Palestinian Elites Threw a Huge Party for the Opening of a Megamall in Ramallah — as Bombs Ripped Through Gaza

On April 12, a new shopping mall was inaugurated in Ramallah under the name “Icon” — a deliberate choice that seeks not only to name but to consecrate, to frame the exemplary as sacred. The opening was marked by a full-blown spectacle: choreographed dancers, celebratory music, a festive crowd, and a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by officials and Palestinian elites. It was an aesthetic of pomp and circumstance, a carefully staged performance of normalcy. But as images and videos of the event circulated online, they collided with the reality of the ongoing massacre in Gaza. Social media erupted — especially from Gazans and Palestinians everywhere — in a wave of anger, grief, and disbelief. How could there be dancing while bodies are still being pulled from the rubble? How could such a display unfold at a time when whole families were being erased daily?

No official apology or explanation was offered by the mall’s management. There was, instead, a studied silence — or worse, the implicit message that no apology was necessary. In the refusal to acknowledge the dissonance, a deeper affective condition begins to show itself: not simply indifference, but shamelessness — a disavowal of the political moment that is so complete that even genocide cannot interrupt the rhythm of consumer desire. This is not merely the opening of a commercial space; it is the staging of a new ritual and the sanctification of the commodity form as the central object of contemporary worship for a Palestinian middle class.

The mall stands along the road to Birzeit University, itself once constituted as an exemplary apparatus of higher learning, imagined in the 1980s as a space for the production of nationalist consciousness and for thinking about the world: its exclusions, its violences, its limits. That the path to such a site is now lined with temples of consumption is not accidental, but paradigmatic. The road was once the site of the old mantra of sumud — resisting the checkpoint and arriving at the university as a gesture of endurance against the apparatus that sought to obstruct it in the height of the Second Intifada. Now, in a near-complete reversal, it is the world of the young, suffused with the imperative to accumulate, that has re-inscribed the university not as a destination but as an interruption. A break between shifts at work or strolls through the mall, the university lingers not as a site of thought, but as a pause within the new liturgy of circulation.

What is wrong with this temple of consumption? Nothing, really. It is just like many other things the world has already seen. It arrives in Palestine late, as usual — something borrowed and repeated. Its newness is only surface-level. What feels like progress is really just catching up to a model already worn out elsewhere. What we receive is not the future, but a delayed copy of someone else’s past.

And yet, like many things that circulate here — imitated, parodied, or consumed — it also arrives as an intrusion. It carries with it the feeling of something off, almost misplaced. It appears not just as a symbol of global sameness, but as a quiet surrender to a present marked by catastrophe and loss, or a kind of reconciliation with what should never have been accepted.

This is perhaps the irony — or the quiet, almost comedic, tragedy — of being in a mall and moving through its rituals: the curated flow of footsteps, the choreography of consumption, the fake smiles at the storefronts, and even the genuine ones that greet a new customer. All of it continues to unfold while, in Gaza, parents struggle to feed their children, huddling together in the hope that if a bomb tears through the tents and the last remaining stones, they might at least not be left alone.

This is also the question that has saturated social spaces in the time of genocide. It is the murmur beneath conversations and the unspoken thread linking Palestinians outside of Gaza. At a moment when Israel has entrenched Palestinian separation, both physical and temporal, Palestinians have been scattered into conditions so vastly different that they now hum the same songs of Palestine while living in radically disjointed worlds. But that humming, however sincere, begins to feel hollow when the bombs fall and the limits of political engagement are laid bare. How does one survive a genocide when not caught in its immediate fire? The answer is simple, cold, and painfully precise: you survive by pretending nothing is happening, or by knowing what is happening, yet still insisting it’s not.

The shameful and the shameless

Since October 2023, Palestinians in the West Bank have been engaged in quiet and often unspoken scenario-planning. The world around them is shifting: checkpoints multiplying, soldiers growing more cruel, more brutal, more sadistic; settlers more numerous, more emboldened, more gleeful in their violence. And Gaza — its daily massacres are a persistent reminder of what is possible here, and across the geographically dispersed communities of the West Bank.

It’s not surprising, then, to hear two people meet and joke about where they’ll end up living in the aftermath of another Nakba — or to hear others declare, loud and defiant, that they will not leave. Even Motaz Azaiza now markets to wealthy Palestinians the option of securing a second passport through investment schemes in Caribbean Island nations.

The paralysis of politics — and the inoperability of a political response — has become the defining feature of life, even as the West Bank undergoes a rapid and violent intensification of colonialism. Tens of thousands displaced, lands annexed, futures foreclosed, and still the attempt to sustain business as usual continues. All the while, settler advertisements appear on screens and billboards telling Palestinians, “There is no future in Palestine.”

