A Tale of Three Cities – Urban Culture and Social Change in the Palestinian West Bank

Thomas Malsch,Hilke Rebenstorf

doi:10.12966/ojssr.03.01.2014

Abstract

A Tale of Three Cities – Urban Culture and Social Change in the Palestinian West Bank

Highlights

This paper is a contribution to an ongoing debate on urban life and social change in Palestine which was instigated by sociologists from Birzeit University some years ago
Based on survey data of Palestinian households collected by the Institute of Women‟s Studies at Birzeit University (IWS) in 1999 and on census data of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), Lisa Taraki and Rita Giacaman have published a research essay in which they submit two closely related, yet contradictory assumptions: first, that the West Bank cities of Hebron, Nablus, and Ramallah may be conceived of as representing three unique social universes or paradigmatic cases of contemporary Arab urban culture; and, second, that the three cities‟ urban cultures could be conceptualized as successive evolutionary stages of modern urbanization (Taraki and Giacaman, 2006: 31)
Saying that the occupation yields “both the exception and the rule” is not very helpful in answering the crucial question: How exactly is difference and variation produced? Saying that Ramallah‟s urban culture is just another, yet somewhat exotic instance of truncated urbanization produced by an underlying general pattern of colonial political economy sounds like a powerful argument, but is not as powerful as it appears, unless we find a convincing way to demonstrate how exactly difference, variation, and exception are generated at the level of urban history within a global context

Summary

Introduction

This paper is a contribution to an ongoing debate on urban life and social change in Palestine which was instigated by sociologists from Birzeit University some years ago. They reflect the 1990s, which is the period when the Palestinian Authority was established in the course of the Oslo accords, but not the disruptions from 2000 onwards, not to speak of the period after the separation of the Gaza Strip from the West Bank in 2006 Keeping these notes of caution in mind, Taraki‟s and Giacaman‟s approach and findings will be presented (section 2), followed by a discussion of critical commentaries (section 3), an intergenerational analysis of the Potsdam survey data (section 4), and a conclusion highlighting major findings (section 5)

Three Cities Compared

In Search for Explanations

Findings from the Potsdam Study

Conclusion