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| Theme: Rural Palestine Cover photo: Suleiman Mansour |
Ya yalla hal rabee’, nohroth hal sahel, wallah bilzare’ wallah, bnihmy ardina al hurra… The lyrics from a folkloric song, recomposed and distributed for Sareyyet Ramallah’s lastest dabkeh production, embody the essence of Palestine’s “rurality.” “Come, my people, let us farm the plain; with farming we protect our free land.” The idea that farming is a form of resistance is and should remain at the centre of Palestinian nonviolent resistance. Palestinians identify themselves with the land. We are first and foremost a rural agricultural society. Our modern urban centres have sprouted from villages and farming communities. We as a people are not urban, but rather descendants of farming families who are deeply tied to their land. And our Nakba is not simply the story of becoming refugees but rather the loss of our farming villages. Our producing farmers have become landless refugees.
It is not a coincidence that we chose Rural Palestine for April’s theme just as khobbaizeh, loof, akkoub, loze akhdar, and karaz akhdar (mallow, black lily, gundelia, green almonds, and green cherries) are in season - rural Palestinian delicacies that have many of us travel hours back to our home villages to taste a small dish. If this issue is supposed to accomplish anything at all, it should serve as a reminder that we are a hop, skip, and a jump away from rural Palestine no matter where we live. It should also put front and centre the true danger that we face as a nation today: an endangered farming craft, not only because of land confiscation but also through the seeping of Israeli produce into our markets and the savage industrialisation of rural fertile farming areas; the latter being more dangerous than Israeli occupation itself. If we lose our rural identity, we lose Palestine, plain and simple.
Read and remember, take a minute to recall the smell of your grandmother’s za’atar and the taste of balady labaneh, and imagine what would happen if we were to lose it all…
You will notice as you leaf through this issue that our print edition has a new look. Again this is no coincidence that we chose to unveil our new look as winter dissipates and spring blossoms. We are very excited about the new print edition, and hope that you will see it as the natural bloom and evolution of our previous look. We look forward to hearing your feedback.
Riyam Kafri-AbuLaban
Content Editor
Content Editor
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ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO
READ GOOD ARTICLES IN FULL: HELP
SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and
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DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE &
PEACE... and hopefully
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April 2014
- Being Rural
By Raed Saadeh
One of the unforgettable memories that seems to accompany my few morning moments most days since I was a child is the smell of taboun
bread stuffed with spinach saturating the air as it mixed with the
first dawn light outside my grandparents’ house. I would watch my
grandmother’s hands blend into the darkness of the taboun oven as
she fiddled with the bread back and forth before laying it to rest on
the stone bed in the bottom of the oven. My grandmother did this
sacredly every day as part of the breakfast preparation ceremony.
I guess I developed a connection to the countryside of Palestine guided by my grandmother’s passion for the fields, the fig trees, the apricots, and the sage or mint herbs that we picked to prepare tea. We would wait for the rest of the family to get up to prepare breakfast under the grape pergola. My grandmother made everything herself: the jam, the labaneh balls dipped in oil, the olives, the pickles, and the zeit and zaatar. Her kindness taught me to care for the little things around me; the sound of the birds, the small vegetable garden, the chickens running around in the coop, and the olive terraces leading down into the valley through a set of intertwined narrow paths where shade is abundant during hot summer days. My grandmother’s generosity was an enlightenment and a stone-engraved lesson in rural hospitality and graciousness.
What does rural Palestine offer beyond this affability? A diverse landscape, a commanding series of olive-tree-covered mountains, and a historically immersed serene Palestinian village are some of the first thoughts that might come to mind. In my involvement with organisations such as the Rozana Association for Rural Tourism Development working from Birzeit, NEPTO (the Network of Experiential Palestinian Tourism Organizations), Masar Ibrahim, and others, I have been active in promoting community-based rural tourism throughout the West Bank. All our work is based on a simple platform idea that aims to identify the resources and capacities that exist in rural areas and that are able to add value to and benefit the local community. Needless to say, resources in the rural areas are abundant and include elements of architecture, handcrafts, environment, nature, food, culture, and heritage. Consolidated together these elements not only form attractive packages for visitors and guests, they also contribute to the building efforts of a differentiated Palestinian identity. I used to think that people who are as connected to the land as my grandparents could convert everything they touch into gold, given that they were able to create many things seemingly from nothing. The lands in rural Palestine can provide for the well being of our people. They are our food basket and our heritage. Our villages are immersed in history and they tell the story of an ancient people whose roots reach beyond time and civilisation.
