Ben Ehrenreich in Harper’s Magazine:
This article was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
Six years had passed since I had last been to the West Bank, and ten years since I had lived there. A lot had changed in my absence. Ramallah had once felt like a small town. When I returned last November, it was, without doubt, a city. Whole neighborhoods had materialized, and the streets seemed denser, packed with more and flashier shops offering varieties of high-end Western consumer goods that would have once been unobtainable: cappuccinos and croissants, designer sunglasses, North Face jackets and Timberland boots. There was a fancy new pastry shop called Crumbs, and the joke was almost too obvious: this is what the Palestinian elite was settling for.
For the first few days, I found myself disoriented. The map I held in my memory no longer matched the streets around me. It wasn’t that so much was new, but that I did not know what was gone. Old houses had surely been demolished, and empty lots filled in to make way for new construction. That was clear. But I did not remember what had been there before, and this destabilized everything.
More here.
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