We are seeking funding to enable Dar Assadaqa (a community project in Abu Dis, Palestine, supported by the human rights charity CADFA) to run media projects for young people in the small town of Abu Dis in the Jerusalem suburb.
Developing skills
This project will enable young Palestinians to improve their skills in media and in communication and build their confidence and their hope. It will help them to build their language skills so they can send their voice internationally to to other young people across the world and inform them about the human rights issues they face under Israeli occupation.
Keeping hope alive
The past year and a half has been difficult for all young people. Dar Assadaqa, along with many other organisations in Palestine, closed its in-person projects; there were reduced social opportunities for young people and Palestinian schools continue to stop and start.
But even without Covid lockdown, young people in Palestine are confined and at risk from the Israeli military occupation that has been imposed on their community together with an apartheid system that ensures that neither they nor their parents have any voice in shaping the conditions they live under.
Abu Dis is surrounded on the west by Israel's 'security wall', on the east by Israeli settlements, on the south by a huge Israeli military checkpoint and on the north by an Israeli military camp and (the other side of Aizariya) by the complicated geography of occupation - closed military areas, diverted roads, new tunnels, flying checkpoints. Palestinian young people are used to night-time invasions of the town by the Israeli army, to their friends being taken to prison, and several young people from the town have been shot and killed by the Israeli army. In this context, Palestinian parents are always worried about their young people.
This project aims to give young people a voice to the international community and a safe way to campaign for human rights and keep hope alive.
Linking together for human rights
Dar Assadaqa has been working in Abu Dis since 2006, and has regularly done media projects with young people. The video here was made in one of Dar Assadaqa's summer camps. In the years before Covid lockdown, young people did other types of media work too at Dar Assadaqa, including interviewing people in their own community about their lives and the current situation and going out of Abu Dis to broaden their experience.
Dar Assadaqa works with the human rights charity CADFA in the UK, which for many years now has created ways for young people in the UK and Palestine to meet. Before Covid, these were visits from Palestine to the UK (most recently a girls' football visit at the end of 2019, a student visit in spring 2020 and a womens' visit just before lockdown) and regular visits and volunteering opportunities in Palestine. Teachers' visits and youth projects led to school twinnings.
This is very special international work for young people from both countries that opens the world to all of them. Our friends in Palestine tell us of the importance of opportunities for young people there to develop their communication skills and express their hopes and fears; it is also helpful to break the isolation usually forced on them by the occupation and speak out to young people in other parts of the world. Meanwhile their partners in Britain learn about the human rights issues that face their friends in Palestine and are encouraged to be active for human rights.
New media projects
During the past year and a half, the international visits and volunteering projects have not been possible because of Covid, but Dar Assadaqa and CADFA have brought young people from Palestine and the UK together in a new way, using Zoom links to organise meetings between young people in schools and youth clubs in the two countries. These have moved from single meetings to small projects and an attempt to make media together.
We are seeking funding to build on and develop this work, bringing in-person media work back to Dar Assadaqa and making more media jointly with young people in both countries.
This will give Palestinian young people a creative space and a voice to reach the outside world and involve young people in the UK too.
We hope you will support them!