I’ve been the Writer-in-Residence in Birzeit for a couple weeks now, and have yet to post about my experiences here. I have plenty to write about – excellent sessions with the workshop participants, interviews with Palestinian circus artists, a tour of a library housing ancient texts in Jerusalem’s Old City, a visit to the grave […]
Tag Archives: Palestine
Wall: A Monologue
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
Writer David Hare has penned a marvelous and beautifully written essay about the West Bank Wall. The monologue was originally performed on stage at The Royal Court Theatre in London and now appears - slightly shortened - in the New York Review of Books. Find it here. (And thank you to Andrew for pointing this […]
A Nakba of Olives – an excerpt
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
[What follows is an excerpt from my Walls book-in-progress. This is from my chapter about the West Bank Wall called 'A Nakba of Olives.' Most of the chapter is about my time in the Palestinian village of Jayyous, and this excerpt is part of a longer account of an anti-Wall demonstration I observed there last […]
Audacity and the Wall
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
I’ve finished a new draft of my West Bank Wall chapter and will post a short sample soon. It was a difficult chapter to write. There are so many facets to the Wall that I had trouble knowing when to stop. What struck me most during the writing, and during my time in Palestine earlier […]
Article: “Berlin Wall is gone but Israel’s inhumane barrier still stands”
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
I found an excellent essay about the West Bank Wall on the Herald Scotland website. The author – who, oddly, is not named – writes eloquently on many of the ideas I mentioned in my last post. You can find it here. [Correction: David Pratt wrote the aforementioned Herald Scotland piece.]
Walls in Berlin and Palestine
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
Along with the Berlin Wall anniversary celebrations this week came the parallels between the Berlin Wall and the wall Israel has built around the West Bank. (The photo is of graffiti on the Wall in Ramallah.) These comparisons were inevitable, of course, and so was the subsequent scoffing of the West Bank Wall’s supporters. There […]
The Walls of East Jerusalem
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
Today I took a tour with an Israeli-Palestinian NGO called Ir-Amim to visit Jerusalem’s backyards and unholy places. A bus carried a crowd of mostly foreigners around East Jerusalem to show the impacts of the Wall. I had been looking forward to hearing about the Wall from an Israeli perspective and was surprised that our […]
A Tree Falls
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
Mohammad told me that he knows every centimetre of his family’s land south of the village of Jayyous. He remembers camping in the middle of the fields in the hot Palestinian summers, and he especially remembers planting olive trees with his father. “It is a special thing for a Palestinian boy, to plant an olive […]
Talking Walls in Ramallah
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
The late winter has brought rain-slicked stones and cold to Palestine. Just like my time in Kashmir in November, I find myself unprepared for the cold. And also just like Kashmir, the unheated hotels bring no relief from the cold outside. My blue jeans which were soaked through during the protest in Jayyous three days […]
Hooked on a Feeling
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
Yesterday, on my brief foray out of my hotel room and into the fresh air, I visited a bookstore in Arab East Jerusalem called Educational Bookshop. The place is little more than a stall, and its main function, as its name implies, is to sell textbooks and school supplies, but the store also stocks an […]
