Palestine is administered from Ramallah, on land that does not touch

Palestine stands in this atlas as an entry of its own. The territory that belongs to it does not lie in one piece. It is administered from Ramallah, in the West Bank. The Gaza Strip lies apart from that.

The recorded capital is Ramallah. Arabic is the official language. The Palestine Monetary Authority does not issue a note of its own. In circulation are the Israeli shekel, the Jordanian dinar and the US dollar. 5,483,450 people are recorded on 6,220 square kilometres. These figures come from the atlas country data. They do not decide who holds which authority. They describe the entry as it is kept here: with a seat, a language, and without continuous land.

The West Bank and the Gaza Strip

The Gaza Strip lies between Israel and Egypt. The West Bank lies between Israel and Jordan. The two territories have no shared border. Between them lies territory of Israel. Anyone going from Ramallah to Gaza does not leave one province and enter the next. The route is not a domestic road. It depends on the political situation of the borders with Israel, Egypt and Jordan. The shape of the entry is this separation, not a compact national area.

The status of the territories is disputed. The violence of recent years has not made one continuous administration out of the two pieces. In the country data of this atlas the neighbours are Egypt, Israel and Jordan. Egypt touches the Gaza Strip, Jordan the West Bank, Israel both sides and the space between them. The United Nations General Assembly lists Palestine as an observer state. That status does not draw an agreed border. It only confirms that the entry has a name in international life, while the land stays divided.

Ramallah is the seat

Ramallah lies in the central West Bank. The Palestinian Authority works there. The Palestinian Basic Law names Jerusalem as the capital. This atlas records Ramallah because the administration sits there, not because that settles the formula of the Basic Law. Both things can be said at once: the Authority has an address, and the legal formula names another city. The entry follows the address.

Jerusalem is not rewritten here into the recorded capital, and Ramallah is not reduced to a mere province. The dispute over Jerusalem is older than this entry and is not decided by it. What the entry can do is be precise about the seat. Tell Palestine only from a capital formula and you lose the place where administration happens. Name only Ramallah and hide the formula, and you lose the dispute that attaches to Jerusalem. An atlas owes both sentences.

Ramallah is the address of the administration. It is not the same thing as the Basic Law's capital formula.

— TerraTally · Countries desk

Money without a note of its own

The monetary authority runs banks and supervision and still does not print a note of its own. The Israeli shekel is the main money of daily life. The Jordanian dinar and the US dollar circulate beside it. That is not a curiosity of the wallet. It is the monetary form of an entity that has a budget and a payments system and pays in a currency it does not itself issue. The sovereignty that a central bank usually signals is outsourced here.

Arabic is the official language of this administration. It links the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in speech where geography separates them. The language does not do what a shared land border would do. It makes the entry readable as a political counterpart with an authority, a basic law, and no note of its own. The 6,220 square kilometres are the area this atlas gives the entry. They are not the agreed survey of every claim attached to this ground.

Palestine is an entry of its own here, with its seat in Ramallah. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip do not touch. The capital formula and the administrative address come apart, and the money in circulation is not its own. Precision means letting these facts stand beside each other.