Meet the crew who introduced skateboarding to Palestine

One after­noon in 2013, then 14-year-olds Aram Sab­bah and his best friend Adham decid­ed to take a vis­it to Ramallah’s Sharek Youth Cen­tre, with their skate­boards hang­ing under their arms. At the time, the pair were among the very first peo­ple to own skate­boards in the West Bank. They had been going out togeth­er into the hec­tic streets of the region’s largest city, try­ing basic tricks and draw­ing a host of ques­tion­ing side-eyes from con­fused passers-by. Adham and Aram had nev­er seen any oth­er skaters in Pales­tine before, hav­ing found their inspi­ra­tion from Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion shows like The Simp­sons. But this time there was a sur­prise await­ing them at the youth centre.

“Maybe there had been some­thing else built and we nev­er knew about it, but there was the first ever wood­en mini ramp [in Ramal­lah],” Aram recalls. ​“It was real­ly sick and real­ly new, and we tried skat­ing it.”

As the pair tried rolling up and down the ramp, attempt­ing basic tricks and falling over before get­ting straight back up and try­ing again – they heard a voice with a thick Scot­tish accent come from the win­dow above. Hear­ing polyurethane grind­ing on wood and the raised voic­es of teenagers, Char­lie Davis want­ed to see what was going on. A few months ear­li­er, Char­lie had found­ed the organ­i­sa­tion SkatePal and built the mini ramp, with his broth­er and a cou­ple of friends.

“Yo,” he shout­ed. ​“Who are you?”

After com­ing down the stairs, Char­lie explained that he had brought a hand­ful of boards over from the UK. They were hold­ing a sum­mer camp in the youth cen­tre as part of SkatePal’s mis­sion to intro­duce skate­board­ing to Pales­tin­ian youth and grow a scene there. Aram and Adham quick­ly offered their assis­tance and, over the next few weeks, they would help Char­lie teach beginner’s skate lessons to young, excit­ed par­tic­i­pants, as well as build more skate­able obstacles.

“We didn’t know how to do a bunch of shit,” says Aram, now 25 and SkatePal’s region­al man­ag­er. ​“We bare­ly skat­ed and start­ed teach­ing kids, so we felt real­ly respon­si­ble at a young age – me and Adham.”

That chance meet­ing altered SkatePal’s tra­jec­to­ry. Aram became a key cog in its machin­ery as he, Char­lie and a host of oth­ers involved in the project intro­duced more class­es and infra­struc­ture to cities and vil­lages across the West Bank over the fol­low­ing decade.

This year SkatePal cel­e­brat­ed its 10^th birth­day. Since its gen­e­sis, the skate­board­ing scene in Pales­tine has grown steadi­ly, to the point where, on the streets, it’s now a com­mon occur­rence to see young peo­ple weav­ing through pedes­tri­ans and traf­fic on boards – wheels grind­ing on tar­mac and concrete.

“You now see ran­dom peo­ple walk­ing around Ramal­lah with a skate­board in their hand, either going to SkatePal’s class­es or just try­ing to find a spot,” Aram says. It’s come a long way from the ground-zero sit­u­a­tion in the region when Aram first hit the streets with Adham and their boards.

These days, the organ­i­sa­tion runs dai­ly class­es between March and Octo­ber at loca­tions across the West Bank. They recent­ly fin­ished build­ing a DIY skatepark out­side the Inash Al-Usra Asso­ci­a­tion in Al-Bireh, the city that butts up against Ramal­lah. The DIY adds to the three per­ma­nent con­crete parks and numer­ous mini ramps SkatePal has already built through­out the ter­ri­to­ry. With no per­ma­nent skate shop in Pales­tine, SkatePal has been cru­cial in bring­ing in fresh boards for skaters to use once they have worn out or snapped their decks, attempt­ing grinds or ollieing stairs.

Yet despite being active for a decade, their prized project – a ful­ly-fledged per­ma­nent skatepark in the city of Ramal­lah – has yet to be com­plet­ed, with bureau­cra­cy, cus­toms and moun­tains of red tape mak­ing infra­struc­ture build­ing dif­fi­cult. Cur­rent­ly, the near­est per­ma­nent skatepark is in Asira al-Shamaliya, about two hours dri­ve away. ​“It’s quite a slow process – get­ting equip­ment is real­ly hard, hav­ing a shop is real­ly hard, get­ting land to build a skatepark in Ramal­lah has been dif­fi­cult as well,” Char­lie explains. ​“When you ship things over, Israel’s cus­toms and how things work is quite arbi­trary – they take things out and you have to pay high fees, etc.”

