Radio Greetings, a story about 1967 in Palestine by Mike Hanini Odetalla

Jordan, 1955. Refugees form a line for food at a camp in Amman. In the aftermath of the 1948 war, many Palestinian refugees relocated to neighboring countries -- Syria, Jordan and Lebanon -- as well as the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Three Lions/Getty Images 

A visual history of Palestinian refugees

Displaced by the tumult in Israel and its environs, most Palestinians have lived as refugees for the last 65 years

Radio Greetings...

I was listening to the radio a while back during a long drive, when I heard people relating greetings to fellow co-workers and friends...A "shout out" to use the slang of today!

My thoughts went back in time. Back to the time when I was a child in Palestine. Back to the time when there were no telephones or electricity in most of the rural villages. This was the time, just after the 1967 war. There was no cell phones, TV's, or computers. Also there was no regular mail service between Israel and the Arab countries.

We had an old radio that was sent to us by my father who was in Venezuela, South America at that time. This radio was our prized link to the outside world. We used to listen to the broadcasts from the surrounding Arab countries. These included News, Music, and other forms of entertainment. On Friday afternoons, there would be broadcasts of taped greetings. Palestinians living in the refugee camps outside of Palestine (the Diaspora), would go to the radio stations and tape a short greeting that would be broadcast over the airwaves, and hopefully heard by their relatives. Sometimes they knew where their relatives had ended up, other times they were more of a plea for information...Hope!

My mom and the other neighborhood women would sit silent and listen to these taped greetings with tears pouring down their faces. I will never forget my mother sitting there and crying along with our people on the radio. These people were usually women sending greetings to mothers, fathers, and other siblings. There were also sons and daughters sending greetings to their parents.

Most of these people had no contact or any other means of contact with their loved ones. So they would go and record a short message in the hope that their loved one happened to be alive and listening.

These messages were absolutely heart wrenching, especially when a mother would come on and start saying," Ya Ibni Ya Habibi ( My son, my love) and then they would start crying as they say how much they love him and miss him. Or when a daughter would come on and start by saying," Ya Oumy ya rouhi ( My mother, my soul) and start telling her mother how she misses her, loves her, and how her kids keep asking about her and so on. They would almost always break down in tears as they were delivering their message. The emotions were just too much...

Being a child of 6 years of age, I truly didn't understand nor fully comprehend the importance of what was happening. I hated these programs because they made my mother cry for hours on end. I blamed theses poor tortured souls for causing so much sadness to my mother. Not until I was older, did I fully comprehend the pain and anguish these refugees were going through. This was their only way of trying to contact long fractured families. This was their only outlet to send a message to their loved ones.

They were in essence casting a bottle, filled with the message of their loneliness and hope, into the sea of their exile from their native land and the people that were left behind, or exiled elsewhere...

Mike Odetalla 3-2012 All Rights Reserved!

This Week in Palestine SOCIAL MEDIA: How do we move from “preaching to the choir” to communication with a wider audience that leads to more understanding, empathy, and behaviours in concert with our plight for self-determination and an end to the Israeli occupation?

YES, BEAUTY! This Week in Palestine Gaza Photo by Mohammad Zarandah.

 [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]

http://www.thisweekinpalestine.com/details.php?id=4313&ed=233&edid=233

Would Social Media Bring Freedom to Palestine?
Saleem Alhabash, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Public Relations and Social Media Michigan State University
 

I am a social scientist who is enthusiastic about the social media phenomenon and how it affects our lives. I use lab and field experiments to test what motivates people to share, like, and comment on social media posts and how engagement with social media can lead to offline behaviours. Applying my research to my homeland, I argue that interaction on social media related to the Palestine question could potentially lead to changes in attitudes and behaviours toward Palestine and the Palestinians.