I guess I developed a connection to the countryside of Palestine guided by my grandmother’s passion for the fields, the fig trees, the apricots, and the sage or mint herbs that we picked to prepare tea. We would wait for the rest of the family to get up to prepare breakfast under the grape pergola. My grandmother made everything herself: the jam, the labaneh balls dipped in oil, the olives, the pickles, and the zeit and zaatar. Her kindness taught me to care for the little things around me; the sound of the birds, the small vegetable garden, the chickens running around in the coop, and the olive terraces leading down into the valley through a set of intertwined narrow paths where shade is abundant during hot summer days. My grandmother’s generosity was an enlightenment and a stone-engraved lesson in rural hospitality and graciousness.
What does rural Palestine offer beyond this affability? A diverse landscape, a commanding series of olive-tree-covered mountains, and a historically immersed serene Palestinian village are some of the first thoughts that might come to mind. In my involvement with organisations such as the Rozana Association for Rural Tourism Development working from Birzeit, NEPTO (the Network of Experiential Palestinian Tourism Organizations), Masar Ibrahim, and others, I have been active in promoting community-based rural tourism throughout the West Bank. All our work is based on a simple platform idea that aims to identify the resources and capacities that exist in rural areas and that are able to add value to and benefit the local community. Needless to say, resources in the rural areas are abundant and include elements of architecture, handcrafts, environment, nature, food, culture, and heritage. Consolidated together these elements not only form attractive packages for visitors and guests, they also contribute to the building efforts of a differentiated Palestinian identity. I used to think that people who are as connected to the land as my grandparents could convert everything they touch into gold, given that they were able to create many things seemingly from nothing. The lands in rural Palestine can provide for the well being of our people. They are our food basket and our heritage. Our villages are immersed in history and they tell the story of an ancient people whose roots reach beyond time and civilisation.
The
question remains: How do we move forward beyond this potential? All
organisations that are involved in community-based tourism supported by a
strategic cooperation within the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities
have been converging towards a holistic vision that reflects the shape
of the Palestinian rural-tourism product. The vision is based on a
network of thematic trails and paths and a number of centres for local
culture, all of which are linked together and developed in harmony and
synchronisation, building and sharing synergies, resources, and
capacities. One of the main pillars is a long trail that runs through
the West Bank from Rummaneh in the north to Hebron and its vicinity in
the south. This trail is locally called Masar Ibrahim and is
essentially a cultural trail that zigzags between villages, fostering
the Palestinian culture of hospitality, friendship, and kindness. National Geographic recently ranked this trail as the number one new trail in the world. It forms a spine as it crosses the entire West Bank. Masar Ibrahim
intersects with the Nativity Trail in several areas as it connects
between Bethlehem and Nazareth. Both trails also link with a network of
Sufi trails, led by the Rozana Association. The Sufi trails model is
based on a network of hub villages that operate as centres from which a
number of trails originate. These are also cultural trails that attempt
to promote local resources, history, heritage, landscape, environment,
and an opportunity to meet and benefit the local rural communities...READ MORE
[AS
ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO
READ GOOD ARTICLES IN FULL: HELP
SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and
conversations) THAT EMPOWER
DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE &
PEACE... and hopefully
Palestine]
- Rural Palestine
Land-Based Identification
By Muna Dajani - Artas, Hilma Granqvist, and the Lettuce Festival
Portrait of a Palestinian Village
By Ali Qleibo - Rural Palestine
The Unrealised Potential
By Khaldun Bshara - Green Palestine for Rural Development
A Popular Action and a Cry for Freedom and Independence
By Basem Masry - “Ethno-Botanics”
The Evidence
of an Unperfected Crime
By Vivien Sansour - Palestinian Resistance
and Israel’s Apartheid Wall and Settlements
By Jamal Jumaa
- Artist of the Month
Mohammad el-Shanti - Book of the Month
Mapping of the Arab Left: Contemporary Leftist Politics in the Arab East - Exhibition Review
Khaled Hourani - Personality of the Month
Abu Jamal Steadfast - Where to Go ?
Holy Week in Jerusalem
[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine]
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