2012 Palestine Center Annual Conference – Panel III

 

9 November 2012
The Palestine Center
Washington, DC

Mr. Yousef Munayyer:

Thanks Omar, thank you all. We will do our best, like Dr. Ali said, to keep you awake after lunch. I think we’ll do an OK job of that with a change of pace in our subject matter. Let’s just bring down the lights a bit. So my talk is going to be on “Hopes and Challenges of Representations of the Palestinian Narrative in the Media”, and the focus here is going to be on social media. I want to cover first where I think there is some optimism, and we’ll talk about the hopes at this point. So I will talk first about how social media is an outlet for campaigns and we’ll talk about some specific examples of campaigns. Some of you in this room may be intimately familiar with social media, and the most recent technology used for having intense discussions online and sharing information, whereas others may not. So I want to show you some examples of how social media is used as an outlet for campaigns. I also want to talk about another hope and that’s the proliferation of technology and the effect that that has on the discourse, shaping and changing it. Finally we’ll talk about how new representations of reality provided by these first two items translate into changes in the mainstream media by challenging it to adjust to that narrative.

So these are just a couple of the campaigns that I’m going to talk about to give you an idea of what’s been done, how they work and how they can be effective through various mediums. The first one is called “Love Under Apartheid,” which was a specific project. Then there was a campaign specifically focused on “Hunger Strikers” and we will look at one in particular and how that worked. Then I’m going to tell you a little bit about something that we did here as part of an on-line twitter campaign through the Palestine Center to remember the Nakba which is of course 64 years as of this May, and Sabra and Shatila, the massacres which took place in the camp, we had the 30th anniversary of this year in September. So I will tell you a little bit about how we use social media to talk about and commemorate these events. Finally, I want to show you “Info graphics”, how they work, what they mean, why they’re powerful and how they’re helping to change the discourse in ways that we have not seen before.

So let’s talk a little bit about our first example, “Love Under Apartheid”. This is the website here, and for those of you not familiar with this campaign, this was an absolutely brilliant idea because it took the most elementary and most commonly understood human idea of partnership and love between two individuals, and then explained how those relationships are effected by occupation, by Israeli apartheid policies, by putting individuals in front of cameras to talk about their stories. How does the person in Gaza who is married to someone in the West Bank deal with the daily struggles of apartheid and occupation policies have a relationship? How does someone living in the outside of the West Bank and Gaza have to deal with these types of policies? For example how does someone like myself and my wife, who is a Palestinian citizen of Israel, how do we experience the different effects of Israeli policies, and how does that impact our relationship? So it’s an extremely human idea that is being conveyed here and anyone can understand it. With this campaign that essentially had You Tube videos of people telling their personal stories about what this like and how it affects them, gathered together on a website and then on February 14th, which is Valentine’s Day, there was an extremely effective campaign on twitter, to get people to go this website. So using both appropriate timing of Valentine’s Day, and a theme that is understandable and transcends cultures and boundaries, this campaign was able to convey part of the Palestinian narrative in an important and effective way, the tools for which did not exist before. So you can see here some of the data, particularly during the period when this took place. I think this says, 21,530 tweets and retweets, specifically during the period around Valentine’s Day that directed people to this website to interact, face to face with Palestinians telling them stories in ways that you would not see on CNN, that you will not hear from the New York Times. So this is just one example of a campaign, which using social media democratized the discourse.

Moving along, I want to tell you about the Hunger Strikers, many of you may be familiar with the Hunger Strikers. This year in particular, around the Day of International Solidarity with Prisoners, the Palestinian prisoners began a campaign of resisting food to raise awareness about their predicament, and the most effective of these were the Palestinian prisoners facing administrative detention – and administrative detention for those of you who are not familiar with it is an Israeli policy of essentially arresting Palestinians and holding them without charge or trial for extended, indefinite, periods of time. The face of this campaign, at least early on, was a Palestinian activist and baker from Jenin named Khader Adnan who was imprisoned by the Israelis, under administrative detention for an extended period of time, and his periods of detention continued to be extended indefinitely. So a twitter campaign started raising awareness about the situation with Khader Adnan, trending the hashtag of Khader Adnan. Thousands of tweets and retweets were sent, and every day that progressed, every day that Khader Adnan denied food, more and more people kept tweeting, more and more people such that the hashtags changed. We went from KhaderAdnan51 days, to KhaderAdnan52 days. More and more people kept checking in to see if Khader is still alive today, will the Israelis do anything about Khader Adnan today? Will people start paying attention to this one particular Palestinian prisoner, whose name otherwise we would never have heard had it not been for these kinds of campaigns. So we saw numerous tweets being sent out. Here you see, for example, the hashtag Khader62 on his 62nd day. This also took place in mid-February, and you can see that many of these tweets have hundreds of re-tweets, so the impact of this is really significant because it is moving not only from one person to another but across networks in a very impactful way.

