Interference in Palestine pt.19

Most days Ramallah feels like the world’s biggest construction site. Buildings are going up everywhere you look, the street leading up to our hotel didn’t have a sidewalk when we arrived last week, now it does. Amongst the cement bags and rebar there are some strange sculptures going up. I quite like this one, in […]

Interference in Palestine pt.18

While in Nazareth we took a tour with British journalist Jonathon Cook, who lives with his family in Israel/Palestine. He brought us to the remains of the Palestinian town of Saffuriya, which up until 1948 had been one of the largest towns in Northern Palestine and the Galilee. It had been a central site of […]

Interference in Palestine pt.16

When I was in school, it took two years of organizing to get our college library to build their collection of books about prisons from a dusty shelf of old criminal justice sociology texts to a clutch of volumes about prison movements and books written by prisoners. At al-Quds University in Abu Dis, there is […]

Interference in Palestine pt.17

The walls of Palestine are alive with messaging and communication, including layers of posters for cultural events, political martyrs, commercial advertisements, and election campaigns. While the martyr posters are mostly left to fade away, or eventually be covered by a new generation of martyrs, the election posters are regularly scratched, torn, and intervened in. Some […]

Interference in Palestine pt.15

While almost all the graffiti across Palestine is either directly political (exhortations from one political party or another) or utilitarian (so and so street, Mohammad’s shoe shop, etc.), in Ramallah there is a burgeoning “street art” scene. There is emerging a form of graffiti much more familiar to the West, individual artists signing their work, […]

Interference in Palestine pt.14

There is a way that the occupation of Palestine seems to have frozen in time certain aspects of life in certain places, creating strange anachronisms. In the old city of Hebron, where there is an intense Israeli military presence and a large group of vicious and brutal Brooklyn-born settlers (who taunted us and took our […]

Interference in Palestine pt.12

There is a lot of amazing graffiti here in Palestine, but I think this might be the best thing I’ve seen so far. This hand is so pretzeled to make the two-fingered peace sign, it raises serious questions about the costs of that peace. -Josh

Interference in Palestine pt.11

I barely got used to seeing the pay-to-ride CitiBikes around New York City before I left town. Although these bike programs seem to now be a prerequisite for any city that wants to pass itself off as successful, fun, and vigorous, I didn’t expect to see them in Yaffa, the Palestinian city strapped to Tel […]

Interference in Palestine pt.10

There is a lot of graffiti here in Palestine, but almost all of it is in either Arabic or English, with a very, very small smattering of French. It was exciting to see some solidarity painted in Korean on the walls at Aida Refugee Camp. -Josh

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