Within this landscape, people are being transformed, not only in their retreat to the world behind closed doors, but overwhelmed by the uncertainty of what comes next. Moreover, the shameless no longer apologize, and those who feel shame act as if shame itself were the only remaining form of political engagement. The war, then, unfolds not only on the ground, but also between affective dispositions — between the shameless and the shameful.

It is not surprising that some of those who attempt to inhabit shame begin to weaponize it — as if it were a form of redemption, a ritual of self-cleansing. Others retreat into silence, broken from the intensity of the transition, the failure to inhabit resistance, and the withdrawal behind closed doors. Meanwhile, those who dwell in shamelessness adopt an increasingly hardened stance: anti-resistance, self-blaming to the point of moral reversal, calling for surrender as if it were clarity, backing the Palestinian Authority as if it were the last sanctuary of order, and collapsing the sacred into the profane in a desperate search for political legitimacy.

In the wake of the Nakba, many Palestinians who felt the shame of forced displacement turned that shame inward. They blamed themselves for failing to defend, to organize, to fight — and they took up silence as a form of mourning and self-punishment. Today, the roles have shifted. Shame now becomes a way of feeling attuned to the massacre, of staying affected, implicated — yet it remains circular. Meanwhile, the shameless feel no need to act — because, for them, submission is the only answer, and blame falls on those who refuse to submit.

And this, too, is shaped by the voices of friends and loved ones in Gaza — or from Gaza — who speak in disbelief at the silence, the stillness, the paralysis of their fellow Palestinians. The price of the war for liberation is being paid in one geography, while in another, people dance to the rhythms of new brands. Or at least that’s how it’s made to appear.

It was no surprise, then, to see the governor of Ramallah and al-Bireh invited to cut the ribbon — to make that ceremonial cut which inaugurated not just a building, but a desire for more: for the new, the sleek, the fashionable. Not merely as a symptom of bureaucratic indifference, nor solely as a gesture affirming the presence of the Palestinian Authority, but also as a means of staging a visual dissonance.

Few things serve the ideological architecture of the Palestinian Authority more than this: the image of a massacre in Gaza, unfolding in the realm of resistance, set against the image of shoppers strolling through a mall in Ramallah. A split-screen reality, where sovereignty is no longer measured by liberation, but by the illusion of normalcy — by the ability to consume, to manage, to keep calm. One might speculate that in the near future, the images of Gaza and the West Bank will converge — that those who clung to security coordination with Israel, who were shameless in their pursuit of collaboration, will find no shelter in the architecture they helped build. But for now, the split-screen remains: the rhythmic dance to the commodity form on one side, and the unrelenting massacre on the other — a schizophrenic image through which the PA not only seeks to weaken the moral and symbolic resolve of Gaza, but to reaffirm its own doctrine of survival: a mode of governance that trades freedom for capital, sacrifice for lousy and empty spectacles, and sovereignty for self-effacement.

Shaming as a political act

Much has been said about the insistence of Palestinians on recording their own massacres — posting footage of a journalist burned alive, or a paramedic filming his own martyrdom after being ambushed by Israeli soldiers. These acts of documentation — of turning the lens toward death itself — serve not only as an archive, but as an ethical mirror held up to a world that permits, even supports, the slaughter of tens of thousands. Perhaps it is also a means of breaking through Western media complicity and its willingness to believe Israeli claims and conceal Israeli crimes.

They are also acts of narrative resistance, assertions of agency in the face of erasure. And perhaps, above all, they are attempts to shame — to expose the world’s complicity not only in violence, but in its silence.

But this shaming does not speak only to Europeans, or Americans, or policymakers and institutional leaders. Its address is, first and foremost, to the Arabs, the Islamic umma, or other Palestinians. It is a cry that crosses borders not to plead, but to confront, demanding why, in the face of unbearable clarity, so many still choose to look away.

Shaming has long been a political instrument in Palestinian history — a tool wielded not only against external oppressors but also against the failures of those who claim proximity, solidarity, or kinship. One only needs to recall the burning of al-Aqsa Mosque in 1969, when a Zionist extremist set fire to one of the holiest sites in Islam. The flames sparked not only outrage but also a wave of shame across the Arab world. The event catalyzed the creation of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) — an institutional gesture born, in large part, out of embarrassment, a need to appear responsive, to be seen acting in the wake of humiliation.

But what did that shame produce? A summit, a communiqué, another layer of symbolic architecture laid atop a broken reality. One could also observe that much of the anti-normalization strategy — especially in its contemporary forms — is driven by shame, or the fear of the scandalous and the socially unforgivable. Movements like BDS are, in part, structured around this affective register.

Shame has also shaped the intimate geographies of political life: among comrades in prison, among close-knit circles where a friend or comrade dares to speak the names of those who once acted together in resistance. There, too, shame operates — not as mere emotion, but as a technique of discipline, a way to mark the boundaries of what should remain unspoken. But more than anything else, this shaming is willing to forgive, but contingent on holding oneself accountable, being ashamed. If you can’t look into my eyes, then perhaps we will look into each other’s eyes soon.

