Notes from S’s visit.

S. has now left. Here are a few retrospective thoughts from the two weeks she was here:

• On the first night S. was here, we went to see Boney M play the Ramallah Cultural Palace (an awesome gig btw). A couple of days later we went to see a reggae concert at a local bar, and the next evening we had dinner at a popular local restaurant. By this point, it seemed like we knew or recognized half the people in the restaurant. This definitely gave me the sense that Ramallah is starting to resemble Amman: a limited social scene where an elite few constantly search for and inhabit the ‘next’ restaurant/bar/event, speaking to see and seeing more or less the same people.
• Travelling around the West Bank, the extensiveness of Israeli colonialisation is (still) staggering. Bantustanization (the division and fragmentation of Palestinian space) is a ‘permanent solution’, regardless of which variety of state – if any – emerges in the next few years. [I don’t conceive of ‘permanency’ in this context as either static or eternal, rather obdurate and enduring].
• Birzeit Old City has been extensively renovated since my last visit in 2007. I should have an opportunity to write more about this later in the month.
• We visited Al-Khalil [Hebron], which has changed a great deal since my previous visit in 2005. It’s much less tense. Businesses have opened in the Old City again. The colonies built on top of Palestinian houses in the heart of the city remain, as does the military presence protecting them. This situation will not endure.
• Also in Al-Khalil, Jawwal – the Palestinian mobile phone company – has built a series of fountains in the middle of roundabouts. Their billboards and posters are all over the West Bank. They sponsor festivals and community projects. We are witnessing the Jawwalisation of public space in the Palestinian areas of the West Bank.
• Frequently when people met us (i.e. as a couple), they would ask if we had any children. When we said no, the common response – inshallah (God willing) – could be interpreted as part invocation, part blessing. One young woman told S. that when she returns to Palestine, she should return with a child. One old woman told me I looked too young to have children.