A dedicated group of activists and teachers have launched a program called "Go Palestine!"
Its purpose is to provide a summer experience for Palestinian Diaspora youths (ages 14 to 17) by pairing them with a Palestinian host family for the summer.
Sa'ed Atshan, the program director, is a good friend of mine and has been conducting alternative tours of Palestine for visitors for the past year.
Here's a brief description of how the program will work:
International teens will pair up with local Ramallah teens, living with their family in home-stays. Together they will experience Palestinian culture as a part of their new extended family. The 'host family' will include the teens in their own extended family, sharing excursions and outings with them. Introduction into the "Palestinian perspective", cuisine, Arabic language, life and work will be reinforced and personalized through these home stay. Go Palestine participants will use the web to communicate and connect old and new friends and families from around the world to each other during the summer and beyond.
Please go to the website and take a look. This program deserves our full support so please help to spread the word.
Let’s just head of the impending bullshit storm of trying to make a false analogy between this and Birthright tours by pointing out that these youths come from families that lived (and in many cases still live) in the Holy Land for generations.
Also? Name any Palestinian Americans who’ve A) volunteered for someone else’s army, then became B) a Senator, C) Presidential Chief of Staff and D) mayor of a major American metropolis and then maybe I’ll consider paying this program the sort of ire I direct at the Birthright program.
That said? It’s good to see Palestinians keeping their culture alive. It’s also good to see people who recognize the differences between religion, ethnicity and nationality.
This is awesome! It was a trip to Palestine in my teens that opened my eyes to the settlements in the West Bank and then taking a Taxi into Gaza we were stopped and surrounded by armed Israeli military jeeps with dozens of Israeli military personnel pointing their automatic weapons at us 3 kids (I’d convinced my twin cousins, senior class Homecoming Queen and her brother the Varsity Football Star that Gaza was perfectly safe). You don’t forget those experiences.
“Name any Palestinian Americans who’ve A) volunteered for someone else’s army, ..”
My son was born in the US. When I was registering his birth to claim his other citizenships, the British Embassy warned us that service in a non-US military could compromise his US citizenship.
But the IDF doesn’t count for that, it seems.