Your graffiti on the Israeli wall: 30 Euros

Back in 2002, the Israeli government started the construction of "The Wall", a combination of wire fences and concrete walls separating Israeli from Palestinian territories. In several places, The Wall is formed by 8 meter high concrete blocks.

"The Wall" was constructed to prevent "the uncontrolled entry of Palestinians into Israel", in a desperate attempt to control the crossing of Palestinian militants and arms.
The Wall has been highly controversial in many ways, not at least because it splits communities into "ghettos" of isolation, while many see cooperation, if not integration, the way to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The Wall brought one opportunity, a lighter message - literally then: A Dutch-Palestinian project brings people together through wall graffiti. For 30 Euros you can send in your text via SendAMessage. Young Palestinians will spray your message on the wall and send you three digital pictures of the graffiti.

The benefits go to projects of the Palestinian Peace and Freedom Youth Forum putting youth at work in volunteering projects in their society. (Full)

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Picture of the Day: The American School in Gaza

[Ed: no comment]

More Pictures of the Day on The Road.
Picture courtesy AP

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News: A Visit to a Gaza Rocket Factory

The young man pulls the door of the taxi closed. He is wet. There is a light drizzle in the Gaza Strip. He turns around and greets the passengers in the back seat with a quick handshake. "Are you ready?" he asks them. "As of this moment, we could be going to paradise at any time." The other people in the car don't respond, and the driver of the Mercedes hits the gas. "I should have phoned my wife," he says after a while. "She should start to keep an eye out for a new husband." (full article)

Source: The Road Daily. Picture courtesy Der Spiegel

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Rumble: Palestinians: Refugees for Life.

Warning: this piece is highly opinionated. It is nevertheless my honest opinion. My impression of the reality, my interpretation of the facts, and my reflection on the state of affairs. Mine only.


Today:

Today's headlines: "Mortar strike wounds Israeli troups", "Lebanon camp offensive continues!", "Seven US soldiers killed in Iraq"... The Middle East... How did we ever let it come this far?

In a previous post, I stated that today, 5.7 million people in the world were long term refugees. That excluded the Palestinians. 4.3 million Palestinians have been "Refugees for Life" since 1948. 4.3 million... That is about the whole population of Norway. Or half of New York city.

Since 1948, time and again, the "Palestinian Issue" became front page news. An excellent historic overview, you find in this summary. But have a look also at the UNRWA overview of the issue, which includes a lot of pictorial data.

According to me, the "Palestinian Issue" has been at the basis of most conflicts in the Middle East, as well as at the root of the artificial split the US foreign policy has made in the world since 9/11: on one hand they put the Muslim world, and the other hand, the non-Muslims. "With us or against us..".


Turn back time: August 2001. One month before 9/11

Why am I saying that? In one of my short stories "M- Requiem for Baghdad", I wrote: In August 2001, I told Tine just before I left home: “I do not have a good feeling. The stars are not right. Something is up.” That feeling was in sharp contrast with the one month holiday off the beaten track in Hawaii we just had. But the sixth sense was there, with big warning signs.
That feeling was mostly based on something that happened a year before that:


Turn back time again: September 2000.

The US was in full presidential elections battle, and after years of a US (and an international) push for peace in the Middle East, there was less attention on "the Palestinian Issue". "At last", Sharon, the then leader of the hard-line opposition party Likud, must have thought, and he took the opportunity of the distractions to provoke the Muslim community, inspired by his political ambitions: In September 2000, he visited the Temple Mount, a site in Jerusalem sacred for Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. This visit was internationally seen as a direct provocation amidst a very volatile situation.

That particular day of his visit, was to me the start of re-newed trouble in the Middle East. Fighting started during his visit, resulting in several days of back and fro firing fighting between Israeli forces and Palestinian gunmen. Amidst the fighting, there was one occasion where a young Palestinian boy, called Muhammad al-Durrah, and his father got caught in a cross fire..

Video footage, shot by France 2, showed the father and son hiding behind a barrel, until in the end both were shot. Muhammad died, and his father was seriously injured. There is a lot of controversy if this was all a clever media setup. Still, the picture of a father trying to protect his son, in the midst of a violent shoot-out, stuck in my mind forever. A father, who could have been any father, trying what any parent does: protect his child. And the overwhelming violence resulted in what must be the greatest sorrow of any parent: not being able to provide safety for your child. Muhammad died in the hands of his father, he himself half shot to pieces. In a conflict they had no part in.

That picture, those thoughts, did not only stick into my mind. The picture of Muhammad Al-Durrah and his father squatting for cover, was painted on walls all over the Middle East. They became a symbol of oppression. Senseless violence.
So, Arafat called for an intifada, a civil upraising, and the umpth Middle East civil war started.

Al Qaeda jumped onto the media frenzy, claiming to act on behalf of the oppressed Palestinians, and off we went. 9/11 here we come! After that, Bush took the opportunity to bash El Qaeda in Afghanistan, and while at it, went for the oil in Iraq.

We can all guess what would have happened (or preferably NOT happened) to the world, if Sharon did not visit Table Mount in September 2000. But to me, that one single act, and the attitude behind it, is one of the reasons why we still have 4.3 million Palestinians without a home. With millions of children without a future. Lost generations. Lost opportunities. And why? Because of political ambitions. International ill-meddling.

A sad state of affairs.

Suggested reading: Hanan Ashrawi's Miftah site: a Palestinian initiative for the promotion of global dialogue and democracy.

Pictures courtesy UNRWA, Wikipedia

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Rumble: Refugees for Life

My friend E. commented in one of my previous posts: "Some groups have been refugees for so long (for example, the Palestinians in Lebanon have been displaced for almost 40 years) that people (including yourself) have already 'forgotten' their plight. Did we all become immune or saturated already?"

And she is right. Read this article: "Protracted refugee situations: Millions caught in limbo, with no solutions in sight".
While worldwide refugee numbers have fallen to their lowest level in 25 years, a larger percentage of asylum-seekers are spending a longer time in exile in an often-overlooked plight of subsistence living in a virtual state of limbo. Excluding the Palestinians, they account for 5.7 million of the world's 9.2 million refugees.

The root causes of long-standing refugee populations stem from the very states whose instability engenders chronic regional insecurity. Most of the refugees in these regions - be they Somalis, Sudanese, Burundians or Burmese - come from countries where conflict has persisted for years.

East and West Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Middle East are all plagued by protracted refugee situations. Sub-Saharan Africa has the largest number, 17, involving 1.9 million refugees. The countries hosting the biggest groups are Guinea, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

In Asia (China, Thailand, India and Nepal) there are five protracted situations and some 676,000 refugees. Europe has three major cases involving 510,000 refugees, primarily in the Balkans and Armenia.

Although the measure of at least 25,000 refugees in exile for five years is traditionally used to define such situations, UNHCR argues that other groups should not be excluded. For example, of the Rohingya who fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh 12 years ago, 20,000 still remain. Similarly, there are 19,000 Burundians in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 16,000 Somalis in Ethiopia, 15,000 Ethiopians in Sudan and 19,000 Rwandans in Uganda.

Picture courtesy UNHCR.

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