It may not seem important, but the dueling Palestinian reactions to the opening of a mall in Ramallah are telling.
“Icon Mall marked its opening on Saturday with live music, dance performances and a large public turnout,” Haaretz reports. “Palestinian Authority officials, including Ramallah Governor Laila Ghannam, attended the event.”
Gaza-based influencer Khaled Safi surely spoke for many of his fellow enclave-dwellers when he objected to the celebratory photos of the gleaming mall filled with shoppers—now the largest mall in the West Bank—against the backdrop of the war in Gaza: “In Ramallah, to the sound of flowery applause and protocol, the largest mall in the West Bank opened, a mall befitting a country that has forgotten that it has a bleeding wound in its side called Gaza.”
But the article also quotes the complaints of non-Gaza-based Palestinians, which aren’t as easy to empathize with. “What happened at Icon Mall is the smallest of the [Palestinian] authorities’ crimes and their blatant nonsense. We kept silent about their greater crimes, and this was the result,” posted Yassin Ezz El-Din. But El-Din sees the Palestinian government as an extension of the Israeli government and has advocated for “violent resistance in the West Bank”—in other words, for the West Bank to share Gaza’s bleak fate, rather than prosper or establish some consistent form of self-determination.
Then there was the writer Yunus Abu Jarad, who lamented a Palestinian government “psychologically, socially and politically detached from its homeland.” But Abu Jarad is physically detached from the homeland: he lives in Turkey. That isn’t a sin, but it does make his “detached” criticism a bit hypocritical. The West Bank and Gaza together are presumably what Abu Jarad means by “homeland,” so why shouldn’t life improve for those still living in it?
Most hilariously, Haaretz quotes Ramy Abdu, the head of an NGO whose sickening fealty to Hamas repulses Palestinians too. Abdu, one of the most widely reviled anti-democracy activists in the conflict, whines that the director of the mall is Qassam Barghouti, son of Marwan Barghouti, a prominent Palestinian politician in Israeli jail for his alleged role in numerous terrorist attacks. Barghouti is also considered a serious challenger to PA President Mahmoud Abbas should he be released by Israel. Were Barghouti to eventually become Palestinian president, his constituents would surely benefit more from the construction of shopping centers and the opening of employment opportunities than from an endless commitment to bloodshed apparently preferred by Abdu.
And that’s the crux of it, really. Statehood and self-determination is not as attractive to these Palestinian activists as is mutual, perpetual misery. Who wants food and jobs when you could have war?
In fact, the real objection of so many Palestinian pundits to signs of normality and commerce is the contrast they set with Gaza. Palestinians have made choices over the years. Those choices have resulted in two different national projects: one looks like the West Bank and one looks like Gaza. Which is the more desirable path forward?
The Icon Mall isn’t going to bring peace. But it has a Palestinian branch of an Israeli luxury textiles chain, and that puts Ramallah closer to coexistence with Israel than pretty much every U.S. college campus.
Considering Gaza’s real estate and the unholy gobs of money the world throws at it, Gaza could out-gleam Ramallah any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Gaza’s condition today is what happens when you take all that human and physical capital and put it in Hamas’s hands.
The Palestinian-governed parts of the West Bank aren’t exactly a land of endless prosperity. And the Abbas-run PA is an incompetent and corrupt bureaucratic dinosaur. Yet there is still such a difference between that and Gaza.
The Palestinian pundits and activists quoted by Haaretz don’t want that difference to be emphasized. But Palestinians ought to know how much better their lives would be without Hamas or another death cult in charge. In that sense, the son of an imprisoned terrorist opening an enormous mall in Ramallah is what we call generational progress, even if we’re grading on a Palestinian curve.