Along the way, SkatePal’s jour­ney has been filled with road­blocks and speed­bumps – many result­ing from the dif­fi­cul­ties of life in the West Bank, in the face of the Israeli occu­pa­tion which began in June 1967. ​“One of the dif­fi­cult things is some of the skaters who were involved, as they get old­er and realise there’s not much to hold them back, oth­er than their fam­i­ly or a desire to stay in the home­land,” Char­lie reflects on the slow growth of the skate­board­ing scene. ​“Loads of peo­ple go abroad to study and work, so some of the old­er skaters that we’d hoped would take on [SkatePal roles] have left, so it’s hard to build up a scene. But every time we built a skatepark there was a new injec­tion of inter­est and enthusiasm.”

Since the events that Pales­tini­ans remem­ber as the Nak­ba or cat­a­stro­phe – the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that birthed the mod­ern Israeli state – count­less lives have been lost in over 75 years of con­flict and mil­lions of Pales­tini­ans have been dis­placed from their homes. Israel’s occu­pa­tion of the West Bank is the longest mil­i­tary occu­pa­tion in mod­ern his­to­ry. Young peo­ple in the West Bank grow up sur­round­ed by huge walls topped with barbed wire and mil­i­tary check­points. Many of their rights are restrict­ed, includ­ing their free­dom of move­ment, as mil­i­tary check­points block their paths, as well as their free­dom of expres­sion, with protests often vio­lent­ly sup­pressed by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), lead­ing to deaths. Over 1,000 Pales­tini­ans are in Israeli ​‘admin­is­tra­tive’ deten­tion, with­out charge or tri­al, as of 2023, the high­est num­ber in two decades, accord­ing to Israeli rights group HaMoked.

In such an oppres­sive con­text, skate­board­ing pro­vides relief. ​“It means you can have your own way – nobody can tell you to get off the board, it’s your board,” Aram says defi­ant­ly. ​“It’s such a cliché, cheesy thing to say that ​‘skate­board­ing means free­dom’ but it’s kin­da true. And it’s some­thing that makes you feel con­nect­ed to the inter­na­tion­al world with­out need­ing to be out­side Palestine.”

Recent months have wit­nessed an esca­la­tion in vio­lence from the Israeli mil­i­tary and ille­gal Israeli set­tlers in the West Bank, pro­vok­ing a fierce reac­tion from Pales­tin­ian armed groups, which some ana­lysts have sug­gest­ed could rep­re­sent the begin­ning of a new intifa­da or upris­ing. On Sep­tem­ber 19, Israeli mil­i­tary forces killed at least four Pales­tini­ans and injured around 30 oth­ers in a raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the north­ern West Bank, accord­ing to Al Jazeera.

“It affects peo­ple in gen­er­al,” Aram says of the conflict’s increas­ing pres­sure, his tone dark­en­ing. ​“Peo­ple are get­ting more intense, more charged, peo­ple are more alert [to things]. Skate­board­ing has become a tool that a lot of peo­ple use to escape [con­flict], same as me per­son­al­ly – I’m not going to speak for oth­er peo­ple, [but] a lot of times I felt like my san­i­ty is drop­ping away from me and skate­board­ing made it all come back.

“It makes you reflect on so many things,” he con­tin­ues. ​“A lot of ses­sions that I went and thought: ​‘I’m going to learn a trick.’ I didn’t learn a trick, but I learnt a trick in life, I reflect­ed on myself and my sur­round­ings. I think the inten­si­ty of what peo­ple live day-to-day is going to make skate­board­ing gnarli­er – I think peo­ple will go full-send because how it is reflects from a per­son onto their skat­ing. Go out­side Ramal­lah, it’s like check­points, IDF sol­diers, a lot of guns, a lot of shoot­ings – when these things hap­pen, you feel too priv­i­leged to go on the board and enjoy your day because everybody’s feel­ing sick. Some­times you can’t even enjoy skate­board­ing because you get to the point where it’s like: ​‘I’m too mad, I’m too sad, I’m too depressed to go and live a nor­mal day.’”