So you can see that along with simply raising awareness about the issue, others challenge the mainstream media. For example, in this tweet, The New York Times, directly tagging The New York Times, which draws this to their attention published dozens of stories on Gilad Shalit, which was of course the Israeli prisoner in Gaza, but nothing on Khader Adnan who was jailed without charges. Well Nick Kristoff who is a columnist at The New York Times covered Khader Adnan. This had hundreds of retweets and if you think the people at The New York Time are not going to notice when their twitter column starts going off with hundreds of tweets of criticism that has an important and serious impact. So can see here from the statistics on this particular twitter campaign, that right around the Day of Solidarity with Palestinian Prisoners, this reached its significant point, and then a short time later when the Israelis announced a decision after all of this pressure to eventually release Khader Adnan, we saw an explosion of tweets which topped off at 52,129. So there is serious mass mobilization here in a way that maybe you’re not seeing these people all coming together in a public square but there is a serious, coordinated and active campaign of mobilization for specific goals, raising awareness about issues that we did not have before.

Our particular campaigns, and this is something that I think a lot of people can participate in, and do at any time: we decided to use technology in a creative way to try to remember the Nakba, and remember Sabra and Shatila. So, on the 15th of May of this year, which is the day when the Nakba is commemora-ted, we decided to send out a tweet for every single ethnically cleansed Palestinian village, with the name of the village, where it was located for people who are not familiar with where its located, how many original inhabitants were depopulated, and using the hashtag Nakba64 for 64 years. So, village after village, with populations, people started to get a feeling that the Nakba which is a word that you hear but don’t necessarily understand was a massive, massive thing, that this place had depopulated hundreds of thousands of people, and these villages started to have names. These villages started to have identities in social media 64 years after the fact in a way that did not exist before. Obviously these get tweeted and retweeted, and it is an effective way of changing the discourse, and taking May 15th and reminding people that something serious and tragic happened on this day, and this is what it was.

So we also were able to utilize this tool for commemorating Sabra and Shatila. We sent out tweets on the 18th of September, 19th of September, around the 30th anniversary commemorating the individual victims of Sabra and Shatila. For example we say, here is the name of the victim in this case, Farid Srour Mohammed al Mirei, age 6 was massacred in the camps thirty years ago. So these victims that were just numbers before, on an occasion that was a footnote in history, had names, had identities, people who were not born at the time that Sabra and Shatila took place never really understood what this was began in a very direct and personal way, seeing and experiencing the massacre. When you talk about massacres, in history books massacres are represented more often than not by numbers. But the really effective thing about twitter is that when you individualize the casualties in this case, or when you individualize the villages in the case of the Nakba, what people see in their streams is a virtual graveyard, is a series of headstones, and start to grasp the gravity of what took place, in a way that they wouldn’t when they just see 2000 or 400, or numbers that don’t mean anything to them. Because each tweet represents an individual or represents a village, which is really a scale in that stream of destruction that people could never identify with before. So that’s another example of how we were able to use social media in that sense to get the Palestinian narrative about these events out there in ways the mainstream media would not do.

Finally, I want to talk a little bit about Info Graphics as a tool, and I think these are super effective, and Info Graphics are essentially images, or charts, or a collection of images and charts and numbers that convey extremely detailed information in a compact way that’s easy to grasp and also easy to transmit because they’re one image. So instead of writing, for example, an article or a book, on the policies that affect Israeli Jews versus Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank, a campaign called “Visualizing Occupation” put together an Info Graphic like this. It says, here at the top for those who can’t read it, let’s say you live in the West Bank and you want to spend the day at the beach – you can see the surf board there at the top with the thought cloud, the question is, “Are you Jewish?” If the answer is “yes”, just go, and you can see the green line here. If the answer is “no” – in other words, if you’re Palestinian, then there’s a whole other set of series of questions that you need to satisfy to even have the possibility of getting to the beach. And if you happen to get to that point – and you can see here most paths lead down to “forget it” – the path here at the bottom that finally says “yay”, says “congratulations you’ve been awarded a 24-hour pass to go to the beach.” So, in a really simple, condensed, easy to convey way, people can now understand the policies that affect Palestinians without having to go through dense information. This can be passed around via twitter, via Facebook, things can be put on blogs, can be shared via the mainstream media.

