Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

ADC Panel Examines Perceptions of Palestine

Sara Powell 30 September 2004



Nigel Parry of the Electronic Intifada said it was encouraging to see young Palestinians like Dean Obeidallah, Maysoon Zayid, and Suheir Hammad, (p)reaching outside the choir through their art. Like Lechner, Parry related his story of “seeing the light.” He went to Palestine with no previous knowledge and wound up in a U.N. bus in a refugee camp, just in time to see a small child throw a rock—very ineffectually—at an Israeli soldier, who then knelt, cocked his gun, and aimed at the child. The soldier was about to kill the child, Parry said, when he spotted the U.N. bus, and guiltily stood up. “There is no context in the media,” Parry stated. That is why the Electronic Intifada and other information outlets are crucial, he said, because “information is what will end the conflict. If we could transport Americans to Rafah for five minutes, they would never support Israel.” 

Intifada on the Internet: Exposing Media Biases Toward Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Nizar Wattad 30 April 2002

In October 2000, a group of dedicated pro-Palestinian activists from around the world combined their efforts to wage an electronic intifada—a digital ‘shaking off’ of the biases present in media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Four months later, Ali Abunimah, Arjan El Fassed, Laurie King-Irani and Nigel Parry officially launched the Electronic Intifada, a Web-based movement geared toward deconstructing the distraction tactics of ‘the Israeli media war machine’ and highlighting the damaging effects those tactics have on accurate reporting. Nizar Wattad reports in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.