The Icon Mall Opens in Ramallah

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In Ramallah, a gleaming new mall has just opened, the largest in Judea and Samaria. This Icon Mall is an ode in steel and glass to consumerism, and the foot traffic has in the first several days been considerable. The head of the Icon Mall is Qassam Barghouti, the son of the imprisoned Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti, who is widely believed to be the likely successor — even from his prison cell — of 89-year-old Mahmoud Abbas. While the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria are proud and pleased with this achievement, other Palestinians, especially in Gaza, are infuriated at this display of prosperity and what they take to be the seeming indifference of the Palestinian Authority to the miseries being experienced by the Gazans. More on the Icon Mall, and on the reaction to it, can be found here: “A Mall in Ramallah,” by Seth Mandel, Commentary, April 18, 2025:

It may not seem important, but the dueling Palestinian reactions to the opening of a mall in Ramallah are telling.

“Icon Mall marked its opening on Saturday with live music, dance performances and a large public turnout,” Haaretz reports. “Palestinian Authority officials, including Ramallah Governor Laila Ghannam, attended the event.”

Gaza-based influencer Khaled Safi surely spoke for many of his fellow enclave-dwellers when he objected to the celebratory photos of the gleaming mall filled with shoppers—now the largest mall in the West Bank—against the backdrop of the war in Gaza: “In Ramallah, to the sound of flowery applause and protocol, the largest mall in the West Bank opened, a mall befitting a country that has forgotten that it has a bleeding wound in its side called Gaza.”

From Gaza, Khaled Safi objects to any display of happiness among the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria. He apparently wants them to share in the misery of the Gazans, as a sign of loyalty. But the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria (a/k/a the West Bank) are not willing to sacrifice their own happiness to what the supporters of Hamas demand of them. It is Hamas that holds Gaza in thrall, and is the onlie begetter of their misery.

All the people in Ramallah are doing is claiming their inalienable right to shop, to take in the sights of the mall even without spending money, and thereby to take their minds off of war and war’s alarms. And Hamas supporters don’t want them to have that right.

But the article also quotes the complaints of non-Gaza-based Palestinians, which aren’t as easy to empathize with. “What happened at Icon Mall is the smallest of the [Palestinian] authorities’ crimes and their blatant nonsense. We kept silent about their greater crimes, and this was the result,” posted Yassin Ezz El-Din. But El-Din sees the Palestinian government as an extension of the Israeli government and has advocated for “violent resistance in the West Bank”—in other words, for the West Bank to share Gaza’s bleak fate, rather than prosper or establish some consistent form of self-determination.

Yassin Ezz El-Din claims that the PA acts as “an extension of the Israeli government.” He’s wrong. The PA continues to fund its Pay4Slay program, which provides generous subsidies to imprisoned terrorists and to the families of terrorists killed while committing their attacks. In this way, the PA both rewards past, and incentivizes future, terrorism. The PA conducts a relentless diplomatic offensive against Israel at the UN, at the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, and through the most powerful NGOs with their anti-Israel bias, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. All of which makes clear that the PA is not in the slightest “an extension of the Israeli government.”

Then there was the writer Yunus Abu Jarad, who lamented a Palestinian government “psychologically, socially and politically detached from its homeland.” But Abu Jarad is physically detached from the homeland: he lives in Turkey. That isn’t a sin, but it does make his “detached” criticism a bit hypocritical. The West Bank and Gaza together are presumably what Abu Jarad means by “homeland,” so why shouldn’t life improve for those still living in it?

Yunus Abu Jarad complains that the PA is “detached from its homeland.” But it is Abu Jarad, living in Turkey, who is even further away from Gaza physically than are the leaders of the PA, who monitor closely what happens in Gaza and are even now preparing, as they hope, to be accepted by both the other Arabs and the West as the new administrators in Gaza to replace a dismantled Hamas. The PA, unlike Hamas, chooses to spend money on consumer projects, of which the Icon Mall is the most spectacular recent example; Hamas chooses to spends almost all of its donor-supplied money on its military, including a vast arsenal — now much reduced by IDF airstrikes — of weapons, and 450 miles of tunnels that crisscross Gaza and that cost many billions of dollars to construct. And Hamas wants the PA to spend its money in the same way, on arms and fortifications, but the PA refuses.

Most hilariously, Haaretz quotes Ramy Abdu, the head of an NGO whose sickening fealty to Hamas repulses Palestinians too. Abdu, one of the most widely reviled anti-democracy activists in the conflict, whines that the director of the mall is Qassam Barghouti, son of Marwan Barghouti, a prominent Palestinian politician in Israeli jail for his alleged role in numerous terrorist attacks. Barghouti is also considered a serious challenger to PA President Mahmoud Abbas should he be released by Israel. Were Barghouti to eventually become Palestinian president, his constituents would surely benefit more from the construction of shopping centers and the opening of employment opportunities than from an endless commitment to bloodshed apparently preferred by Abdu….

Ramy Abdu is outraged that the director of the Iconic Mall is Qassam Barghouti, whose imprisoned father Marwan Barghouti is the most popular Palestinian leader in Judea and Samaria, the man most likely to succeed Mahmoud Abbas, even if he has to direct things form prison. Once the war in Gaza is over and the rich Arabs who are going to finance the rebuilding of Gaza have to approve new leaders to replace the discredited and thoroughly defeated Hamas, they may try to persuade the Israelis to release him to fulfill that role, provided they can be assured he will no longer promote, but will instead suppress, terrorism.

The Palestinians in Gaza live in misery that they brought upon themselves when they allowed the terrorists of Hamas to take over the rule of the Strip. And Hamas now does not want the Gazans to be exposed to any signs of prosperity under the PA, lest they begin to ask themselves why they, too, should not have such malls, such consumer goods, such….normality, in the Strip.

One way to compare the two regimes — that of Hamas in Gaza and that of the PA in the Arab-populated parts of Judea and Samaria — is the Corruption Scale. Abbas and his two sons Tarek and Yasser together have a net worth of $400 million, money taken from what aid donors meant to be shared by all the Palestinians ruled by the PA. Quite a sum, but Hamas has outdone the Abbas family. Just four of Hamas’ leaders — Mousa Abu Marzouk, Ismail Haniyeh, Khaled Meshaal, and Yahya Sinwar — have managed between them to steal $14 billion, a colossal sum, 35 times what the Abbas family managed to accumulate during the PA’s rule. So the Palestinians under the PA’s rule have something to celebrate when they compare their lot to that of the Gazans: our crooks are not nearly as bad as your crooks.

Shop till you drop, Palestinian women, with your seven children in tow. All the latest fashions are waiting for you at the Icon Mall. Make your sisters in Gaza envious. Make your brothers in Gaza furious.