Social Media: A Global Village?
In the mid-1960s, Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan1 talked about technology as a force unifying the world into a global village, where people communicate freely and things that happen in one part of the world are seen or heard in another. However, the fact that people are on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram does not make them connected and does not remove physical and mental borders among nations. Social media are still very segregated. We interact with people who are like us, despite the possibility of having diverse online networks. It becomes difficult, then, to infiltrate people’s networks with content that is incongruent with their values and norms. Even when it happens, the chances of them engaging with such content are slim. Taking into consideration negative stereotypes of Palestinians, pro-Palestinian social media content is deemed incongruent, thus leading us to a case of “preaching to the choir,” instead of changing how others perceive us as a nation and as a cause.

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Over the past decade, social media have experienced exponential global growth. Facebook has 1.28 billion users, each with an average of 338 Facebook friends.7-8 There are 255 million active Twitter users, who send 500 million tweets per day.9 More than a billion Internet users visit YouTube each month, where they watch six billion hours of video monthly, and upload 100 hours of video every single minute.10 Palestinians have the opportunity to leverage social media in order to engage people in online interaction that will lead to empathy and support for ending the Occupation.

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How do we move from “preaching to the choir” to communication with a wider audience that leads to more understanding, empathy, and behaviours in concert with our plight for self-determination and an end to the Israeli occupation? It will not be easy. To master this art, we need to understand how people use social media and the resulting effects. But first, we need to understand human nature.

Return to Basics
As humans, we respond to everything in our environment in one of two basic ways: we either approach stimuli or we avoid stimuli. Our central nervous system is guided by the appetitive motivational system, which drives us to seek out pleasurable stimuli such as food and sex, and the aversive motivational system that drives us to avoid negative stimuli, such as danger so that we run away from a roaring lion. Understanding this trait of human nature is essential to realizing why people click on a link, hit the “like” button, share a post, or comment on something someone else has said on social media. When communicating with others, the key is making it relevant enough to activate their approach motivation, which guides both online and offline behaviours. A study in 20122 found that positive articles in the New York Times were shared more often than negative ones. My own research showed that college students were more willing to like, comment, and share anti-cyberbullying posts if they had a positive rather than a negative tone.3 This is precisely why images of babies and kittens get more likes, shares, and Retweets. Pleasant images activate pleasant emotions, and people like to share pleasant things. I’m not suggesting we start posting pictures of cats to garner support for Palestine, yet knowing about this dynamic is essential to getting people more engaged online.

In 2007, I conducted a month-long experiment, where I asked Palestinian and American young adults to interact on Facebook. In addition to discussing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, participants asked each other about dating norms, food, school, and family relationships. Pretty mundane, right? Yet after one month of such “mundane” interactions, both the Palestinian group and the American group had changed their perceptions about the other for the better. Bottom line: the experiment was a success. Participants were able to humanize the other side, which resulted in viewing them favourably. In another study, American college students played the roles of the Palestinian President or the Israeli Prime Minister in PeaceMaker, a video-game simulation of the conflict. Results from two studies showed that playing the role of the Palestinian President for only 20 minutes led to positive changes in attitudes and stereotypes toward Palestinians.

A sceptic might very well say that these interactions are meaningless, considering the complexity of the conflict. That might be true in some cases, yet additional studies I’ve conducted show that expressing intentions to “like,” share, and comment on a Facebook status update (regardless of the topic) nearly doubles the chances that a person would express intentions to engage in relevant offline behaviours.4, 5How do we, then, get people engaged online with our cause?

Creating a “Dragonfly Effect”
In their book, The Dragonfly Effect,6 Aaker and Smith argue that to create successful social media campaigns, you need to identify a clear goal, figure out how to grab people’s attention, engage them with the content, and invite them to take action. I often see posts on my Facebook newsfeed related to Palestine that have no clear goal. We need to think more strategically about what kind of impact we want to have with the information we share about Palestine. We need to provide content that not only grabs people’s attention, but also engages them. To engage people and motivate them to take action, we need to tell a story, to put a human face on our just cause, to generate empathy (bloody and gory pictures don’t generate empathy; they create anger and push people away). Above all we must remain authentic. We need to provide a call to action beyond sheer awareness-raising. It’s not about telling people what to do; it’s about offering mechanisms for them to act upon their online engagement.