Another one that I wanted to show you, it’s really difficult to explain to people the apartheid system throughout Israel and Palestine; and we’re talking about one system, make no mistake. When we talk about two states, there really is one state, the state of Israel that controls everything going on within those borders. When we talk about the road system, there are hundreds of roads, and it’s really complicated to explain to people, “well, some roads some people can go on”, then there are bypass roads, and there are some roads closed only for settlers, and then there are some roads that are part-time open to Palestinians. This is extremely difficult to do in language, it’s extremely simple to do with images and Info Graphics. So, you can see with this particular Info Graphic which was put together by a group called “Visualizing Palestine” the different roads, how they are all really connected as part of one-state system at the end, but there are several degrees of separation and segregation, and all of them are explained in color-coded fashion here so that anyone who is unfamiliar with this system can immediately become familiarized with what’s going on.

Next I want to turn to the proliferation of technology and how this effects the discourse, and I call this proliferation of technology, the “New Vanunus”. Those of you who are familiar with Mortechai Vanunu – of course he is the Israeli nuclear technician who smuggled a camera into the Israeli nuclear facilities which were previously unknown, and managed to get these images out and exposed that the Israeli narrative, that the Israeli’s were in fact the David in the David and Goliath dichotomy was completely turned up on its head because in fact Israel had in its possession the largest single per capita nuclear arsenal in the world. So how was he able to do this – well in the past this is what was involved, he took pictures with a camera, he then smuggled it out, in his backpack and over the course of a year made his way to Australia where he liaised with a British journalist who then flew him back to London one year later so that he could the famous expose with the Sunday Times of London that revealed that Israel had a secret nuclear arsenal. The new Vanunus have cut down this process to the press of a button. You no longer need the ability of the Israeli state or any state for that matter to control the discourse with physical restrictions. It has crumbled today because of the use of new technology. The new Vanunus now take a picture and press of a button and the picture is online. The occupation and Israeli apartheid is now being live-streamed. You are watching the occupation and apartheid in real time.

So what are some examples of this? We have the live-streaming of the flotilla, I will talk a little about that, a little about the use of You Tube, and also cell phones and the proliferation of cell phones and the limitations on the cell phone networks inside occupied territory. Many of you remember the flotilla, and what was different about the flotilla is that when the Israeli army boarded this ship in international waters, we saw it happening in real time, which is something that when you have real time military action happening live on camera the mainstream media eats that up because its controversial and there is the potential, and in this case the reality of casualties, which is highly controversial and draws a lot of attention. We were watching this unfold before our very eyes. It becomes impossible then for the state actor who in this case is doing the boarding, is committing the violations, to spin the story back in their direction. The Israelis found it very difficult to play “catch-up” and put out a whole different spin on this situation, which many people did not buy because this technology was there. If you didn’t see this, who were you going to hear from, you’re going to hear only one side of the story. Now you have a different option available because you get to see it with your own eyes, and the Israeli spin begins to fall apart, not because the quality of the Israeli spin is any different but there’s finally a different side of the story to show that it’s a bunch of nonsense. So that is the live streaming which is now available.

Apartheid at a screen near you, thanks to You Tube. Many of these images we were never able to see before, but we’re able to see today. This is for example an Israeli settler crouched down, prepared to shoot at Palestinians on Palestinian territory of course in the presence of an Israeli soldier. So the idea that Israeli soldiers are there protecting Israeli settlers from dangerous Palestinians and what not crumbles and the reality of Israeli settler violence comes to a screen near you. We see this in so many cases. We see this in a number of different videos. This one, for example, a Palestinian protestor who is handcuffed and blindfolded is being lined up to be shot point-blank in the foot by an Israeli soldier, all of it caught on camera. Prior to this, it was very easy to say, “Well, we never heard of this incident, it didn’t happen or we’re looking into it,” and then just drop it. You can’t drop it when you have video because you have real live proof, much of which is recorded and uploaded immediately. So the ability of the state to convey this narrative falls apart.
Again, another case where you see an Israeli soldier, this time with a leftist Israeli protestor, walking by, pulling his gun out, shooting at the protestor on camera. Again, this scene with an Israeli soldier pulling a weapon point-blank on a Palestinian in the streets of Hebron – these are images that you could not get in the past, but these are images that are flooding social media on a daily basis – and, we only have reason to believe that as technology proliferates into the territories, these images are going to continue coming out, not because they didn’t happen before but because now we’re finally getting a chance to see them.