Fate­na Suleiman, 23, first start­ed skat­ing in 2019, after encoun­ter­ing a young woman and man walk­ing in Ramal­lah with their boards. After stop­ping the pair, they invit­ed her to a SkatePal ses­sion at the local sports cen­tre, where she was giv­en her first board and tried rolling along for the first time. ​“In Ara­bic we have a word called fashit ghol,” she says, casu­al­ly puff­ing on a cig­a­rette. ​“I don’t think there’s a term for it in Eng­lish – maybe sim­i­lar to blow­ing off steam. The first thing that I real­ly felt was like I was releas­ing so much ener­gy and it still does that for me every time. I love it.

“In Pales­tine there are a lot of things restrict­ing us,” she con­tin­ues. ​“One thing that real­ly hit home is the con­cept of free­dom, of move­ment and of expres­sion. Not just [regard­ing] the occu­pa­tion but also soci­etal norms and gen­der norms – espe­cial­ly as a woman, you are bat­tling many things at once. Skat­ing is a real­ly raw, aggres­sive, in-your-face activ­i­ty and it feels like you break loose from all those restric­tions because it’s a loud sport – it feels like you’re send­ing a message.”

Now 23, Fate­na is one of many women who have come to embrace skate­board­ing in the West Bank over the past decade. Char­lie claims the gen­der split stands at around 60 per cent male and 40 per cent female, an impres­sive fig­ure giv­en skateboarding’s tra­di­tion­al male dom­i­nance in the West. Fate­na explains that female skaters can often out­num­ber men at Ramallah’s skat­ing hotspots. Since the very begin­ning, SkatePal has put a major empha­sis on fos­ter­ing an encour­ag­ing envi­ron­ment for women and girls, such as hav­ing a strong con­tin­gent of female teach­ers at its sessions.

“Ever since I got into skat­ing, there’s been a lot of girls,” Fate­na says. ​“It’s great and con­trary to so many things that we have in our soci­ety. Skat­ing has always had a real­ly nice bal­ance, I think main­ly due to hav­ing a lot of female vol­un­teers when SkatePal was start­ing, encour­ag­ing young girls to come through. They kind of felt like it was a safe space.”

It’s an exam­ple of how skaters in the West Bank have come to inter­pret the sport in their own unique ways over the past decade, cre­at­ing a dis­tinct­ly Pales­tin­ian skate cul­ture in the process. The past few years have seen new gen­er­a­tions of skaters cre­at­ing their own net­works and find­ing their own spots. ​“Almost all the skat­ing activ­i­ties have been led by SkatePal, but I think last year every­one [realised]: ​‘We want to do our own thing, so what we’ll do is go skate on the street and find park­ing lots where we can just go and skate,’” Fate­na explains. ​“It’s great, because it’s start­ing to feel less attached to SkatePal and we want peo­ple to just be able to pick up a skate­board, go out with their friends and do their thing. That’s some­thing that’s been hap­pen­ing more over the past two years.”

In the end, that was always the hope for Aram and Char­lie – to build the parts that would allow Palestine’s skat­ing scene to even­tu­al­ly fly on its own. ​“We’re mov­ing away from that mod­el of doing class­es with inter­na­tion­al vol­un­teers and shift­ing focus onto the local skaters,” Char­lie says. “[We want to] get away from the dynam­ic of the aid receiv­er and giv­er, and make it become more self-sus­tain­able for every­one. Because peo­ple don’t know when the end point is and when you’re going to have to hand things over.”

“Boom­ing,” says Aram, of where he sees the scene going in the next 10 years. ​“It’s going to be more skaters – more girls and boys skat­ing in the streets, in the parks. We’re gonna build more parks, more spots. I’m sure of that.

“I think we’re gonna have like two or three skaters who are going to be fuck­ing gnarly and either get picked up in the USA or Europe or just stay in Pales­tine and shred their ass­es,” he con­tin­ues, with opti­mism glint­ing in his eyes. ​“I’m sure of it – I’m 25 now, I’ll be 35 and I’ll be look­ing at them like: ​‘I wish I could have done that when I was young.’ I want to see that, I want to have it, I want to feel these emo­tions towards some­one else, help them and push them. But yeah, it’s going to be nice.”

Find out more about SkatePal and how you can sup­port young peo­ple in Pales­tine through skateboarding.

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