hilly terrain, a new presidential palace is under construction and the Palestinians are building new ministries for their government rather than continuing to rent out office space.

No Arab leader, least of all Abbas, is about to say that Ramallah will be the capital of a Palestinian state--implying that the Arabs have given up their claim to part (or all) of Jerusalem, but the construction going on in Ramallah shows they are being pragmatic:

The PA is building a complex that will house seven ministries. The work, more than half complete, is one sign of Ramallah's transformation into the PA's "eternal capital," said Iyad al-Barghouti, a critic of PA policy on the issue.

New presidential offices are being constructed at the compound where Mahmoud Abbas and Yasser Arafatbefore him have presided over the limited self-rule ceded by Israel.

Work has started on a new commercial district, the Ersal Center — a $400 million investment envisioned as becoming a center for Palestinian banking and trade.

And this month, Abbas opened new Ramallah headquarters for the Palestine Liberation Organization(PLO), which was headquarted in East Jerusalem in the years between its establishment in 1964 and Israel's capture of the land in 1967. "God willing, the headquarters of the PLO will return to Jerusalem soon," Abbas said at the November 23 opening ceremony of the building, which the PLO is renting. "All of our sovereign headquarters are temporary. The time will come, God willing, to move all of them to Jerusalem," Abbas said.

But what begins as merely pragmatic can begin to take on signs of psychological attachment as well:

"On the psychological and practical level Ramallah has become the eternal capital of the Palestinian Authority," said Barghouti, a sociologist who lectures at the Palestinian university of Birzeit, in the West Bank just outside Ramallah.

"The Authority is acting in a way that gives the impression that Ramallah is the capital of the state. It's not just a matter of whether they rent or build or buy, but the way they have focused the institutions of the PA in Ramallah," he said.

No one believes that Ramallah will replace Jerusalem for the Arabs--Jerusalem is too good an issue to pass on. Besides, what Arab leader would dare say publicly that Ramallah is to be a permanent capital in place of Jerusalem.

Still, it is a development worth taking note of, along with the rest of the turnaround of the West Bank.

Technorati Tag: Jerusalem and Ramallah.