Dear friends--
I'm happy today to announce a series of new initiatives that Just World Ed's board has decided to pursue. They're designed to take the best advantage we can of the great opportunities now opening up to e-x-p-a-n-d the discourse in the United States on our core issues of war, peace, and justice... especially on Palestine and other parts of the Middle East.
One of these initiatives is a project that I've long been mulling: To draw on my own numerous decades of experience as a journalist, writer, and researcher on Middle East and global issues to provide more context for understanding some of what is happening in the region today. This project is titled "Story/Backstory". You can read more about it in this post on the JWE blog, which also contains some great supportive comments from our board members Alice Rothchild and Richard Falk.
In this project, in the first half of of each week I'll publish a 1,300-word text column-- sometimes with our friends on the super Mondoweiss site, sometimes elsewhere... And then later in the week I'll release a 25- to 30-minute podcast episode on the same topic that will start with a reading of the column but go on to include further riffs and reflections on the same topic.
We gave the project a soft launch this past week! Here's the column I published on Mondoweiss last Wednesday, "The Longer Arc of US-Palestine Relations"... and here's the 27-minute podcast on that topic that I released on Friday.
Look out for Episode 2 in the "Story/Backstory" project this coming week. It will look at "The Curious Case of U.S. Domination of Israel-Palestine Peacemaking."
Some great ways to stay up-to-date on the new episodes as they are released are by following our Twitter or Facebook accounts, or by subscribing to our blog, which you can do via these links:
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We're exploring a number of other great initiatives for the coming 12-18 months, in addition to the "Story/Backstory" project... But what we're already committed to doing is the following: 
** We'll be mounting two great online-info campaigns over the spring... One of these will mark the upcoming (March 30) first anniversary of Gaza's fine mass-nonviolent action, the Great March of Return.
** Our other online campaign will be a revival of the #WarHurtsEarth campaign we launched last year, which aims to educate people about the heavy environmental costs of militarism and war.
** In those two campaigns, we'll be providing more great materials on these topics on the Resources section of our website. We'll also be working with Eli Gerzon, a Boston-based organizer who does social media work for social justice, focusing on climate change, local community issues, and Palestine solidarity work. (One of their longtime clients is Alice Rothchild: author, filmmaker, and Just World Ed board member!)
 ** We will also continue to post great material onto our blog, in addition to the "Story/Backstory" articles. We've gotten some great new pieces up there recently! Did you see this piece by the inimitable Miko Peled, exploring one of the rapidly growing communities of staunchly anti-Zionist, ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, the Satmars? Or this piece by Gaza-based writer Wafa al-Udaini on some early-February casualties in the Great March of Return? Or Alice Rothchild, reflecting here on the double-standard when discussing Israeli racism?
** We're planning to have a good presence at two key Washington DC-based events in the next couple of months. These are the March 22 pre/anti-AIPAC conference led by WRMEA and IRMEP, this year featuring Ali Abunimah... and World Beyond War's "No to NATO" Peacefest, on April 3-4.
** But we're also still committed to building the nationwide network of our partners and colleagues. Right now, I'm in Berkeley, CA, where I'm meeting with some great justice/antiwar organizers. (Email me if you're in the Bay Area and you'd like to get together in the next week...)
** Just a quick note that we've had to reschedule the westcoast speaking tour of Algerian liberation heroine Mme. Zohra Drif, and are currently exploring various dates in late September or October with her. Sorry for any inconvenience this rescheduling causes...
Before I sign off here, I want to share a quick observation about the continuing power of cultural actions to shift attitudes in today's interconnected society. (Edward Said would, I think, have been proud to see how much has been happening on this front in the past few years...)
Before I left DC, I saw a few old friends at the performance of Einat Weitzman and Morad Hassan's "Shame 2.0", produced by the Mosaic Theater. It strikingly explored anti-Arab racism in Jewish-Israeli society and the constant struggles of the country's 1.2 million ethnic-Palestinian citizens.
 Then on Saturday, here in Berkeley, I saw a screening of Ahlam Muhtaseb and Andy Trimlett's powerful 90-minute documentary "1948: Creation and Catastrophe", and afterwards we were honored to hear Dr. Muhtaseb talk about the long path she and Trimlett traversed as they made the movie.
"1948: Creation and Catastrophe" presents on film the direct testimonies of more than two dozen people who participated directly in the epoch-making events of 1947-48, a period when, as British power was collapsing in Mandate Palestine the well-organized Jewish militias aggressively set about both "cleansing" the areas under their command of their indigenous Arab residents, and expanding the areas they controlled far beyond what the UN's Partition Plan had allotted to the future Jewish state.
 These are historic, multimedia records that add new dimensions to the filmed, English-language records of the Palestinians' Nakba from earlier documentarians-- including our very own Alice Rothchild. In "1948" we saw very elderly participants in those Jewish militias wrestling with their consciences regarding the actions they'd taken 71 years ago; and we saw very elderly Palestinians, many of them still living in very reduced circumstances in exile, as they recount the traumas of the exodus they suffered in their youth. We also saw many excerpts from relevant records kept by the Haganah and other actors...
 Seeing a film like 1948 provides, I think, essential background for all who want to understand the situation in Palestine/Israel today. You can download 1948 from Amazon, Google Play, or iTunes very affordably and watch it at home. Or you could work with the film-makers and their distributor to host a larger screening like the one we went to here in Berkeley.
I'm also hoping that Just World Ed can work with Dr. Muhtaseb to bring her and the movie to various places around the country, though she's a busy woman...
Of course, on the ground in Palestine and in the refugee camps of the surrounding states, the situation continues to get worse; and the Israeli government is lurching, apparently quite drunk with power, ever further to the right. But there is a huge amount that the US citizenry can do to change the gross imbalance of power in historic Palestine... provided we are well informed and well organized.
Just World Ed welcomes your help and your support!
I hope you find our new "Story/Backstory" project and the rest of the projects we're working on to be informative and useful. Be sure to tell your friends about them! Do send me any feedback you have on them-- and if you're able to make a financial contribution to keep our projects going, that would be extremely welcome, too.
Stay well--
Helena.
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