ar-Ram

Ar Ram sits 8.1 kilometres north of Jerusalem on the road to Ramallah, bordered by Jaba’ to the east, Kafr ‘Aqab and Qalandiya camp to the north, Bir Nabala to the west and Beit Hanina to the south. Together with Dahiyat al-Barid it forms a single local-council area. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics counted 18,356 people there in 2007 — 4,149 households in 7,530 housing units, a gap that is itself part of the story.

The name is older than the town’s present shape. ARIJ, citing al-Dabbagh, records it as Roman-era ar-Ramah, the high hill, which Arabic later turned to ‘Aram, the form the Franks used in the Middle Ages. Its families are given by the local council as the Ramiyah, Ghazawnah, Khattab, as-Salaymah, Shweiki, Dweik, Abu Gharbiyah, Julani, Jaber, Ghaith, Jaradat, Matoor, an-Natsha, al-Qawasmi, al-Huseini and Abu ‘Asab households — the Khattabs among families displaced from Qaluniya, the village west of Jerusalem emptied in 1948.

What the wall did to it

Ar Ram lies outside the municipal boundary Israel declared in 1967 but was, in every practical sense, a northern suburb of Jerusalem: its people worked in the city, studied in it and were treated in its hospitals. Under Oslo II the town was split into Area B — 2,226 dunums, a third of its land, holding most of its population — and Area C, 4,482 dunums where Israel retains full control and Palestinian building requires a permit from the Civil Administration.

Then came the barrier. Following the route published by the Israeli defence ministry in April 2007, ARIJ records the wall running six kilometres across ar-Ram and Dahiyat al-Barid, isolating 1,202 dunums — 17.9 per cent of the town’s land — on its southern and western sides. The wall was built directly over the town’s sewage lines: the main carrier of the network now lies behind it, so that a blockage can only be cleared by the Jerusalem municipality, which ARIJ’s report says does not always respond.

The human figure is the one that stops you. ARIJ’s field survey with the local council found that approximately 20,000 people had left ar-Ram since the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000 — more than the town’s entire recorded population in the 2007 census. Those who stayed live between two obstacles: the Qalandiya crossing to the north, where Jerusalem ID holders queue for hours to enter the city and West Bank ID holders may not pass at all without a permit that is rarely granted, and the Jaba’ checkpoint near the town’s entrance on the southern approach to Ramallah, which ARIJ describes as a site of arrests, shootings and closures.

OCHA’s wider count of the East Jerusalem localities the barrier stranded — some 160,000 people holding residency they cannot exercise without crossing a checkpoint — describes the condition ar-Ram sits on the edge of: it is on the West Bank side of the wall without ever having been inside the boundary, which means its people lost the city without gaining anything in exchange.

Sources

• Ar Ram & Dahiyat al Bareed Town Profile — Applied Research Institute–Jerusalem (ARIJ)
• East Jerusalem Palestinian localities behind the Barrier — UN OCHA occupied Palestinian territory, 10 August 2016
• East Jerusalem: Key Humanitarian Concerns — UN OCHA, update August 2014