Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

A meeting at Qalandiyah - Haaretz 

The Web site Mahsanmilim - Reports from the West Bank (www.mahsanmilim.com) - grew from a 31-second video clip in which Palestinian teacher and poet Hatem Hushi stands next to the Ofer Blockade, a roadblock erected by the Israel Defense Forces on Al-Khader Road, at the entrance to Bethlehem. He stands in front of the camera reciting a poem, in Hebrew, that speaks of his longing for the city of Holon (tinyurl.com/2awa3t). When he finishes the last line of the poem, he smiles self-consciously, and the clip ends.

“There is something in that scene that is so absolute. It sheds light on everything, unravels everything,” says Aya Kaniuk. She and Tamar Goldschmidt, who filmed the scene, have been running the site for about two years.

“It was at one of the blockades. Hatem was carrying a cane, and he suddenly came up to us and said, ‘I am the only Palestinian poet who writes in Hebrew.’ He wanted to read us a poem, a love poem to Holon. Later, we discovered he was a cancer patient, and he was on his way to chemotherapy treatment. But he didn’t want to talk about the fact that, because of the blockade, he couldn’t get to his treatments. He wrote a poem and presented it to the outside world.”

The clip about Hatem Hushi is only one of the films, pictures, and texts that comprise the Mahsanmilim (word warehouse) site. It is one of the most interesting political sites in Israel. There are provocative scenes, like the one documenting soldiers abusing peddlers in Qalandiyah (tinyurl.com/32xsba) or the young girl bursting into tears in front of a soldier at the Hawara checkpoint (tinyurl.com/2eugss). But the site does not promote sensational documentation of one type of event or another.