Before the dust from the departing Israeli jeeps had settled, the Palestinian police climbed on top of the police station waving flags and AK-47 rifles. Journalists quickly followed to capture images of the symbolic event and I located myself on an adjacent building to watch both of them.
Redeployment week in Ramallah saw scores of journalists descending on the town. With their coming, camera mania has descended on the town. Many Ramallans hired video cameras for the week. Any strangers that walked around town carrying one were pursued by children asking for their photographs to be taken.
It occurred to me that these pictures of celebrating Palestinian policemen were in one sense a lie. These external trappings of a State encourage the world to think that the crucial question of Palestinian self-determination has almost been solved and peace and security will naturally follow. In fact none of the Oslo accords either guarantee a coming Palestinian State or even grant Palestinians complete soverignty over their own areas.
This may seem an overly cynical thought on a day like this, but real peace is dependent on the establishment of a state with complete soverignity over its territorial area. Anything less will fail to satisfy all parts of the Palestinian community worldwide and anything less cannot guarantee the safety of Palestinians against continuing Israeli repression.
Any compromise on this issue will leave the Palestinians with very serious internal political problems for years to come. To believe otherwise is to say that the emperor is fully-clothed.
This young Palestinian boy was wide-eyed in awe, as he finally was able to satisfy his curiosity about what was inside the former Israeli police station.
Palestinian Police spent hours allowing queuing kids inside to see what had before been as foreboding a place as Dracula's tower. The children scampered around the building, looking in each nook and cranny for something...in fact there was not much to see at all except white walls and empty rooms.
The children therefore ran around collecting spent M-16 cartridges from the ground, while their parents gazed in incredulity around the deserted building.
There was no hesitation from rejoicing by the older people. Having seen the Israelis come in 1948 and 1967, and the years of infrastructural neglect, suppression of Palestinian culture and human rights violations, they were overjoyed to see them go.
Much of Arafat's support seems to come from the older generation of Palestinians, who have a strong sense of the historical context. This old woman, who I met upstairs in the police station, was ullulating with joy and agreed to pose proudly now that she had seen for herself that the Israelis had really gone.