OneVoice Movement

Influential Israeli daily publishes a feature on OneVoice’s Imagine 2018 campaign

New York, January 6, 2011—Featured in the National News section, the article includes in-depth interviews with OneVoice Israel Executive Director Tal Harris and Imagine 2018 coordinator Daniella Shlomo in which they discuss the program so far, as well as their own hopes and dreams for 2018.

The Imagine 2018 campaign is OneVoice’s latest initiative being carried out in parallel in Israel and Palestine. The aim is to shake people out of apathy. By imagining how their lives may change for better or for worse in the future, people will have taken a vital first step toward achieving a peaceful solution and avoiding the usual pitfalls of cynicism, disillusionment and fatalism.

Haaretz reporter Jonathan Kahan writes that “many young Israelis from a spectrum of political movements are investing their time and energies on a daily basis—with the goal of solving the conflict.”

Thus far the campaign has engaged the Israeli grassroots through a wildly successful Facebook application, as well as prominent figures in Israeli politics, journalism and entertainment through the publication and distribution of an Israeli daily newspaper from 2018.

Haaretz, meanwhile, also devotes a large part of the piece to discussing the Imagine 2018 campaign OneVoice Palestine is running, offering a window through which Israelis can look and see that they have a partner for peace.

Read the Haaretz article.

Interview with Gal Bareket, winner of the OVI Headlines Competition

New York, January 6, 2011—OneVoice Israel’s (OVI)  headline competition—an online invitation to write headlines for a mock newspaper from 2018—concluded on December  15 and, two days later, the winner has been announced as Gal Bareket, a recently-joined member of OVI’s Tel Aviv University chapter.

The headline competition is the online component of a OneVoice grassroots campaign that is sweeping Israel. The competition asked users to put themselves in the shoes of a journalist from the future; what events would they be asked to cover in 2018? The tone of the submitted headlines ranges from fascinating to poignant, from witty to tragic. The Facebook application used by the campaign then arranges the headline on a newspaper front page with a choice of iconic images. That web page has received 50,000 visits and 350 submitted headlines from a population forty times smaller than that of the United States.

  Gal Bareket’s headline received over 950 “Likes”—a stamp of approval from Facebook users—and can now be seen on bus shelter billboards all around the country, along with the other nine most popular entries. Upon the announcement of Gal’s success, Dana Sender, Youth Leadership Program director in Israel, said “nothing makes me more proud than to watch one of our own Fellows win the contest and represent the movement abroad.”

 

Bareket's headline in a Tel Aviv bus shelter

Bareket’s prize, in addition to online fame, is to embark on a diplomatic tour of the United States and Europe to represent the movement. He spoke to us about his imminent trip and the experience so far.

OneVoice: How do you feel now that the competition is over?

Gal Bareket: I feel free at last! It took a lot of time and campaigning to get people to vote for me. I’m also very happy to win such an amazing prize. To go on a diplomatic tour of Washington, D.C., London, and other parts of Europe as a representative of OneVoice is such a great opportunity.

OV: What is the  meaning and inspiration behind your headline?

GB: The headline, lite rally translated as “Two, together always,” is a parody of a commercial slogan from Cha nnel 2 news in Israel. It’s very catchy when you hear it in Hebrew. I took the slogan out of its or iginal context and used it to reflect on the fact Israelis and Palestinians share a piece of land and there’s no w ay to change that fact. The solution, as I see it, rests in the two-state solution.

 

Before I settled on the picture of the two children, I wanted to use the image of a band-aid over the Middle East. I think it’s a powerful image as well. I finally decided on the picture of children because of my belief in working toward peace and change through education. My mother is a teacher. The western world sees the term peace, shalom, as such a romantic idea but that’s not necessarily how other people see it. Achieving a peace agreement will only be the beginning. It is the next generation, or that of 2018, which will be on the other side of the thaw. Only then will we have the possibility of a “warm peace,” one in which rehabilitation is possible.

 

OV: What is your role at OneVoice?

GB: I joined OVI a little over a month ago as a youth fellow in the Tel Aviv University chapter. My role is to contact policy-makers and community leaders and convince them to lecture and become involved in informing young minds on the peace process.

 

OV: Why did you decide to get involved with OneVoice?

GB: The reason I got involved in OneVoice is because of their objective approach to the situation. I’m quite interested in politics and really support OneVoice’s stance of not giving their own solution to the problems between Israel and the Palestinians, but instead offering public support to those in government.

I see OneVoice as an opportunity to raise awareness. People don’t really know the core subjects that stop the peace agreements from happening. 

 

OV: What did you think about OVI’s use of Facebook in creating awareness?

GB: Facebook is a very important tool and can help bring awareness to the people. This is just the beginning. We need recognition and it’s a great tool to do that. The movement has been existence since 2002 and I only heard about it this year. 