To answer the question I posed in the title of this article, I can only say: it depends. Social media offer amazing opportunities to share our perspectives without the restrictions of mainstream media gatekeepers. We have access to a virtual space where anyone can talk to everyone, where everyone can fulfil his/her responsibility to champion our rights and induce change, even if it’s just one person at a time. This is the time when one person could make a difference. The world awaits our call to action!

Saleem Alhabash is an assistant professor of public relations and social media at Michigan State University’s Department of Advertising + Public Relations and Department of Media and Information. He completed his B.A. in Journalism and Political Science from Birzeit University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. Away from research, he enjoys baking batches of baklawa and muttabaq-consistently crowd-pleasers-to share with friends and colleagues.

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1    http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_mcluhan.htm
2    Berger, J. & Milkman, K. L. (2012). What makes online content viral? Journal of Marketing, 49(2), 192-205.
3    Alhabash, S., McAlister, A., Hagerstrom, A., Quilliam, E. T., Rifon, N., & Richards, J. (2013). Between “Likes” and “Shares”: Effects of emotional appeal and virality of anti-cyberbullying messages on Facebook. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 16(3). DOI: 10.1089/cyber.2012.0265
4    Alhabash, S., McAlister, A. R., Richards, J. I., Quilliam, E. T., & Lou, C. (In Press). Alcohol’s getting a bit more social: When alcohol marketing messages on Facebook motivate young adults to imbibe. Mass Communication & Society.
5    Alhabash, S., Baek, J.-h., Cunningham, C., & Hagerstrom, A. (2014). Anti-cyberbullying civic participation: Effects of virality, arousal level, and commenting behavior for YouTube videos on civic behavioral intentions. Paper presented to the Communication and Technology Division of the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Seattle, WA.
6    Aaker, J. & Smith, A. (2010). The dragonfly effect: Quick, effective, and powerful ways to use social media to drive social change. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
7    http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/
8    http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/02/03/6-new-facts-about-facebook/
9    https://about.twitter.com/company
10    https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html

See PDF www.thisweekinpalestine.com/i196/pdfs/article/would_social_media.pdf
 

Palestinian passengers will be more tempted to read books after a new reading campaign is launched next week. A group of young writers are gathering books to put in mini-vans linking major cities in the West Bank, routes that can waste hours.

 http://www.themedialine.org/news/news_detail.asp?NewsID=36916
Library on the Move Written by Diana Atallah
Published Monday, January 14, 2013

Get In the Taxi, Pick Up a Book

Ramallah - Palestinian passengers will be more tempted to read books after a new reading campaign is launched next week. A group of young writers are gathering books to put in mini-vans linking major cities in the West Bank, routes that can waste hours.

Wiam Karyouti, a sales employee and a young writer, first thought of the campaign when a passenger next to him asked him if he had another book for him to read. “I usually read in the taxi and carry books with me. I handed him a novel and he gave it back to me at the end of the ride saying he would go buy it,” Karyouti told The Media Line.

The incident triggered Karyouti to think of ways to encourage reading and use the spare taxi time only to find that taxi drivers welcomed the initiative of putting books in their orange-painted service cars, which take up to seven passengers.

Karyouti and his colleagues at a young writers club called “Bastet Ibda" (Creativity Peddlers) volunteered to make their idea come true and advertised for the campaign through their Facebook pages.

Since their announcement on December 26, they have received 600 books donated by NGOs, publishing houses, intellectuals and individuals who came to the collecting points in different West Bank cities.

After the collecting ends this week, seven or eight will be available in a cloth bag near each driver in 311 taxis for passengers to read. “The topics range from religion, science history and arts, to novels and children books, because we think that parents might travel with their kids,” Karyouti added.