Finally, one of the things on the proliferation of technology, one of the things that is going to slow this is the fact that you need technology in your hands to be able to convey these messages, and while there is approximately 2.6 million Jawal customers and another 500,000 Wataniya customers – which for Palestinians those are the two largest providers in the West Bank – there’s extremely limited 3 G network access. So what that means is you may be able to take a picture of a scene at a checkpoint but getting it uploaded online is going to take some time. So we’re not yet seeing an instantaneous representation of apartheid, but that’s coming. That’s coming because there was a time when they did not have the 2 G networks that they do now; 3 G is coming soon, and after it the 4 G, and so on and so forth – and the ability of people on the ground to convey the reality that they see on a daily basis instantaneously is right around the corner. I personally believe that when that happens, the tidal wave of imagery that you are going to see is really going to have significant effect on the discourse. Number of internet lines could certainly be better, but they are continuing to increase. So, that kind of connectivity, once it finally happens is going to be super helpful.
Lastly, I want to talk about how these representations effect the reality and challenge mainstream media. We talked a little bit about Khader Adnan – nobody would have heard of Khader Adnan had it not been for that online social media campaign. That’s why, for example, The New York Times, which is about as mainstream media as it gets picked up the story as part of their blogging on this issue, and this story made it to The New York Times, and from that point, then, further into mainstream media. They take cues off of each other. We talked about some of those videos, of settler violence, and I pointed out one in particular out to you. That’s how it got into a story in the Atlantic Monthly, another very important and influential blog on this issue – and you could see the same imagery that was taken from this video. Had that video not been taken, had that technology not been available, this story would not be written. It’s impossible now to deny that these things are happening. Finally, of course, we talked about the Info Graphics, and you could see that some of the power of the Info Graphics are [that] they’re very easy to put into blogs, move them in and out of online commentaries, send them around… So someone like Andrew Sullivan, who’s at the Newsweek website can take this and write a passage there that shows you an entire system and comment that Jim Crow, the segregation system in the American South was never this extensive. So, the reality is these things are having an impact on the mainstream media.

Those were the hopes, there are also challenges. I don’t want to delve too much into the challenges because I’m sure we’ll talk more about that, but I will just mention a couple of them. First of all, while we’ve seen a lot of changes in the on-line media in the mainstream, and also I would argue in some of the print media in the mainstream, tv has been impermeable so far in many ways. It’s been difficult to see that. The online media is of course in much greater proximity to the social media because of the nature of it, and so that contributes a lot to that fact. But as tv increasingly incorporates social media into their broadcasts, I think we’re going to continue to see more of a change in the discourse because the discourse is democratized by social media. Of course, we have continued pro-Israel bias, especially in Washington, and the mainstream media, where do they take their cues from? They take their cues from officials more often than not. They cover the government, what does Congressman so and so say, what does Senator so and so say, what does Secretary of such and such say, what did this hearing on the Hill cover? That pro-Israel bias continues to translate into coverage of the media because the media is so focused on Washington, which really is still very much biased towards the Israelis but I think that too in the future will continue to change.

Finally, and this one I highlight because I do want to talk about this a little bit, and that is the problem of mixed messaging. We have two different ideas that are often talked about in terms of an outcome for the Palestinian issue: a one-state outcome versus a two-state outcome. So this sends mixed messages to Americans who are saying, many in the American media are looking at this disarray and saying, what do the Palestinians want? Where is the direction? I think we’re moving increasingly closer to settling that divide, and as we do, it will become a lot easier for the American media to follow this. Why has it been difficult so far has been because you have analysts and activists, many of them who’ve covered this issue, who have settled on the proposition that a two-state solution is done. So they are focused on a one-state outcome. The problem is that official rhetoric from Palestinian officials, American officials, and Israeli officials, is still focused on the two-state outcome. So you have many people talking about one-state and many others talking about two-state, which creates a mixed messaging for the media to reflect on.

Finally, the same division exists when we talk about civil society mobilization and when we talk about diplomatic initiatives. Civil society mobilization is largely situated within a framework of equal rights and a rights based framework where diplomatic initiatives are still stuck on the quartet, on a two-state issue, on envoys, and so on. So I think as that issue continues to be increasingly settled, it will remove one more obstacle in the way from effectively conveying the Palestinian narrative in mainstream media, and so I will conclude there, and pass it on to my colleagues. Thank you.

Will Youmans:

So, the panel question asks is there a reason for optimism? And I follow Yousef in probably saying yes. Yousef gave a lot of great examples to show that these tools of being engaged in discourse have opened up in a lot of ways so there is actually a lot more room for agency among Palestinians and solidarity activists and advocates, for getting the word out, to basically create self-communication avenues and produce self-media that lets Palestinians define themselves, that lets traditional orthodoxies in thinking about that region be challenged in new and exciting ways.
Yousef made a really great point about as the technologies and the access to cellular phone, like the 3 G network opens up in the West Bank, there will be more of a tidal wave of images, information and videos and so on. But it’s also important that those images be curated and categorized and put into structured presentations, otherwise you have the problem of information overload, which is one of the dangers of having too much information out there. How do we know what’s important, how do we focus on it. So my talk today is actually not about what has been happening but about what has not been happening in terms of the digital realm.

