INTRODUCTION:
When I arrived in the US in June 1998 after deciding to take a break from the West Bank, I realised I couldn't get away from the place. Arriving in Minneapolis at my aunt's house, I discovered that the area was known as "the West Bank". The shop I'm pictured standing outside (right) is owned by a Palestinian family from Nablus.
"A Personal Diary", still getting over 5,000 unique visitors a month, needs to be expanded in order that the "on the ground" perspective of events it offered for 3 years is not lost. The "Personal Diaries of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict" project proposal grew out of this thought, a plan to establish a national alternative news network to cover events in the Palestinian towns and cities of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The Personal Diaries project will offer a unique and powerful window into daily life for the Palestinian people who live at ground zero in the conflict. Six writers living in the towns and cities of the West Bank and Gaza Strip [and two from the Palestinian Diaspora to give an entirely different perspective] will send text, stills, audio and video back to a centralized core group of seven people that includes editors, translators, and multimedia professionals.
This core group will publish the material in a weekly 'newspaper' website, a monthly magazine, quarterly CD-ROMs, and an annual video documentary, available in three languages - English, Arabic, and Hebrew. This section of the diary is dedicated to recording my efforts in the US, during 1999, to see this project realised. If you can help in any way, please write.