Dissing Information
Why binary partisanship in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is hurting both sides, and what to do about it. This is our darkest hour, for me, for my children and for my loved ones. We, Israelis and Palestinians who believe in a shared equal society are grieving, we are violently attacked by the warmongers on both sides, … Continue reading Your Empathy is Killing Us
Israel’s greatest political uprising in recent years is fighting to “not be political”. Why? And would that hurt it’s chances of social change? In the last week we’ve seen the rise of a popular revolt against the housing bubble. It started as a simple Facebook event in Tel Aviv but within days multiple tent cities … Continue reading Tel Aviv is on fire, what’s cooking?
English notice: This post is a part of the “Israeli Sphere: Connection Theory” a workshop I lead in Bezalel Art and Design School in Jerusalem, Israel. The workshop will be led in Hebrew, but I will try to post its results here with some English to accompany it too. Here’s a short description in English:
1948, The water level in the sea of Galilee, Bublil, Shema Yisrael, what’s the connection?
Through a design-research workshop we will place information bits lost inside the web of the “Israeli sphere” in an attempt to find out, where is this Israel sphere anyway? How to design inside it? Towards it? From it? Students will work in small groups and will conduct a networked research following cultural, logical and visual connections. The work methodology will be divided into three steps: Content, Structure & Presentation, inspired by new approaches of indexing, linking and delivering information online. In spite of the networked inspiration and practice, the output of the workshop is not limited to this medium or the other and the workshop is open to students from different disciplines as long as they are ready to work hard, sleep little and experiment with this new and challenging process.
1948, מפלס הכנרת, בובליל, שמע ישראל… מה הקשר?
במהלך סדנת עיצוב-חוקר נמקם פיסות מידע אובדות בתוך רשת ה”מרחב הישראלי” במטרה לגלות איפה זה בכלל המרחב הישראלי הזה? כיצד מעצבים בתוכו? לתוכו? מתוכו? סטודנטים יעבדו בקבוצות קטנות וינהלו מחקר מרושת בעקבות הקשרים תרבותיים, לוגיים וחזותיים. מתודולוגיית העבודה תחולק לשלושה שלבים: תוכן, מבנה ותצוגה בהשראה מגישות חדשות לתיוג, חיווט והגשה של מידע ברשת. על אף ההשראה והפרקטיקה המרושתת, תוצרי הסדנה אינם מוגבלים למדיום זה או אחר והסדנה פתוחה לסטודנטים מדיסיפלינות שונות כל עוד הם מוכנים לעבוד קשה, לישון מעט ולהתנסות בצורת עבודה חדשה ומאתגרת.
Continue reading “סדנה בבצלאל – המרחב הישראלי: תאוריית הקשר”
On Friday March 12th 2010 I will be participating at NYU’s Media Culture & Communications’ Radars & Fences III: Borders, Affect, Space (please RSVP and come). My friend Laila El-Haddad and I will present You Are Not Here – A Tour of Gaza Through the Streets of Tel Aviv, and we’ll discuss the way geography and the concept of the border is shaping the mediated experience of the conflict. We will also discuss some of our recent initiatives to disrupt the theater of conflict resolution.
I am posting an essay Laila and I wrote for the catalog of the Unrecorded exhibition in Istanbul, March 2008, curated by Basak Senova. At the end of the essay I embedded the videos of Laila & Saeed’s Al Jazeera documentary Tunnel Trade that have inspired this text.
When Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula in 1982, the city of Rafah was suddenly split between Egypt and Gaza by an Israeli wall. Families found themselves divided by a high-security international border, though their houses often lay less than 100m apart. Before long, influential families who once controlled trade through Rafah moved their business underground through dozens of secret tunnels burrowed below the border, connecting family houses on either side.
With Israel’s military withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, the number of tunnels mushroomed. The Israeli military used the tunnels as a pretext for stepping up demolitions of houses to make way for a buffer zone along the border. Israel’s main concern is the smuggling of weapons to armed Palestinian groups. But for the smugglers themselves there is far more to the tunnel trade than politics and arms smuggling. Everything moves through Rafah’s tunnels: from cigarettes and drugs to cash and people. It is a vast enterprise, and pays five times an average annual Gaza salary in one month. It is a family business, passed on from father to son and always – for reasons of security as well as economics – kept in the family. Continue reading “Radars & Fences / You Are Not Here / The Gaza Tunnel Trade”
This video is taken from a public debate between Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Dr. Israel Eldad and Dr. Menachem Brinker in 1980.
In the 50:40 minute an Israeli farmer asking what should he tell the Ismaili (apparently referring to the Biblical term used in the debate by members from the right portraying the Palestinians as the arch-enemies of the Jews in Biblical Israel/Palestine friend), who works in his farm and asks him:
“This land that you’re working, I sat in just 30 years ago… In a friendly manner he says that… How can you explain the fact you are working it now? And sometimes, with my labor… You hire me and my friends, to work for you on the land that belongs to me.”
The Israeli farmer continues…
“What will I explain to that Arab, which I want to live with in peace, that I want to reach the day in which he will think of me as a friend and will not think bad thoughts about me.”
What Gaza teaches us of networked solidarity The web is celebrated as this new radical space that re-challenges our old definitions of identity and solidarity, beyond prejudice, beyond borders, beyond nationality. However, the war in Gaza and the mediation around it tells a slightly different story. I would like to focus a couple of blog … Continue reading Gaza and the media parasite/host reversal