“We still need another 600 books, but we won’t distribute all of them at once. We plan to periodically renew new books in taxis," Karyouti explained. 

Intellectuals and young writers agree that reading is not very popular among Palestinians and think the education system and lack of government support has a role in pushing people away from reading. 

“I see the same groups of people in book readings,” says Karyouti, who hopes that when he publishes his first poetry book, he will rely on friends to encourage their connections to read it.

Abd El Salam Khaddash, the Reading Campaigns Manager at Tamer Community Education Institute, told The Media Line the Palestinian curriculum doesn’t make students thirsty for knowledge and learning.

Khaddash added that the curriculum depends on memorizing books by heart, and doesn’t encourage creative thinking.

Tamer championed reading campaigns for the past 20 years focusing on a different topic each year. Last year, their “Father: read for me” campaign events included distributing children books in the dentists’ waiting rooms.

Although Ramallah’s public library, not far from the city center, has more than 40,000 books in different topics and languages, it only served around 7,000 visitors of the city’s 30,000 inhabitants during 2012. Around 300,000 people live within the borders of the governorate of Ramallah and Al Bireh and neighboring villages.

“A few visitors come for the sake of reading, but we have housewives, workers and retired people who come to read for fun. Students visit because they are required to study and read for their research papers,” library supervisor Ruba Husseini told The Media Line.

In 2012, around 1,000 books were loaned to the library’s subscribers who pay a yearly fee that doesn’t exceed $10. Using the library is free of charge unless photocopying is needed.

Khaddash thinks that reading has become less of a priority these days. “I was a student in the eighties and people were eager to know what would happen next with their lives, especially politically,” he said.

Tamer works with 75 libraries in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and around 50 public schools libraries to encourage reading. “We think that the librarians can play a part in encouraging learning and education but their salaries are too low and some work as volunteers,” Khaddash said.

He added that there is a problem with both libraries. Some community libraries are the first facilities to be affected when the local municipalities face financial difficulties. Also, the absence of specific reading classes in many schools or using this class for exams studying makes school libraries less useful to students.

Hala Kaileh, the manager of a libraries enhancement project in the Ramallah Municipality, told The Media Line that the municipality is working to develop reading in the Palestinian society. The municipality set up a new children's library to help make reading a habit for children. “Content of books is important but the library looking good is important to attract visitors, and we’re working on developing the children's library and including a film room as well,” Kaileh said.

Karyouti is not worried if people decide to borrow or keep the books they read in the taxis for themselves. “If I win a reader, I wouldn’t mind losing a book,” he cheerfully told The Media Line.

Khaddash told The Media Line he is optimistic. “I interview hundreds of people for jobs, and I care less for their university marks. Now parents care more for their children to be educated rather than being at the top of their class,” he said.

Khaddash added that it’s not important that readers increase by a thousand, but rather to broaden the idea into the importance of education and reading in life.

CITIZENSHIP: The 21st-century competencies - captured as the 4Cs of communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity - are critical for success in college and career.

"Besides basic skills in reading and math, young people today need to acquire 21st-century skills and competencies that include:

*  Knowledge of economic and political processes.

*  Skill in understanding what is presented in the media.

*  The ability to work well with others, especially diverse groups.

*  Creativity and innovation to solve problems in new ways.

The 21st-century competencies - captured as the 4Cs of communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity - are critical for success in college and career. They are also essential for effective citizens and a vibrant democracy. The knowledge and skills needed to engage in civic and political life - whether that be in one's school, hometown or local clubs, or state, national, global and/or virtual landscapes - are the same skills needed to solve hands-on, real-world problems in college and in the workplace. The skills one needs to engage in civic discourse are the same needed to work with diverse colleagues, address challenges and creatively solve problems. "

Op-ed: What citizenship means for the 21st century

 http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20120917_Op-ed__What_citizenship_means_for_the_21st_century.html