Second visit to Ramallah

Yesterday was the Friday salat (call to prayers) and the proclaimed "Day of Rage" by Hamas, so I kept a low profile. Mercy Corps's concern was that all those young men on their way to the noon prayers could mean trouble. So, I went for an early walk,  then pretty much stuck around the hotel the rest of the day. Pretty quiet in the part of East Jerusalem where I was located, but plenty of action elsewhere.

Today (Saturday) I casually inquired at the hotel desk about a "political tour" around Jerusalem and Ramallah. Five minutes later a guide came up to me in the hotel's restaurant and said, "We leave in 10 minutes." I decided, what the hell, and went.

I can't say the Palestinian guide was very good (a lot of loud hectoring directed at us, the clients), but it was interesting. It was easy enough to let him vent --- who can blame him? It's only a day for us, a lifetime for him --- but it gave me an idea of how deep the rage can go.

On the way to Ramallah, we stopped at a section of the "Security wall," a sinuous wall that separates the Israeli settlements embedded in the West Bank, from the surrounding Palestinian communities.

Most of the Palestinians who live in Jerusalem are not Israeli citizens. Instead, they hold "residency cards," which can be taken away for the slightest infraction. If they marry a Palestinian who does not hold a residency card, they cannot live together and, instead, must have "weekend relationships". Their children do not automatically get residency.

If they leave the area too long, they can lose their residency.

There are elaborate rules that govern how they can travel. They must go through certain checkpoints to pass from West Bank back into Jerusalem.

For a Palestinian who lives in the rest of the West Bank, she/he has no rights at all to enter into Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, there is a continuous slow process of ever expanding settlements, working their way outwards from Jerusalem. Most are in former "green areas" --- parks --- but some are where the land was simply confiscated.

This is one of Pisgat Za'ev, one of the many Israeli settlements around Jerusalem. Note the security wall that separates it from the Palestinian areas of Jerusalem (from which this picture was taken).

The wall. 

Once in Ramallah (my second trip in 3 days), we visited Yasser Arafat's tomb. Whatever you think of the guy, he sure got himself a nice place to rest.

The outside of Arafat's tomb.

His honor guard.

It's interesting to compare it now to my last visit, almost 10 years ago:

The tomb 10 years ago. They had run out of money so not much was happening.

The canonization of Arafat is now almost complete. Palestinians see the old terrorist as a "man of peace," who was duped, and possibly poisoned, by the Israelis after the Oslo agreements.

After a quick coffee in downtown Ramallah, it was time to head back. Rather than risk going through the Qalandia crossing, we decided to try the usually much quieter DCO / Beit El checkpoint to the north. It's only for "authorized persons," but our guide hoped that the 3 American and 4 Dutch passports in the car would do the trick. Unfortunately, once we got up there, it was in the middle of a raging rock battle, with several ambulances around. I only had time to take some hurried pictures from the window of the van, shown here as a GIF, before we got out of there.

The entrance to the DCO / Beit El checkpoint.

So, off to the Qalandia crossing we went. But then our guide got the idea that the Jaba checkpoint, which as I understand it, is a settlement-only checkpoint, might be doable if he could pass as an Israeli Jew. Again, the 7 foreign passports was our ace-in-the-hole.

We breezed right through.

Such is life for a Palestinian Arab.

Visit to Ramallah

Arabreneur is a business accelerator and seed fund with offices in Amman, Ramallah, Bahrein and, oddly, Toronto. I promised their Ramallah manager, Hanan, that I would stop by and run a 90 minute workshop on sales and marketing, with a focus on user acquisition. Parenthetically, it is with mild surprise that I find myself giving talks on this subject. I'm a techie guy! People used to want me to talk about designing distributed systems or managing a multi-threaded application! What do I know about sales and marketing? My old VP of Sales, Mike Foreman, would be laughing.

Yet, it makes sense. These days, there is lots of technical information on the web, but to get advice on how to scale a company means spending a lot of time with a mentor until he/she "gets it" and offers something useful. You can't get that through the static pages of the World Wide Web.

Workshop attendees in Ramallah.

Before the talk I spent about 3 hours with some young entrepreneurs learning about their businesses and the very unique challenges they face starting a company on the West Bank, currently occupied by the Israelis. It's tough to get goods in and out, so most startups focus on software products. But not all of them. I heard from a company wanting to make a wearable sporting goods electronics. Another a consumer goods product. Both wanted to manufacturer in West Bank, but recognizing how tough that would be, have reluctantly recognized that they will have to go to Eastern Europe or China to build the thing.

The talk went well. Or, at least I think it did. Nobody walked out, which I was told is a good sign.

Afterwards, Hanan, visiting mentor Elizabeth, and I went for a ride to visit the planned community Rawabi, on the northern outskirts of Ramallah. This is an incredibly ambitious project to build a planned community for 20,000+ residents, with schools, hospitals, commercial areas, and even an outdoor theater, from scratch, out of the hard scrabble rock of the desert. Seven hundred million dollars later, they are nearly done, and the first residents are moving in.

View of the planned city of Rawabi.

It's pretty dead now because the residents are just beginning to move in.

On the eastern side of the city is a remarkable outdoor amphitheater, where they plan to put on concerts and plays.

Outdoor amphitheater. All that stone makes for some great acoustics!

Hollywood movie stars line the inside box seats.

We were shown around by their director of sales, who rightly took great pride in what the Palestinians have been able to build out of nothing. He took special delight in the project as an in-your-face statement to all the surrounding settlements that the Israelis have built in the West Bank. This hilltop was originally slated to be yet another one, but Rawabi got there first. They too can change the facts on the ground!

Said the director of sales, "I take great pleasure in waking up each morning, knowing that the settlers have to look across at the Palestinian flag flying on the hilltop."

After an enjoyable and informative day, it was time to head back to my hotel in Jerusalem. Unfortunately, nothing is simple in the West Bank. Although the hotel is only about 8 miles as the crow flies from where I gave the talk, you have to go through an Israeli "checkpoint" to get back into the city. The obvious checkpoint, Qalandia, has been a site of recent unrest and a knifing or two, not to mention an hour or more wait. So, Hanan let me out at a diplomatic checkpoint, where I was able to make a lonely crossing by foot in the dark and meet up with a taxi on the other side.

The checkpoint at night. Intimidating, but an easy crossing.