I called my talk, “Digital Palestine” , as a way to string together different ideas or thought experiment projects that I want to present to you as ways to move forward, and to make the most out of what opportunities are lying in online technologies. There’s actually a lot out there that’s not being used, and that’s not to take away from the great projects that Yousef highlighted and all the good work that numerous organizations like the Palestine Center are doing, but just to say that there’s a lot more that could be done.

My disclaimer that I do want to say is that when you focus on on-line technology and you focus on discourse you risk overlooking the importance of traditional organizing, of real institution-building, of the traditional avenues to self-determination and power. I think that these things go hand in hand so my emphasis on the on-line and on discourse is not to say that those other things don’t matter, but really I want to make the point that they have to complement each other and I’m going to give some practical recommendations about that towards the end.

So, my talk is really a series of ideas, but to give you some background first, when I’m thinking about “Digital Palestine”, I’m thinking of it as a short-hand for the strategic re-presentation of Palestinian narratives, events, facts, historical memory, using network technology. So in a way a digital Palestine lets us realize what’s denied and practiced, or inner reality, the physical landscape of Palestine, the homeland. So “Digital Palestine” is about where the discourse of being Palestinian, or what the experience of being Palestinian meets the technology, and takes advantage of technological affordances. So what Yousef is talking about is spread out all over the place but can we think in a more organized strategy of a “Digital Palestine” that brings things together. I think some of my ideas are aimed at that.

But why should we be thinking in terms of a “Digital Palestine”, or aiming for that? For one thing, these online technologies let Palestinians have self-definition against representation by other media, and this representation of self is a form of power, so where there’s no army, where there’s no military option for Palestinians, the only Palestinian resistance so far is a discursive one, really. The online realm is where there are the most opportunities. Also Palestinians have a shortage of institutions of historical memory, which are important for every national or self-determination or every liberatory cause. Where are the repositories of memory, of information; where are the museums, the memorials, the physical plants that capture the Palestinian essence of the Palestinian story, but are still alive and taking on new information? We lack these institutions and I think that online can be a space for promulgating them.

Thirdly, and also importantly, is that online technology offers a very dynamic way to sustain and give new shapes and forms to Palestinian identity. This quote from a Palestinian living in Shatila camp, a 19 year old, said, “All people have a country to live in, but we have a country living inside of us.” So there’s always this disconnect between identity and the physical space, and actually when you think about the virtual world, when you think about online technologies, there’s also this disconnect between the physical and the identity, and the expressions of the identity, and this is an idea which comes from a book by Miriam Ourag, Palestine Online, Transnationalism, the Internet and the Construction of Identity, she writes about how Palestinians are actually using on-line forums to foster the transnational connections between Palestinians in Lebanon, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinians in Jordan. This is a really important development that can’t be overlooked. Miriam writes, interestingly, “the virtual space is always a reminder of the absence of shared territorial place.” So even as the online world is used to connect people, it’s also a reminder of what’s absent, and that is Palestine. “Digital Palestine” is a way to approach that absence, and one way that a Digital Palestine can be particularly subversive is in the politics of naming. One big part of discourse is the power to name things, to call things. This is partially inspired by the famous quote by Moshe Dayan, the Israeli leader and military politician, who said famously, “You don’t even know the name of the previous Arab villages, and I don’t blame you because those geography books aren’t around anymore.” Well, maybe online we can bring them back. Not only the books, the villages aren’t around.” He cites the Arabic names, that are replaced by the Hebrew names, “There isn’t any place that was established in an area where that had not at one time been an Arab settlement.”

So, given this erasure of the names that Dayan talks about, “Digital Palestine” could be a way to re-assert those names, to subvert this erasure that Dayan talks about that is so essential to the formation of the Israeli state. So one idea, my first idea, for taking advantage of what was called “augmented reality” – how many people have heard of “augmented reality”? – So the basic idea of “augmented reality” is you have a mobile device and it has a camera, and the camera can capture a location that you’re at. It also has GPS, smart phones that can tell you where you are. Putting these things together through an application can bring out information about place that you or I are at, information that is not there in the physical world, but is bringing basically on-line information. So it taps into this real-world environment, or represents this real-world environment through a screen, and that image is augmented by super-imposed, computer-generated content. It could be sounds, you could have sound files connected, and you can have video-graphics or text. So looking at this image here, what you see is an example of augmented reality where this person is at a location putting their camera on a location, they know where they are in this information, and we could just as easily do that with erased villages. So that cell phones, smart phones that are there, in the area will be able to pick up where the closest erased village was and this can be in the form of a mobile application. This is very basic, this is very easy to do, but nothing like this exists. I think this is very powerfully symbolic , for redefining or renaming the place, according to the Palestinian history. So this is one project that could be done very, very easily that hasn’t been done yet. You’d probably have a situation where the Israeli government tries to block access to this, but think about the alternative tourism industry that could come around based on this kind of stuff, and it’s already happening in different areas.

