*CONTENTS*
Intro | Personal Diary re-edited, redesigned and relaunched | Key features
of the relaunched diary | The planned expansion of the diary project |
Where I'm at with the fundraising for the expanded diary project | Final
words



*INTRO*

Greetings all. Firstly, my apologies to those of you for whom this form
e-mail comes in response to an personal letter you wrote to me about the
diary. I will rectify this as soon as possible, now that all of this is out
of the way.

If you have suddenly found yourself on this occasional e-mail list without
your consent or are on the list twice, please accept my apologies. I hate
spam too. If you have been added without requesting it, it was probably
because you wrote a nice letter to me about the diary. That'll teach you.
To be removed, please write to me at nparry@admin.birzeit.edu. Sorry.

Similarly, please forward this message to anyone you think might be
genuinely interested in the diary.



*PERSONAL DIARY RE-EDITED, REDESIGNED AND RELAUNCHED*

Some time after arriving in the U.S., I decided it was time to undertake
the long-planned re-edit and redesign of "A Personal Diary of the
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict" at http://www.birzeit.edu/diary/

I decided to do this for a couple of reasons:
 i) I had the time.
 ii) My desire to expand the project in 1999 so that it covers the entire
geographical area of the Gaza Strip and West Bank including Jerusalem,
means that the existing diary must be attractive to funders.

The re-edit/redesign is now complete.



*KEY FEATURES OF THE RELAUNCHED DIARY*

1) There is a new U.S. mirror site of the diary at
http://www.nigelparry.com/diary/. The main advantages of this are increased
access speed and freedom from potential cut-off in the event of an increase
in conflict in the West Bank. This is now up. The new diary will also be
uploaded to the old Birzeit address in the next few days. Please use
whichever one is faster. If you're offering links to one or the other,
please link to the US version.

2) A Discussion Board. A lot of the e-mails I get ask me to further explain
entries and raise questions about life in the West Bank that would be
interesting to a general audience. Please visit the Discussion Board and
use it. I'll check it regularly and answer where appropriate. Abusive and
anonymous posts, advertisements and entire news reports will be deleted.
Apart from that, anything goes.

If you are a teacher or discussion group facilitator, why not get your
group to visit the discussion board? Friends and colleagues still living in
the West Bank are waiting to join in as well, so we won't lose the "on the
ground" perspective.

3) Entirely new section indexes (e.g. Birzeit Diary), introductions to
entries in the Entry Index, and new material in many of the sections.

Abu Ghnaim Diary, for example, is about 50 percent larger than it was
before. 'On the ground in Ramallah' Diary, a re-edited version of the
original September 1996 photodiary on the Birzeit website is about 400
percent larger than the original site.

4) New section introductions, with the aim of making section contents
clearer to people less familliar with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
have been added. Section indexes also now have cross references with other
sections. Navigation in general has been improved.

5) A number of smaller technical issues have been resolved. See the Diary's
"What's New?" page for more information. If you find any errors, please let
me know.



*THE PLANNED EXPANSION OF THE DIARY PROJECT*

The idea is to make the diary national, with video journalists in each of
the main Palestinian towns and cities. A core team, based at Birzeit
University, will produce a weekly English/Arabic/Hebrew-language multimedia
website compiled from their experiences, a monthly print magazine, a
quarterly CD-ROM, and an annual video documentary.

Needless to say, a project of this kind has not been attempted before in a
conflict zone, to the best of my knowledge, and will provide a badly-needed
alternative to the censored Palestinian media and offerings from an
international media based in Jerusalem and apparently surviving on a diet
of Israeli government press releases.

The project will do much to increase knowledge of what is for me the most
important part of the conflict -  the experience of daily life by average
Palestinians. This missing humanising factor is ultimately what will rally
support for a real solution to the conflict, as well as working on other
levels - to countering negative images of Arabs in the media, for example.



*WHERE I'M AT WITH THE FUNDRAISING FOR THE EXPANDED DIARY PROJECT*

In a phrase: the beginning.

What I need right now is what fundraisers call "seed money". This will
allow me to purchase some equipment such as a computer, costs such as
stationary/printing expenses, and pay myself a modest salary to enable me
to fundraise full-time for the actual project.

If you have any contacts who may be interested in receiving a proposal for
the "seed" part of the project in the region of $20,000, please let me
know. I am writing the seed project proposal as we speak.

Half of this amount will be used to purchase initial equipment and
stationary (the fundraising proposal will include a colour brochure with
extensive examples from the Diary and explanatory text about why some of
the entries made history) and the other half buy me enough time to work on
this until the target amount for the actual project is reached.

Organisations usually take 2-3 months to respond to a seed proposal.
Smaller interim donations can be sent by cheque to the address at the
bottom of this e-mail message or sent by bank transfer to:

Name of Bank: Norwest Bank Minnesota, N.A., Nicollet Mall Office, 1221
Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis, MN 55479, USA
Routing #: 091000019
Name of Recipient: Nigel Parry
Account #: 3974036304

All donations will be acknowledged on the Personal Diary website. If you
want to remain anonymous, let me know. Unfortunately, I have no way of
making any donations tax-deductable at this point. You may know of a way to
make that work.

