August 6, 2003
In This Issue
in this issue
SOMETIMES THE BEST journalism isn't journalism, exactly. Personal letters and diaries can tell stunning tales, and when it comes to a war zone, immediate, uncensored reflections, sent to friends and not to editors, can give an immediacy and insight that you don't always get from professional reporters. And in the era of e-mail, anyone who's anywhere anything is happening is suddenly a journalist of sorts, sending dispatches back to the folks at home.
Dozens of people from the Bay Area, many of them folks we know, have spent all or part of this summer in Israel and the occupied territories. An international peace movement has been encouraging activists to come to the area, particularly the disputed borderlands, to protest Israel's crackdown on the Palestinians, the continued expansion of the settlements, and the Sharon government's wall, a giant fence and ditch that runs right through the middle of some of the best Palestinian farmland and that has forced many families to choose between staying in their homes (on one side of the fence) and working in their fields (on the other).
(You can read some alarming accounts of how the wall has ruined Palestinian lives, written by reporters from the Independent of London, in the Life during Wartime section of sfbg.com.)
Even the Bush administration thinks the wall (known to many in the region as the "Apartheid Wall") is a terrible idea – Secretary of State Colin Powell recently called it a major impediment to peace.
Some of our friends who've been participating in the antiwall demonstrations, or just traveling to see for themselves what's going on in one of the most violence-torn and politically complicated parts of the world, have been writing regular accounts of their experiences and e-mailing them back to us. We've found them fascinating reading. And when we decided to publish a collection of them, we broadened it out and solicited pieces from others traveling in the region.
Not all of the writers of "Letters from Palestine" have the same perspective, and they've had very different experiences. (The accounts of two Americans, one Jewish, the other Palestinian, attempting to get through Israeli customs and airport security is an interesting narrative just by itself.)
But from all of the letters, you get a poignant picture of a troubled region – and a clear message that what the Sharon government is doing is only making things much, much worse.