Ramallah

Ramallah was founded in the mid-sixteenth century, by tradition when the Haddadin, a Christian clan from east of the Jordan, settled on this cool ridge. For three centuries it remained a village of a few thousand people living from olives, grapes and grain, with a Christian majority and a reputation for its climate. An Ottoman-era migration to the Americas began late in the nineteenth century, and the resulting diaspora — especially in the United States — sent back money that built stone houses and schools. The Quakers opened their school for girls in 1869.

The British Mandate made it a summer resort: Jerusalem families came up for the air, hotels and cinemas opened, and the Palestine Broadcasting Service was inaugurated in the town. Jordan ruled from 1948, and the 1948 war brought refugees into the camps of al-Amari, Qaddura and Jalazone around the town, shifting the population towards a Muslim majority. Israel occupied the town in the 1967 war.

Its modern character was made by the Oslo Accords. When the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994 it based most of its ministries here rather than in occupied East Jerusalem, and embassies, aid agencies, banks and media followed. Yasser Arafat was besieged in the Mukataa compound during the Second Intifada and died in 2004; his tomb and the museum beside it are now the city's most visited site. Building boomed through the 2000s and 2010s, giving the city towers, malls and traffic, and the planned new town of Rawabi rose on a hill to the north. The city's economy has been under severe strain since the war that began in October 2023.

Ramallah is where Palestinian cultural life is organised. Publishers, theatre companies, dance troupes, film festivals, radio stations and the Palestinian Museum's programmes all work from the city or its northern edge, and the Khalil Sakakini centre and the surviving old villas host readings and exhibitions. The dabke folk dance is taught and performed seriously here, in particular by long-established troupes that tour abroad, and the poet Mahmoud Darwish, buried beside the Palace of Culture on a hill overlooking Jerusalem, is treated as a national figure.

The city is unusually mixed. Founded by Christians, it is now mostly Muslim, with refugees from 1948, villagers who moved in for work, returnees from the diaspora and a floating international population of diplomats and aid workers. That mix produced the West Bank's best-known nightlife — bars, live music and late cafés in al-Masyoun — and a liberal reputation that residents of other towns note with either admiration or disapproval. Al-Bireh next door is markedly more conservative.

Customs are the Palestinian ones: elaborate greetings, coffee poured from a long-spouted pot, shoes removed in homes, and hospitality that does not take no for an answer. Weddings fill the streets with processions and drumming, and funerals and memorials are public occasions. Ramadan, Eid and Christmas are all marked in public space, and the awareness of politics is constant without being something visitors are pressed to join.

About 40,000 people live in Ramallah proper, and roughly 100,000 in the continuous built-up area it forms with al-Bireh and Beitunia; the governorate holds well over 300,000. Three refugee camps — al-Amari, Qaddura and Jalazone — sit within or just outside the city and are dense neighbourhoods rather than temporary settlements. Rents and house prices are the highest in the West Bank, pushing many workers into surrounding villages.

The economy is administrative: Palestinian Authority ministries, banks, telecommunications companies, universities, hospitals, NGOs and international organisations, with construction, retail and a small technology and outsourcing sector alongside. Salaries are concentrated here and so is the visible wealth, which draws criticism from the rest of the territory. Public-sector pay has been irregular during fiscal crises, and unemployment across the West Bank is high.

The rhythm is early: offices and schools open around eight, the market runs from dawn, and the afternoon quietens before the evening fills the cafés and the streets around Rukab. Many residents commute through checkpoints, and a closure can turn a half-hour journey into several hours. Water arrives intermittently and is stored on roofs, electricity is bought from Israel, and traffic and parking are the daily complaints alongside the larger ones.

Ramallah eats the food of the central hills, cooked well and served in quantity. Mezze arrives first — hummus, mutabbal, tabbouleh, labneh under olive oil, pickles, fresh bread from a taboon oven — and the main courses are musakhan, chicken baked with onions, sumac and oil on bread; maqluba, the pot of rice, aubergine and meat turned upside down onto a tray; and mansaf, lamb with fermented jameed yoghurt over rice, brought out for guests and celebrations. Grills of shish taouk, kofta and lamb are everywhere.

Breakfast is hummus with warm chickpeas and olive oil, ful medames, falafel and eggs with za'atar, eaten in small kitchens in the old town. The city's own speciality is ice cream made with mastic and thickened with salep, chewy rather than creamy, sold on Rukab Street and known well beyond the West Bank. Sweets run to knafeh in cheese and syrup, baklava and ma'amoul filled with dates or walnuts.

Coffee is Arabic, heavily cardamomed, and tea is very sweet, with mint in summer and sage in winter; both are drunk constantly. Ramallah is also the drinking capital of the territory: the brewery at Taybeh, founded in 1994, and Palestinian wineries in the Bethlehem hills supply the bars of al-Masyoun, and the Taybeh beer festival in October draws crowds from across the West Bank. Fruit from the villages around — apricots from Jifna, grapes, figs and almonds — appears in the market in season.