Shaming remains a powerful political tool. It wagers that by breaking through indifference, by naming what others wish to obscure, it might compel a decision. Not always a transformation, not always justice, but at the very least a crack in the smooth surface of silence and complicity, of pretensions that nothing has happened.

Today, Palestinians aim their shame not only upward but outward and inward — toward brothers and neighbors, toward a region that rehearses solidarity but practices avoidance; toward resistance movements that abandoned the struggle; and toward the peoples of neighboring countries, whose borders remain sealed while Gaza burns — no entry of food or medicine, no hospitals to receive the injured. It is a world that seeks to abandon Gaza and leave it alone. Isn’t this also at the heart of arresting students across American universities, as if to say: “how dare you speak or disrupt on behalf of Gaza? How dare you shame the empire?”

But something has shifted. Today, shame circulates within a far more intricate ideological infrastructure within Palestine — one that has managed to turn it into a tool not only of moral reckoning, but of subjugation. In a cruel reversal, shame is now being redirected onto the shoulders of those who chose to fight and dared to act. The act of resisting has become the object of rebuke and the source of blame. The very ones who stood against annihilation are made to bear the weight of the consequences, as if their refusal to submit were the original sin.

“They [meaning the resistance] decided, then they are to blame,” goes the mantra. It circulates quietly, sometimes unconsciously, among those who cannot reconcile themselves with the clarity of the act, with the refusal to wait, with the audacity to break out of the script. It is easier, perhaps, to assign blame than to confront one’s own paralysis; easier to pathologize the decision than to reckon with what it exposes — the hollowness of life in many parts of the West Bank without the capacity to resist.

For many, the question of why one should shame oneself, why one should feel the agony of paralysis, confront the traumatic kernel of pacification, or reckon with the sedimented layers of mistrust, is too heavy, too destabilizing. It is easier to evade these questions, sublimating them into cynicism or resignation, than to confront them directly.

And it is precisely here that the hidden desire for shamelessness emerges as the new goalpost: shamelessness in the affective register — a yearning to feel nothing, to no longer be exposed to the internal collapse that comes with facing complicity, fear, or betrayal.

In this condition, the fantasy of shamelessness promises relief: a forgetting of the self and a soothing detachment from the unbearable intimacy of political failure. But this fantasy, too, is a trap — one that trades the discomfort of reflection for the comfort of numbness, and in doing so, forecloses the possibility of ethical transformation, and by extension, of political mobilization.

In other words, it permits the shamelessness of business as usual, the cutting of ribbons in Ramallah, the festive welcoming of brands, and overpriced coffee. It allows for the rearticulation of the Palestinian Authority as a shameless collaborationist regime — one that no longer even pretends to be anything else.

Still, the shame of inoperability, of silence, of lacking the will to act, remains the cornerstone of the hidden transcript of life in the West Bank. A friend from Jenin reminded me recently that there are, nonetheless, small acts emerging — new words taking shape. Perhaps the most compelling among them is the phrase,“ʿazīz al-nafs.”

The term evokes more than pride — it connotes a self, an ego, and a soul all at once. At its root is nafs, often translated as “soul” or “self,” but originally meaning “breath” — opening the word to the intimate entanglement of the metaphysical and the material: the breath as life-force and the soul as presence.

To be ʿazīz al-nafs — literally, “one whose soul is held in honor” — is to carry oneself with quiet dignity, to refuse humiliation or dependency even in the face of devastation. The word ʿazīz in Arabic connotes strength, preciousness, and inaccessibility; al-nafs refers to the self, the soul, the breath, the very site of ethical and existential struggle.

Together, the phrase describes someone who preserves their integrity when everything else collapses, who refuses to beg or perform victimhood, and who, by simply standing with composure, opens a different horizon of political possibility. This is not a politics of spectacle, nor the silence of defeat, but a third stance: a principled endurance that neither succumbs to nationalist shame nor to neoliberal shamelessness. It is the refusal to surrender the soul to degradation, even as dignity itself becomes structurally impossible. In this, ʿazīz al-nafs offers a counter-image to the depoliticized consumer wandering the halls of Icon Mall in Ramallah — a figure disoriented by the fantasy of normalcy. It also does not seek to disavow, nor overcome the collapse by pretensions of normalcy.

My friend in Jenin spoke of a young man who, having been forced to leave his home in the camp, still wears his winter clothes despite the arrival of summer’s heat. His other garments, lighter and more suited to the season, are buried beneath the rubble of what once was his home in the camp. She speaks, too, of families who attempt to sneak back into the camp under cover of night to reclaim not just shelter, but presence, refusing to disavow or blame themselves, and refusing the seductive pull of resignation. She speaks of both the collapse and of the persistence entangled together through a figure who refuses to ask for summer clothes, yet still persists.

Source: Mondoweiss