Left: The day after redeployment saw the first parade in a week of celebration. Here, outside my front gate on Radio Boulevard, a smiling Palestinian policeman drives past in a truck loaded with children.
Posters of Arafat are everywhere and shops compete to see who can hang the most flags in their windows. Local taxi drivers have decorated their taxis, shops have put out banners, and it's like the circus has come to town.
Right: The convoy of over 50 police vehicles drove around the centre of Ramallah. Many of the police, although not native to Ramallah, have cousins and other relatives here, making the occasion part welcome, part family reunion.
I took this photo from the roof of the police vehicle in front, the result of a quick question to the driver. In common with the rest of the photos in the Ramallah section, which were scanned in early 1996 before we really knew what we were doing, I had to shrink the file to make it viewable. One day, I'll go back and rescan all the photos from this section, some of which I felt were the best I took in my four years in Palestine. Right now I don't have the money to reprint them all from the negatives and rescan them. This and the photo below lose pretty much everything with the detail missing.
Left: Many shots from AK-47 assault rifles were fired in the air when the convoy neared the police station, disturbing when one considers that several people in the autonomous areas have been killed and many more injured by the improper discharge of firearms since the PA moved in.
What goes up must come down, and high school physics tells us that it will come down at much the same velocity with which it went up.
One Palestinian aquaintance of mine's father had been at a wedding where people began firing in the air. He went over to tell them to stop. As he did, one of the bullets returned to earth. Today he is paralysed.
As the firing began, I backed under a shop awning. I couldn't believe the stupidity. The police were cheering. It would be continue like this for a few days.