Blog For Palestine

The Electronic Intifada
www.electronicintifada.net

Overall Assessment: This website can only be rated as best in class. It stands heads and shoulders above all the others out there. The EI team is serious about their mission, they have an absolute committement to quality and professionalism, and they respect their audience. If you have time to read only one website and ask me for my recommendation I would say The Electronic Intifada. I know this is bad self-promotion but I’d rather be stupid than dishonest.

Mission and Objectives: “The Electronic Intifada (EI) is a not-for-profit, independent publication committed to comprehensive public education on the question of Palestine, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the economic, political, legal, and human dimensions of Israel’s 38-year occupation of Palestinian territories. EI provides a needed supplement to mainstream commercial media representations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” All the work that they do is faithful to this mission.

Content: The four founding partners, Ali Abunimah, Nigel Parry, Arjan Al Fassed, and Laurie King-Irani, are all outstanding writers, journalists and activists. This has ensured that over the years EI’s content has always been of excellent quality. They allow content from many different sources, but as evidenced by their extensive Content Submission Guidelines page, the content is carefully screened. Aside from the high quality and the committement to journalistic professionalism, the content is extensive and varied covering the spectrum of the Palestinian struggle. The content spans several major categories from Opinion and News, Activism, Human Rights, Arts and Culture. In addition to that they have a number of specialized series that highlight some of ignored dimensions of the conflict, some examples are their Live From Palestine Diary series, The Israel Lobby Watch, their Business and Economy section, even an Internet and Technology series that looks like it just started. Finally, EI is a great resource for anyone wanting to learn about the details of the conflict and its history. You can find pages that give comprehensive coverage about topics such as the refugees, the 1948 Nakba, Israel’s Assasination policy, etc… Check out their By Topics page for an index of all this stuff. Every once in a while they produce absolute gems such as the “Debunking 6 Common Israeli Myths” which was widely circulated a couple of years ago.

Presentation and Usability: The site is beautiful in its simplicity. I’m a bit biased though, since as you might guess from this site, I’m not a big fan of festive colors. The different categories are adorned by beautiful pictures illustrating what the category is about (my favority is their Contact Us page where they have pictures of Palestinian stamps). The front page usually greets you with a banner that presents a series of pictures and text which tells you about some current event or points you to an interesting story. Navigating the site is very intuitive. The front page is divided into six sections, five of the them listing the latest story in that category and one section compiling a list of all that is new on EI. A sidebar on the left allows you to navigate to all the critical places on the website. The top of the sidebar has some editors picks which brings to your attention things that you might not have looked at before, or something that they are trying to highlight. Finally they have a search box which can help you find anything on their site or in their extensive archive.

Technology: The site is setup with every conceivable way to allow for access to its content. You can sign up to receive emails, insert their content on your site using their syndication mechanism, or get an RSS feed of their stories (I had trouble finding this one so I’ll save you the trouble and give you a direct link). They were early adopters for all this stuff and I hope that they continue the great work in this field.

After being completely unsatisfied with yesterday’s post about the electronic intifada website and realizing that I didn’t do the website justice with my little post, I’ve made a decision to fix it. I’ve come up with a standard format by which I will review ei.net and all future websites. This will enable me to provide consistent coverage for all the websites and even more importantly it will allow for comparison between websites.

• Mission and Objectives: Outline the mission and objectives of the website and how well its doing in acheiving those objectives.
• Orientation: If the site has a political position we’ll analyze it and judge it harshly, and if they happen to have a lame position then we’ll skewer them.
• Presentation: How appealing is the website visually? Do they do a good job with colors, organization and asthetics?
• Content: Is the content of high quality? Is it original? Does the content have depth? breadth?
• Usability: Is the website easy to navigate? Is there a way to search the whole site? Can you get to the most commonly used content easily? We’ll look at these questions and judge how well the site is doing in these areas.
• Technology: Using the internet is an opportunity at using new and exciting technologies to communicate and advocate. We’ll assess which technologies are being used and look at some other ones that might be useful.

This weekend I’m going to redo the review for ei.net using this format. I’m going to extend this concept to apply to reviews of books, organizations, advocacy efforts, etc… Each one gets a unique form for use. Hopefully this will make the content a lot more useful.

The Electronic Intifada is a gem of a website. Everything about ei is anchored in a commitment to quality and professionalism. This is what really makes it stand out amongst the other sites out there. Here are the things that I think make it is so successful:

Great Web Design: This is probably their greatest assest. The mastermind behind the web work is Nigel Parry. This guy is basically behind every well designed Palestinian Advocacy website, ex. IMEU and AAPER, and the electronic intifada is his masterpiece. Having such a well designed website packages the quality content in a way that makes people want to come back to the site.

Varied Content: The Palestinian people struggle against the occupation in a variety of ways, and the Electronic Intifada covers them all. From political activism, media, art, to the act of remaining steadfast against Israeli oppression, these are all highlighted by EI. Some of their more interesting features are the Diaries from Palestine and the Israeli Lobby Watch.

Quality and Consistency: The contributors at EI do an excellent job of always delivering original news and analysis. The quality of the content is consistent, and this is applies to all the contributors of EI. I especially like the work of Ali Abunimah who is a regular contributor to EI and whose commentary and work is often found on the BBC and in the Guardian.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the different options available for pro-Palestinian advocacy. There are many that seem to believe that we are weak in many traditional advocacy arenas - the media, politics, and education because we lack access. I really don’t agree with that assessment, I just think that we simply aren’t trying hard enough. Our weakness isn’t lack of access but rather lack of effort, and the evidence for that is how we’re doing in the field of electronic activism. The internet should be the great equalizer. I might not be able to get an opinion piece in a newspaper, but I sure as hell can start a blog telling the world what I think and try to get as many people as possible to read it. Despite having that opportunity, most individuals who support Palestinian rights, don’t seem to be using it. An informal survey that I did showed a 4 to 1 bias in the number of pro-Israel blogs vs the pro-Palestinian ones.

It’s crazy that today we aren’t kicking ass in the internet game. Why aren’t there thousands of pro-Palestinian blogs and hundreds of pro-Palestinian websites? The access is there; the knowledge is not hard to get; and this is a fight that we can win. So where does one start? It’s probably a good idea to start looking at what’s out there already and try to figure which efforts need to be supported, expanded, and replicated.

I’m going to begin by looking at one site that caught my attention:

The Palestine Database: This website is basically a giant archive or articles, audio/video material, quotations, journals, maps, etc… all of it about Palestine. It’s probably the most comprehensive thing that I’ve seen of it’s kind. I can only describe it as a wealth of information and should be the first stop for anyone who is working on a presentation or a speech on the topic. The problem with something that has such a large amount of information is that you need a sophisticated system to sort through it and get to what you need; and this is what is missing. These guys can go a long way with an upgrade to some better software and a simple community racking scheme for their content. This effort is definitely a keeper. They have the full support of the Tineen.

You’re probably going to be seeing a lot of posts about sites that I like. If you come across something that’s good, drop me a line and let me know.