Not being one to sit around and do nothing while I am here in the U.S., I
am also looking into the possibility of undertaking speaking tours, radio
and TV appearances, and a touring exhibition of photographs (and some that
never made it on) from "A Personal Diary".

I'm also looking for opportunities to write for non-U.S. media
organisations (a visa stipulation), so if anyone wants an article on what
it's like to live in the West Bank or a weekly column on developments in
the peace process, let me know.

Maybe all of the above together, which would require a national
organisation to arrange and sponsor the tour. If you're on the committee of
one, please consider approaching them to ask if this is a possibility. I'd
hate for the experience of four years of living in Ramallah under both
Israeli occupation and Palestinian Authority autonomy to go to waste.

Getting the exhibition ready will cost a fair amount.

20-30 professionally printed 16"x20" photographs at $65 each, costs between
$1,300 and $1,950, depending at which end of 20-30 images the total number
of prints falls.

At an 11"x14" size, the cost varies between $920 and $1,380.

The idea is to present each image with one or two facts about what it
represents and some text from the diary.

e.g.  http://www.nigelparry.com/diary/hebron/images/settkidb.jpg

This photograph of a Jewish settler kid throwing a stone at me would be
accompanied by the statistics of how many settlements and settlers there
are in the occupied territories and the percentage of settlements populated
by religious settlers, and perhaps my comments about the lawlessness of
settler children in part 6 of Hebron Diary's "Visit after three weeks of
clashes":


"An 12 or 13-year-old settler kid turns up and starts talking to the
soldiers. I am still photographing. The kid suddenly bends down, grabs a
stone and throws it at me. I turn my head away and protect the camera while
it whizzes past me and then stand and look back in disbelief.

The soldier turns round and half-heartedly says something to the kid, who
answers him back and proceeds to ignore him. The kid has picked up more
stones but this time I myself am ready when he tosses them at
me.

I snap his photo in mid-throw before again turn my head away. The kid's
face is cold, showing no emotion. The soldier does nothing and looks at me
with curiosity to see what I will do. It seemed initially that he was
concerned that I would react but is now standing there, smirking, holding
his gun.

"Palestinian children throw stones," points out Samira later, the Devil's
advocate. "True, I replied, but it's a different thing when a child in a
country under military occupation confronts an armed man. Here we had a
child of the side with power, whose behaviour at 12 or 13-years-old shows
both a knowledge of that power and a normally-appealing, childlike trust in
his right to it.

I remembered Oliver Stone's 'Wild Palms', with its nihlistic vision of a
future where virtual reality had become reality, and where the children
seduced by this technological fiction sadistically torture and murder
adults. That's why what I witnessed was frightening. The amoral and
deliberate ignorance of restraint in a child and the lack of understanding
by the adult present of the consequences of allowing this to continue,
unfettered."

The text length will vary depending on the subject obviously.



*FINAL WORDS*

So, as you can see, I have a few plans, some bigger and some smaller.

The diary as it stands was written while holding down a full-time job and
undertaking numerous part-time projects to supplement my salary from
Birzeit University.

It was always a personal non-profit project - actually loss-making project,
as the photos alone cost me just under $2,000 to process.

During the three years I published the diary, you might be surprised to
discover, I didn't sell a single photo through the website.

What is clear to me at this time is that I will not be returning to the
West Bank unless it's to run the national diary project. Why? Because quite
frankly, life there is hard and unless you feel that what you're doing is
meeting a real need, it's hard to both sustain and justify your existance
there as an international.

Add this to the fact that it took the compensation from the demolition of
my home to provide me with enough money to take my first real holiday in
four years and you can understand why I'm not prepared to go back to the
West Bank without a clear vision for my time there and a salary sufficient
to allow me to get out and chill out for a month every year.

If you can help with any of the above goals, please write to me in
Minneapolis, Minnesota, and let me know:

[obsolete contact details deleted]

Thanks again for reading a Personal Diary. It, although not always a "fun"
project to work on, was always interesting and, judging by the thousands of
e-mails I received between its launch in 1996 and today, it was a project
that was considered worthwhile by a lot of you.

Have fun with the relaunched diary. Please recommend it to friends, tell
people interested in the Middle East about it, add links to it if you have
a website, write and let me know what you think about any of the entries,
and if you can - help with making it a national project in Palestine.

Nigel Parry
17 November 1998
Minneapolis, Minnesota





This mailing was to give you news from "A Personal Diary of the
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict", found at http://www.nigelparry.com/diary/

If you would like to be added to or removed from the list, please contact
Nigel Parry at nparry@admin.birzeit.edu

Please feel free to forward this message to discussion groups, friends, and
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