Other technology that has been used and applied, but there could be a lot more of, is crisis mapping, which really becomes helpful during crises where there’s a shortage of information. How do you get information from natural disaster areas in Haiti and Japan, for example, or during times of election violence in Kenya? This kind of resource became very important. This example is from 2008/2009, Israeli assault on Gaza, and this is an Aljazeera English project that was kind of a test, it wasn’t really fully rolled out, and they used a platform called UCHITI, and they basically solicited information about different things that are happening, such as movement of ground forces, international aid strikes, and so on and so forth, and put the information into a map. So they’re getting information from people on the ground and mapping that information to help facilitate the flow of information. Of course, the problem is that if you’re in Gaza at that time, you don’t have good access to this kind of information, so it ended up being more helpful to on the outside.
But this doesn’t have to be just for breaking moments, this kind of information, I think as Yousef points out, once there’s better cell phone access for all Palestinians all over, in the whole Diaspora, you could have more projects like this, where information is brought out from the ground and mapped. Yousef’s paper or report on settler violence, which is available on the website would be a perfect example of something like this where you could have a settler violence report brought into a map.

My big idea, the idea that I’m most proud of, probably also the most difficult to implement, requires lots of money, so get out your checkbooks, is what I call Wiki Palestine, based on again the idea of crowd sourcing. So here is my theory, there’s millions of Palestinians around the world who actually know a lot more about the history of Palestine than I think we know in our history books, in terms of them having their family stories, their family memories, their photos, their keys, their deeds, but all that is kept within the family. It’s isolated, it’s not brought out, so we have all this unearthed knowledge or as Foucault would call it, “subjugated knowledge”, knowledge that goes against the predominant discourse, but the stories are largely untapped. We finally now have on-line communication technology that can tap into that knowledge. So with the example that I base Wiki Palestine on is actually from Wiki Pedia’s main concept, people uploading information while others are editing it, checking it and verifying it. A good example is also “Encyclopedia of Life” – its mission is to gather all the information and knowledge about the natural world that is out there. You become a member of this website – most of the members are scientists, researchers, hobbyists, outdoors people who take pictures of plant life or animals and stuff, they make observations about them, they upload them, they take sounds, they take audio recordings and they upload them. The idea is to become one repository of knowledge – and we don’t have anything like that on Palestine, despite this happening at every other realm, of Wiki Pedia for example. We could have our own Wiki Palestine. So this is something that I find missing.

Now a project like this would obviously be very big and you would have to set forth a lot of policies. So, really what I’m really thinking is, you know we have really great organizations that are doing stuff here and there, but we need a more centralized coordination of organization around a digital Palestine project. So that’s my closing thought – that is, we are having more information, we are having this tidal wave that Yousef is talking about, but it has to be organized into platforms, it has to be structured, and then those have to feed into campaigns. So a “Digital Palestine” project I envision it as being based on a team of developers, programmers, historians, researchers, activists, journalists, bringing in all the various institutions doing these projects to work towards some of these central technology-based goals. It would require lots of resources, expertise, volunteers, working together, in short it would be nothing less than a major political coup for Palestinian political culture to be able to bring about such high coordination. But I think that this is the time with this online technology. We don’t want to do what Abu Amar (? ) said, miss an opportunity… So I think we should really be thinking about higher coordination of information technology projects towards a realization of a digital Palestine, realizing that that is not the end, but that is the means to facilitate more awareness, more agency, better healthier political discourse among Palestinians themselves. So if you want to talk more about this project, I’m not heading it up, I’m looking for someone else to take it, and if you’re watching out there online, please by all means…. Thank you.

Samer Badawi:

Well, I stand before you with two distinct disadvantages: one is I followed Yousef and Will, and they’ve said basically all there is to say about both social media and print media. That’s not to say that there isn’t more that we can add; the other is that probably for the first time in my life, I realize that I’m the oldest person on the panel, I’m pushing 40, and so it probably behooves me to take the script that I have for you today, which exists in this little black book, and set it aside. It’s probably just as well because as someone who works directly with the media, for the Institute for Middle East Understanding, of which you may or may not know much but I’d be happy to answer questions later, I can tell you that that work is very messy business and there is no script for it. What it depends on, more than anything else in the world, is the resilience of the people who chose to remain. Nothing matters more.

