Electronic Diaries From Within Occupied Palestine
 http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/175595.html
from the Washington Post

By Adam Creed, Newsbytes
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA,
02 Apr 2002, 5:59 AM CST

With the Middle East once again teetering on the edge of catastrophe,
media reports are coming in thick and fast, but what about the
stories from those living among the chaos? Live from the
Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, residents are uploading
several diary entries each day despite electricity problems, curfews,
and increasing military action. The diaries are part of Electronic
Intifada, an independent pro-Palestinian Web site dedicated to
putting across the Palestinian point of view on the Web and in the
global media. World Wide Web:  http://electronicIntifada.net/diaries/

---------------

Life and death in Palestine
The Electronic Intifada publishes daily accounts of Israeli siege

Stephanie Saldana, Daily Star (Lebanon), 5 April 2002

When Israeli authorities declared Ramallah a closed military zone
early this week, the army decreed that the media would also be banned
from the city. What they failed to recognize is that the media is no
longer limited to those with press passes. In the age of the
internet, anyone can become a journalist.

On April 1, a man who signed his name as Ashraf sat down at his
computer and began to write his own version of history.

"The worst thing is that so many people are living without
electricity or water," he wrote. "And the food is finishing. Some
people are injured, and some are just ill and need to get to the
hospital to get treatment. But the Israelis don't let anyone through
to help anyone."

More surprising than Ashraf's decision to write about the siege is
the number of those across the world who would later read it. In the
last days of March, The Electronic Intifada
(www.electronicintifada.net), began publishing first-hand accounts of
the siege in Ramallah written by verifiable citizens and witnesses.

Since then, Live From Palestine - a citizens' diary project recording
events (found on The Electronic Intifada website) - has been
transformed into a literary force. Updated daily, the site contains
on-the-ground accounts of the siege written by doctors, aid workers,
human rights activists, and
anyone else who has managed to get access to the internet despite
repeated power cuts and curfews.

Intended as a news source, the site has slowly been transforming into
a work of art, a human testimony of collective grief and a will to
survive.

"We cannot hope to understand what is going on without access to
alternative information sources," insists Nigel Parry, one of the
Electronic Intifada's founders in a letter posted on-line. "This
latest project represents the closing of a gap between our experience
on the ground and the different
experience suggested by the media coverage we critique.

"With Israel's current attempts to remove the witnesses from the
scene of the crime, initiatives like this will become increasingly
important." Founded by media activists Ali Abunimah, Arjan al-Fassed,
Laurie King-Irani, and Nigel Parry, The Electronic Intifada was
originally created as a means of combating bias in Western media
sources and providing a Palestinian point of view.

"The four founders of the Electronic Intifada were all motivated by
the same thing, the lack of a clear articulation of the Palestinian
side of the conflict, and the structural bias of a media that made no
real effort to see a Palestinian side of the conflict," Parry told
The Daily Star via e-mail.

Live From Palestine has taken their mission a step forward, urging
Palestinian citizens trapped in Ramallah not just to lobby the media,
but to essentially become the media. The result is a series of
diaries that succeeds in deconstructing headlines and redefining them
within a human context, reinforcing the fact that the current siege
has transformed into an attack not only on militants, but on a
civilian population.

While the headlines this past week have understandably focused on the
plight of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat as well as the gun
battles raging in Bethlehem, the testimonies on Live From Palestine
reveal a markedly different side of the conflict. In the last days of
March, horrified
residents living near Arafat's compound began logging in reports on
their feelings of violation as homes were raided by Israeli forces.

"I heard a crashing noise. I ran to the house and found my husband on
the floor with three guns pointed at him," wrote Palestinian-American
Maha Sbitani from Ramallah on March 29. "I screamed at the commanding
officer that came and pushed them away. They were everywhere and
doing what they wanted, including urinating on the floor."

Soon accounts of Israeli pornography being aired on local television
stations appeared. These were later verified by the media.

By the beginning of April, the accounts intensified, and were joined
by a chorus of protests and calls for action from Palestinian
activists around the globe. On April 2, Tzaporah Ryter wrote from
Ramallah about women carrying their children and desperately trying
to flee from the city, and about ordinary citizens panicking and
trying to buy bread.

So detailed were her observations that they could easily have been
from chapters in a novel. Sadly, it was a crash collision between
literary talent and the horrors of real life.

By April 3, the accounts become chaotic and chilling. Arjan
al-Fassed, one of the founders of the website who lives in the
Occupied Territories, begins to send increasingly desperate accounts.

Andrea Becker, the refugee coordinator at Oxfam Quebec, continuously
writes in with horrifying details of the barrage of phone calls their
center is receiving, from pregnant women needing to deliver, families
needing food, water, medicine.

A nineteen-year-old named Malek calls repeatedly, stuck in a
restaurant by Israeli snipers. Scared and isolated, he finally leaves
the restaurant and the phone, and is killed outside.

Diaries and eyewitness accounts, from Anne Frank's to Elie Wiesel's,
have long been the way that we understand history. In the end, Live
From Palestine does not read all that differently from a novel of
fragments, each of the different voices coming together to make sense
of a collective tragedy.

The site is different, though, in large part because of its
remarkable immediacy. It is art in progress, history in the making, a
document not discovered in an attic but available simultaneously as
the events themselves occur. It is not literature - it is a plea for
help.

On April 3, Fassed wrote about being tear-gassed at a demonstration
trying to reach the Kalandia checkpoint. Later, he logged in again to
write about children trapped in their home.

"The children, who lost their mom, 64-year-old Sumaya and her son
Khaled yesterday, are still in the bathroom of their home in the old
city of Bethlehem," he wrote. "The bodies have still not been
evacuated."


The Electronic Intifada and Live From Palestine can be found at
www.electronicintifada.net