When I started the Filasteen project, it contained the following tag: Parce qu’aujourd’hui le monde vit au rythme de la Palestine, which in essence means: “As Palestine goes, so does the World.” That was true and relevant to what I was planning to do with the site, i.e. to show that what happened in Palestine had lots of repercussion here and everywhere around the World. It was also very impersonal.
It did not take long though that through learning more from reading, watching documentaries and on the ground videos, exchanging with fellow bloggers and commentators on this site and on other sites, its mission morphed from ‘Helping my fellow human beings, the Palestinians, in their struggle against the barbarism of the Occupation of their land’ to ‘Joining arms with my fellow human beings in the struggle to save my Soul.’ (*)
It all began one summer afternoon in 2006. I was looking for J.K. Galbraith’s volumes in a used books store when an almost brand new book caught my eye. It was Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’Ari’s book Intifada – The Inside Story of the Palestinian Uprising That Changed the Middle East Equation. Arthur Hertzberg wrote in his review of the book:
This account of the intifada and its effect on both Israel and the Palestinians is the fairest that has yet been written. The suggestions for movement toward peace that safeguards the dignity and the needs of Jews and Arabs are politically and morally beyond reproach.
Indeed, it is a very good book; it is “a landmark book”! I was completely flabbergasted by what I was reading. I could hardly put the book down and was mortified at having to interrupt its reading for daily chores, eating or sleeping. I kept repeating to myself page after page: How come I never heard of this? How come I never heard of that?
And then came the assault of Israel upon Lebanon. As soon as the crisis began, I started reading blogs and other websites to get a sense of what was happening. I was dumbfounded to see that much of what I had been reading in Intifada was not “out there”. It was then that I also became aware I was not alone in being ignorant of all that were at stake in that region. Many were the bloggers who started their posts by “I am not an expert” or “I don’t know much about but” or “I have refrained from commenting up to now because I do not know much …”. That was/is one of the biggest - if not THE biggest issue of world affairs, and here we were groping our way around the various themes and topics of the Palestine/Israel conundrum!
The thing is we SHOULD have been aware of those issues if only because they affect our lives here in Canada. In fact, I know now that we have been deliberately kept in the dark about those issues precisely because of that fact.
I browsed frantically the Internet looking for ever more information. I did find much but they were all over the place. After a few days of reading and research, I came up with a more precise mission for this blogsite: it will be a place where I shall try to input as much information as possible on the Palestine/Israel situation both for myself and for those who like me are looking to educate themselves on the issue and somehow have found their way here. It remains a work in progress.
* More on that journey here.
Updated: February 14, 2009
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The avatar used here is ‘Abed ‘Abdi’s The Wall.
Filasteen’s banner is from a picture ‘borrowed’ from the Palestine Remembered website: A queue from hell, Bethlehem-Jerusalem checkpoint # 2.