Painting a new ray of hope for Palestine in 2018

 
OVP youth leaders and volunteers paint mural in Nablus.

By Elizabeth Cook*

The bus to Nablus, a city in the northern West Bank, picked us up from the OneVoice Palestine (OVP) office in Ramallah. Soon the bus would be filled with the sounds of joy and laughter, which echoed throughout our hour long journey.

It was a beautiful Friday morning in early December and we were all heading to the community park, which was to be the site of our mural. This mural would be the second of several that OVP is creating as part of its Imagine 2018 campaign. This campaign invites Palestinians to creatively envision what life would be like in a free and independent Palestine if a peace agreement were to be reached today.

As we passed settlements, soldiers at surveillance towers watched us from above. Two volunteers visiting from Chicago were with us, witnessing for themselves the reality of the occupation. The two Americans sat beside two Palestinian OVP volunteers who have never known a life without Israeli military presence. Regardless, spirits remained high and we sang and clapped to songs in Arabic.

Once we arrived, everyone gathered in a circle to introduce themselves. We met Samih Abu Zakieh, an art teacher from Hebron, the largest city in the West Bank. Zakieh is the author of the art education book, “100 Ways for Peace in Palestine.” Samih led a brainstorming session to get our creative juices flowing. He told us to actively envision our understandings of what a Palestinian state would be like.

OVP youth leaders and volunteers brainstorm for the mural. 

As the youth leaders were getting started, Samih told me, “the purpose of art is to improve imagination. Life becomes much harder without anything to imagine. The aim is to attain value in art, to build friendship, to have dignity, and to respect one another. Like civil resistance and non-violent forms of expression, art helps us dream of a future homeland and peace.”

The feeling in the air was one of unity and strength. We were stronger together.

The mural was soon filled with many creative and beautiful drawings, which depicted a thriving Palestinian state. The mural included scenes of a future gondola that would enable transportation between the two mountains engulfing Nablus, a peace dove, and the Dome of the Rock, which many Palestinians cannot access.

When I asked Samih if we should draw the wall that separates Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, he replied, “on this mural there are no walls. We do not want to imagine walls today. Here we are building bridges for peace.”

I wanted to paint a scene of the coast of the Gaza Strip, where Palestinians in the West Bank long to catch a glimpse of their homeland’s ocean. Instead, OVP Public Relations Director Ezzeldin Masri, who is from Gaza, suggested that we paint orange trees to signify the delicious fruit grown there. I helped paint the sun, representing a new ray of hope for the year 2018.

Dima Halu, 13, is a volunteer from Ramallah who was born in Kenya and returned to the West Bank four years ago. She painted olive trees on the mural and said that in the year 2018, she imagines walking on free streets, entering Israel again, and visiting her family’s old home there.

“OVP tries to replace the feeling of desperation and hopelessness with a feeling of hope and aspiration,” said Ezzeldin, in between brush strokes. “We try to place the notion of a state in the minds of Palestinian people; a state of mind the Palestinians have never experienced. This is the hope for the Imagine 2018 campaign.”

*Elizabeth Cook is a Canadian volunteer with OneVoice Palestine.

Volunteers painting the mural on the wall of a community playground.

OneVoice Israel breaks in the New Year with Big Brother housemates

New York, January 3, 2011—OneVoice Israel (OVI) hosted a high-profile mixer on December 29, welcoming the New Year with the cast of Big Brother—Israel’s most popular reality TV show.

Big Brother, the Israeli version of the US show of the same name aired on CBS for the past decade, compels a group of strangers to live together in a house for around three months. Guests who fail to abide by the “house rules” or fall foul of the other participants are evicted until, at the end of each season, the last man or woman standing takes home a cash prize. The Israeli version of the show is in its third season and has risen to unparalleled levels of popularity, turning its guests into bona fide celebrities.

OVI Executive Director Tal Harris and Program Coordinator Daniella Shlomo mingled with the cast and prominent figures from the business world and professional sports in a swanky Tel Aviv restaurant, while taking the time to explain our Imagine 2018 campaign.

Former housemate Aviv, 26, a computer specialist, offered an interesting vision of a Big Brother house in 2018, filled with Israeli and Palestinian contestants in equal numbers. The current housemates are also a diverse group and Aviv’s sentiments were echoed by plumber Bentsi Shani, 46, while Shlomo remarked that the entire cast had been very receptive to the OneVoice mission.

This mixer, covered by Israeli lifestyle Web site Yofi and business publication Globes, is another example of how the Imagine 2018 campaign is capturing the imaginations of Israelis from all walks of life.

 

 

 

OVI Executive Director Tal Harris with Big Brother housemate Sarah Levin