We who are in this room, we who know about twitter and Facebook, and emailing and all the things that are more appropriate for people far younger than I am, know full well that we are only as loud as, as effective as the resilience and strength of those who remained, and those who continue the struggle, not only in Palestine, the West Bank, Gaza, 1948 areas, but also in the refugee camps. I think it’s very important for us today to emphasize that many of the initiatives that we talked about, perhaps this morning although I wasn’t here, but certainly this afternoon on this panel as well, for one reason or another do not include the 380,000 plus refugees in Lebanon. It is absolutely critical that we remember that three quarters of our people were displaced from their land in 1948 and they have the right to return.

So in this black book, I do have notes that I intended to share with you today, but I have something that I carry with me wherever I go, and I feel that it is perhaps far more important to today’s session than anything else – and that is a little black and white photo that I have from Bethlehem, from my mother, who I believe from looking at the photo, is perhaps six years old – and I say that because I recognize her, I recognize her in the face of my own daughter. It’s difficult to talk about these things because the trauma that is left behind by 1948 is the very reason why, as Will pointed out, we do not have a repository of memory. I found this photo in a box that my mother had left behind on her last trip to the United States, and I had never seen it in my life. I only saw it at the age of 39, and I don’t know the story behind it. What I do know, however, is that looking at it, I see a young lady, perhaps 6 years old, who has the strength and resilience that we are talking about today, that will ultimately allow us to push the media message forward.

I also see in the face of my grandmother, who is sitting right next to her, somewhere in Bethlehem, the ordinariness of being a Palestinian in the Palestine that we all remember, whether it’s through our parents our through our direct memory. What we are after, ladies and gentlemen, let us not forget, is not a certain number of tweets and 140 characters, it is not the sharing of a message across platforms to a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand or even a million people, we are after the liberation of Palestine. How we get there depends largely on many of the points that Will and Yousef touched upon during the course of their talk, but I’d like to focus on two, and two alone. They are the message and the medium.

Now that may sound simplistic to you at face value, but building on what Yousef said, we as Palestinians do have a problem today, and that problem is that we are not all on the same page. Certainly, the political manifestation of that is in the divide between Gaza and the West Bank, between Hamas and Fatah, between student groups at individual Palestinian universities across the West Bank, some of whom pledge their allegiance to the PFLP, others of whom pledge it to the DFLP, others of whom consider George Habash their idol, others consider Abu Amar, Yasser Arafat, their idol. What brings all of them together – is the idea of two-states? Is it the idea of one-state? Or is it the photos of their mothers and grandmothers? And I’m here to tell you today, that in all my experience dealing with Palestinians throughout the world, and as an aside, I should note to you that as someone who has lived outside in the diaspora his entire life, I do not feel fully at home anywhere, fully at home anywhere. And, I think that’s probably the experience of many of the people in this room. We claim the identity, we work for it, we fight for it, but we are not, whether it’s in Bethlehem, or Washington DC, or the refugee camps of Lebanon, fully at home – and that is our burden to bear.

But in that role, we serve as messengers and conduits between the Palestinians who exist in different forms throughout the world, in different forms of resistance and existence. And I’m here to tell you that, no matter whom I speak with, no matter where I visit, no matter where I go, no matter which accent they speak in, be it Lebanese, Syrian, Gazan or from Bethlehem, the thing that unites us all is precisely what my colleague Will Youmans spoke about and that is the memory. What we need today is a more intense focus on reclaiming that memory through the people who continue to resist. Let me be more clear, Khader Adnan, in 63 days, actually I believe it was more like 67 days, in 67 days did more for the coverage of Palestinian prisoners than 45 years of political propaganda. And the reason for that, ladies and gentlemen, is that propaganda itself is irrelevant anymore. There is no such thing as mono-chromatic messages, in this world and age that we live in. If you need proof positive of that, think of a man named Sheldon Adelson, 54 million dollars spent on Republican candidates in this recent election and not one of them won. Not one.

Why was that the case? Some will say it was the African-American vote, some will say it’s the women’s vote. No matter where you fall on that spectrum, politically or in terms of the argument, I’d venture to say that it was one Republican senator who spoke about rape being God’s will who brought an end to all those Republicans, and to Mitt Romney himself. And the reason was, because of the things that, again Will and Yousef spoke about, which is the incredible ability to spread messages far and wide, and to democratize the messaging process. And ladies and gentlemen, today, for the first time in my lifetime, and I would bet for the first time in all of your lifetimes, we are actually in the advantage when it comes to the opposition vis a vis Palestine. We are, for the first time in our lives, able to do things that the opposition cannot do – and they cannot do it because their messages are mono-chromatic, because they view us as a monolithic entity and we are not that. We are my mother’s photo. We are the mothers and grandmothers of everyone sitting around us today.

