I did some work in Ramallah 20 years ago. Even then it was a modern city.This is a brilliant observation.
One has to ask the question of where the money for the Ramallah economy comes from? Their stores are filled with foreign goods, so those have to be imported and paid for with actual money. What is it that the PA exports to the world that can bring in this kind of capital? The answer is that the PA is an anti-semitic propaganda industry, and the West is willing to pay big bucks for their product. The impoverished people in the descendants of refugee camps are part of the product that they sell. A "peace agreement" with Israel would end the flow of money, and all of the West Bank would start to resemble the camps. There is no incentive for the PA government to make peace. Their only salable product is anti-semitism (politely known as anti-Zionism). They will never give it up unless forced.
it is widely recognized that the Palestinian Arab economy is dependent on NGOs, and a large percentage of the workforce works for anti-Israel NGOs. People are getting rich off the billions being sent as "aid" but that aid is dependent on the NGOs churning out more and more anti-Israel reports. And since the focus of the aid and the NGOs is anti-Israel and not pro-Palestinian, the system is guaranteed to increase the gap between the middle- and upper-class who know how to work the Europeans for more cash and the lower class who either try to do honest work or who prefer to get free medical and educational aid from UNRWA.
There is a Palestinian NGO called the Dalia Foundation, that I reported on last year. That NGO is against the current NGO system, but their reasons are a twisted version of reality. They can't stand that European NGOs put in anti-terror language in their agreements. Dalia wants the aid to come more freely, and allow Palestinians themselves to decide how to spend it, and if they want to buy rockets and anti-aircraft missiles, the donors should have no say in the matter. They believe that free money is a right.
Really.
The real solution is to cut the aid to anti-Israel NGOs altogether. force Palestinian Arabs to re-orient their lives around a capitalist economy, not the current socialist elfare economy that has proven disastrous. In no time you would see more people learning more trades, and more willing to work together with Israelis to help themselves and their families.
NGO money is corrupting Palestinian Arabs and you can see the results in both Ramallah and in Deheisha. They are two sides of the same coin.