Gaza: Voices from the Arab Blogosphere (and beyond)

It's undeniable that the internet has changed the face of global politics. Not only does it allow rapid mobilisation of protests and fundraising, but it provides a source of alternative, informed perspectives and on-the-ground accounts by citizen journalists, photojournalists and bloggers. The Arab blogosphere, as aggregated everyday on toot reads and Global Voices, and as charted in The Blogging Revolution, has responded to the attacks on Gaza with not only opinion and emotion, but by using blogging technology to share and aggregate information, and to organise the online community. We are now not only spectators, as John Berger writes in a letter to today's Guardian, but correspondents.

Updated 30/12/08:

Saying, "I haven't used this blog for activism before, and I may not again. But for now, there is information below on how to demonstrate, donate, and write letters," Qunfuz posts a list of London-based demonstrations, charities and NGOs accepting donations, and details of political actions and contacts for politicians. He also reproduces a letter from today's Guardian, written by the critic, novelist and humanitarian John Berger:

"We are now spectators of the latest - and perhaps penultimate - chapter of the 60 year old conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people. About the complexities of this tragic conflict billions of words have been pronounced, defending one side or the other.

Today, in face of the Israeli attacks on Gaza, the essential calculation, which was always covertly there, behind this conflict, has been blatantly revealed. The death of one Israeli victim justifies the killing of a hundred Palestinians. One Israeli life is worth a hundred Palestinian lives.

This is what the Israeli State and the world media more or less - with marginal questioning - mindlessly repeat. And this claim, which has accompanied and justified the longest Occupation of foreign territories in 20th C. European history, is viscerally racist. That the Jewish people should accept this, that the world should concur, that the Palestinians should submit to it - is one of history's ironic jokes. There's no laughter anywhere. We can, however, refute it, more and more vocally.

Let's do so."

John Berger
27 December 2008

William Bowen's Creative-I Palestine page offers an excellent, and constantly updated, digest of non-mainstream online sources on the attacks on Gaza, including casualty reports, humanitarian and protest appeals, articles, photoblogs, and more.

Blogger Sameh Habeeb -- interviewed on CNN yesterday -- is using crowd-powered news site Now Public to flag articles as and when he has internet access.

Palestine Blogs feed aggregator gathers posts from enrolled blogs around the world, including Mounadil al-Djazaïri and Umkahlil.

Human Rights Tools gathers posts from nasrawi, From Gaza With Love, and Live From Palestine.

Ayesha Saldanha at Global Voices has a round-up of vivid and moving accounts by Palestinian bloggers, while the site also collects messages of solidarity from Lebanese bloggers and Egyptian bloggers.

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29/12/08:

Global Voices has a round-up of Syrian posts (and of Israeli posts), as well as posts from Palestinian bloggers in Gaza and elsewhere. GV also has a fascinating Twitter round-up.

Meanwhile the BBC gathers op-ed from Middle East newspapers. Kabobfest has Al-Jazeera videos and solidarity from the Zapatistas. Jordanian blogger Jad Madi has suggestions and links on fundraising for Gaza. Body on the Line and The Other Side, Westerners currently on the ground, both offer eye-witness reports, as does photojournalist and peace activist Sameh Habeeb. Robin Yassin-Kassab (qunfuz) entitles his post "Besieged", and links to Sara Roy's essay "If Gaza Falls..." (London Review of Books). And the Guardian post that, Ramzy, a young teacher in Gaza, has made a podcast on an independent student website, MideastYouth.com

Alive! Blogging and the Resurrection of the Author

Susannah Tarbush reviews Robin Yassin-Kassab's The Road to Damascus, and draws on the author's 'qunfuz' blog - and specifically a recent post about his wife's decision to wear the hijab - to draw parallels between the author and his main character. The article appeared in an edited version in Observer Woman magazine (and on the Guardian website) on November 02, 2008.

It's a small detail, perhaps -- a reviewer linking a perhaps common thought about a book (that it's timely, contemporary, that the author knows whereof he speaks) to a piece of the author's non-fiction autobiographical writing. But it's also a giant leap: a return to the idea of the living author, whose bodily, historical presence and experience might just have something to do with his or her writing. It's a thought that hardly comes as a shock to most readers -- after all, there are author bios on the flap of every book (and sometimes extended interviews and reading guides, often with biographical information, included at the end of the book), many authors also practice a lucrative sideline in op-ed or cultural journalism, and some are even gossiped-about celebrities (and some celebrities have become authors).

But the academy pronounced the author dead in the 1960s -- a profoundly liberating move for critical reading, releasing the critic from the burden of deciphering (the only possible) meaning as intended by the author. But as many feminist theorists have pointed out, that revelation happened at exactly the moment that people were starting to look critically at exactly who got to be an author, and realising that it was mainly white, upper- and middle-class, middle-aged men. As the end of colonialism, the spread of education, and new technological revolutions in publishing made the act of writing more available to the silent majority, untold stories both global and local began to translate -- for the first time -- into print, often closely hewn from the author's experience of a life that had not been described in fiction.

The internet has made publishing and storytelling even more immediate, with the proliferation of blogs (check out toot for a bewildering and wonderful range of Arabic blogging voices, and Anthony Loewenstein's excellent book The Blogging Revolution for an introduction to further voices, and a serious consideration of what this explosion in communications means for goverment, media and global culture). As well as increasing the number of voices, the internet increases the speed with which they can speak up, and with which readers can access them. In the past, readers might have waited much longer for a memoiristic piece by Yassin-Kassab that allowed them to make an incidental, but profound, connection between the events of his life while he was writing and the events of the novel he wrote.

On her blog the tanjara, starbush (who also reports on lots of author events where living, breathing authors meet their readers) is recognising what readers have always known: the author is palpably alive in the text. That doesn't mean we have to read the book as the writer wants us to, or read only for the things the writer tells us about him- or herself -- but it allows us to connect the book -- politically, emotionally, culturally -- to the moment in which we, too, are alive. It personalises the process of creating fiction, drawing us to look at our world, to think differently about aspects we may take for granted -- to think *inventively* about them, about their stories -- and that's part of the excitement (as well as political value and social justice, according to a recent University of Manchester/LSE study that showed novels can best communicate global dilemmas such as poverty) of reading fiction.