Letter # 2, sent on 20 July 1999. No reply.

Dear Wired,

I am an Internet consultant who was invited to the UN in Geneva in 1997 to present a paper on the development of the Palestinian Internet.

The following press release from my former workplace Birzeit University tells of one of the most significant international developments on the Internet for years. Since McLuhan and Gibson first started popularly articulating how globalisation could impact the world, I can't think of a more significant project that fully realises their visions.

This is not only the first cybercafe in a refugee camp, it is the first stage in a project to, as Palestinian academic Edward Said once wrote, give the "permission to narrate" to a Palestinian refugee camp. It is a symbol that everything who is concerned about the development of the Internet in the developing world will welcome with great interest.

The articulation of the future stages of the project can be found at http://www.birzeit.edu/web/abp.html

It is truly an historic day not just for Palestinians but in the context of the whole history of the Internet. It is the fulfilment of a lot of dreams that many people around the world have had for the Internet, its impact on society, and global relations. The project represents the best of what the Internet can and should be, and I find a distinct lack of words to express the importance of this development. My hope is that people both recognise its importance and encourage similar projects in other parts of the world.

I would highly reccommend this project to Wired as a very significant story to cover. It really doesn't get much more newsworthy than this in Internet development land.

I attach a previous unacknowledged e-mail after the enclosed press release, from 10th July, which similarly asked you to look at some of the significant Internet models that have been developed by Palestinians

Nigel Parry

 
 Launch of Across Borders Project
 
 First Internet Centre to Open in Deheishe Camp
 ______________________________________
 
 This Saturday, 24 July, the Birzeit University Information 
 Technology Unit will officially launch the Across Borders Project.  
 
 This Project aims to establish Internet centres in Palestinian refugee 
 camps, train camp residents in the use of the internet and WWW, 
 and create English/Arabic websites for each camp.  
 
 Saturday will see the launch of the first phase of the project - a fully- 
 equipped computer lab in Deheishe camp at the Ibdaa Children's 
 Cultural Centre. The centre is linked to the internet with a permanent 
 lease-line connection. Ten young people from the camp have 
 completed a 36-hour course at Birzeit University on the internet and 
 WWW.  
 
 Ibdaa will begin running courses for camp residents within the next 
 week. Courses offered include Basic Internet Use and Introduction 
 to Windows. An internet cafe will be opened every night from 6:30 - 
 10:30pm and Friday 12:30 to 10:30pm. Courses will also be offered 
 during the day for children under 16 years.  
 
 The camp websites will play an important educational role for the 
 international community. The ability for people to directly 
 correspond with the refugee population in the camps will increase 
 the understanding of their situation on a worldwide level. School 
 groups overseas for example, will be able to directly correspond with 
 their counterparts in a refugee camp.  
 
 The virtual travel over borders which the Across Borders Project will 
 create, aims to improve the visibility and confidence of the refugee 
 community as a whole. Many analysts of Palestinian society have 
 identified the increasing division of the community along regional 
 lines. The Across Borders Project will facilitate in re-asserting the 
 refugee community as a central axis of Palestinian society.  
 
 Following the launch in Deheishe, the project will extend to other 
 camps in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It is planned to also link up 
 other refugee camps around the Middle East.  
 
 The launch will take place at 4pm, Saturday 24 July at the Ibdaa 
 Centre, Deheishe Camp.  
 
 The first phase of the project has been made possible through the 
 assistance of the Canada Fund, Palestine On-line and several 
 generous private donations.  
 
 For more information about the project, please contact Adam Hanieh 
 at ahanieh@admin.birzeit.edu or Muna Muhaisen at 
 muna@alquds.net  

Letter #1, sent on 10 July 1999. No reply.

Alison Macondray
Managing Editor
Wired Magazine

cc. Editor-in-Chief: George Shirk; Culture Editor: Judy Bryan

Dear Alison,

My name is Nigel Parry and I am a journalist and Internet consultant that has been involved since 1995 in the development of the Palestinian Web community. In August 1997, I was invited to address the United Nations in Geneva on this issue. More information about my experience is available here: http://www.nigelparry.com/mideastinternet/

This letter represents a plea to Wired to improve its coverage of some of the universally important issues raised by the experience of development of the Palestinian Internet both in content and in infrastructre.

Wired has covered the Israeli cellular phone boom and software industry very well in the past, which was appreciated by those of us working out there. But some of the most significant and interesting aspects of the Palestinian Internet, that speak powerful messages about universal Internet concerns such as censorship, articulation by the disenfranchised, and the networking power of the Internet. My paper for the UN is available at http://www.birzeit.edu/web/unpaper.html and sections 1.0-1.3 give a reasonable introduction to the some of the particular infrastructural and political issues faced by the Palestinian Internet community.

When I began reading Wired in 1995, the magazine was filled with articles about cutting-edge things people were doing with content. From articles that explored the new possibilities the Web posed to minority voices to the very entertaining suck.com story, the majority of those who work "on the Internet" who are more involved in content provision than infrastructural development or maintainence were inspired and encouraged to reflect on what we were doing.

The fact that the very significant story of the Palestinian Internet does not seem to have reached Wired led to a significant error in Wired's coverage once. In the same way that the Tienneman Square demonstrators were the first local residents of a country to use e-mail send out alternative news reports during a conflict situation, Wired reported that demonstrators in Belgrade were the first to use the Web to do the same. I forget the issue but the date claimed for the Belgrade experiment was after September 1996.

This was not true, as it was a group of staff and students in Birzeit University, the "Palestinian Harvard or Princeton", that first used the Web to do this in September 1996, to great effect, which was the main reason Israel allowed a "network configuration error" to effectively shut down the local Internet for a few key days during the limited shooting war that left 14 Israelis and 88 Palestinians dead. Those involved in the production of the website were miffed as our experience of collecting news had taken place at personal risk. I mean, people were shooting each other! The dangers on the ground in the news collection arena during that period resulted in foreign journalists and newscrews being issued with flak jackets and gas masks as standard for the first time in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The website - On the Ground in Ramallah: reports from a Town Become Battlefield - changed the way in which many Palestinians in the government, NGO, and educational sectors, and many of those in the NGO and media sectors who follow the conflict from outside the country perceived the place of Palestinians in the media and gave rise to a whole new generation of Internet-related projects that are very significant in their effects on the traditional (old) media and explored cultural issues such as memory & remembering, and censorship in the Arab World. A summary article of some of the key lessons we learnt from this website, at http://www.birzeit.edu/palnews/war/ can be found at http://www.nigelparry.com/diary/war/waressay.html

I am writing not to criticise Wired for its coverage of the Palestinian Internet but to ecourage Wired to look at the experience of this country and perhaps run an article about what happened before those involved forget or it all just becomes lost in the context of the gradually normalising Internet situation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. I would be happy to either write the "inside story" of this community or assist someone else in doing so.

I have written directly to a Wired editor before on this issue without any response. Although I fully understand that you may not want to write anything on this issue, I would appreciate at least a negative response to this e-mail. Thank you.

Finally, I would like to thank all of you at Wired for producing an excellent magazine that I have been challenged and inspired by for many years. In the early days of working on the Palestinian Web, before the Palestinian Internet boom kicked in, there was a noticable absense of sources in the void that gave us any direction and ideas about what was going on in the rest of the world. Through the pages of Wired, contributer after contributer lined up as if they were older brothers and sisters to help us find the right paths. For this we will always be very grateful.

Sincerely,

Nigel Parry
[e-mail address, address and telephone deleted]
Note: this e-mail is not intended for publication.