So the medium matters, by all means. But the message, here I will differ slightly with my colleague Yousef on this – I don’t believe that the message needs to be unified, I don’t believe that we need to have a single platform. I believe what we need is a multiplicity of voices. We need a polychromatic propaganda, a propaganda that views not the image as iconic or the messenger as iconic but the tweet as iconic, the aggregate of tweets as iconic. When you take a hundred thousand people and you demonstrate that they are standing in solidarity with Khader Adnan, you are having the effect that a George Habash might have had 40 years ago, or an Abu Amar might have had at the UN during his famous speech. Facilitating that, enabling that, emboldening it comes down not only to the technology, but it comes down into buying into the idea that we can no longer wait for the leadership that we have been missing for decades on end.

The liberation will come from people like Khader Adnan. It will come from Bassem Tamimi – how many people in this room know Bassem Tamimi, or of him? Everyone should know. Bassem Tamimi, of course, is a non-violent protestor in the village of Ni’lin, who’s entire family in one way or another has been impacted by his resistant struggle – and he has recently been sentenced to four months in jail, because he refused to pay the bail that he was required to pay by the Israeli Occupation to get out of jail. He decided to sit in jail so as not to acknowledge the authority of the Israeli’s over him and his family. Bassem Tamimi. It comes down to people like Abu Nidal, who I’m quite sure that no one in this room has heard of, but he’s a farmer I met, on the outskirts of Bethlehem some six weeks ago. He’s a farmer pushing seventy years old, and he lives right along the path of the wall. Between his home and the graves of his mother and two or three of his immediate family, the wall is being built. So Abu Nidal went to Israeli court and he sued the Israeli government, and he forced them to build a tunnel underneath the wall, so that he could go on a daily basis to visit the graves of his family members.

Now, let us be clear, when Abu Nidal passes, as we all do, the Israelis will make every effort to close that tunnel. The question then becomes what is our role in persevering and continuing the amazing resistance effort that this man had, and again, just to bring it back to what we’ve been talking about all along, I think the answer to that is really that everyone in this room continue to tell the stories without paying too much mind to whether or not they all fit within one bucket, or within one political agenda. I think for too long we have been struggling with that, and in the end our role in the diaspora is to facilitate and to support the resilience and the strength of those who remained.
I will close with an anecdote. This is something, it’s a bit of a riff that I do when I talk about communica-tions, which in the end is my career I suppose – it’s really a poem that was written by a man named William Carlos Williams, has anyone heard of him? Ok, this poem is called “The Red Wheelbarrow”, and in it he says, “So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow, sitting in the rain beside the white chickens.” That’s it, that’s the whole poem. So, people are confused by this, naturally. How is this poetry and how is this man William Carlos Williams to write something so absurd? So he was confronted about it, obviously, by I believe a journalist at one point, and they asked him, “Mr. Williams, what on earth could this possibly mean?” And in his typical terse way, he wrote the same way that he spoke, he answered, “There are no ideas but in things.” There are no ideas, but in things.

Ladies and gentlemen, apartheid means nothing if you don’t understand the story of Abu Nidal. Occupation means nothing if you don’t understand these stories in the “Love Under Apartheid” series. And our struggle, the resistance struggle means nothing if you don’t understand the legacy of my mother and the mothers of other Palestinians who are sitting in this room today. So I would encourage you to continue on that struggle, and I am happy to, with my colleagues here, to take questions about the IMEU, as we continue with the panel. Thank you.

Samer Badawi is a communications manager with the Institute for Middle East Understanding, an independent non-profit that works to provide resources and accurate information about Palestine and the Palestinians to journalists. Previously, he served as Director of Resource Development and Communications with the Geneva-based Welfare Association, as Executive Director of United Palestinian Appeal in Washington, DC, and as DC correspondent for Middle East International. In addition to his work on Middle East issues, Badawi has served as a communications consultant to the World Bank, the IFC, and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Will Youmans is an Assistant Professor at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs. Broadly interested in questions of transnationalism and news media in conflict, his primary research interests include global news, journalism, media law, and social movements. He is currently researching the development of Arab media law as well as the role of transnational media in US-Arab relations. Youmans has presented at numerous conferences, including the annual gatherings of the Middle East Studies Association, the International Communication Association, the National Communication Association, the International Studies Association, and the American Sociological Association.

Yousef Munayyer is Executive Director of The Jerusalem Fund and its educational program, The Palestine Center. He frequently writes on matters of foreign policy in the Arab and Muslim world, and civil rights and civil liberties issues in the United States. His Op-Eds have appeared regularly in The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Detroit Free Press, and AlQuds Newspaper, among others. He has also appeared on national and international media outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, CBS, Al-Jazeera English, C-Span, and others.

This transcript may be used without permission but with proper attribution to The Palestine Center. The speaker’s views do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jerusalem Fund.