DIY Friday

Somewhat inadvertently, I’ve developed a new Friday evening ritual. Over the last few weeks a fluid group of activists – Palestinians, internationals and Israelis – have started tweeting live reports from the Friday afternoon anti-Wall demonstrations in Palestine. I sit and watch them scroll, with a mixture of depression and exhilaration. This to me seems (like harassmap and 101wankers) to be the kind of thing ‘new media’ is supposed to be about. The intertwining twitter feeds from courageous activists (and shock, horror, an occasional journalist who can be arsed to go and look at things for themselves) provide a minute-by-minute picture of what’s happening at Bil’in, Nil’in, Nabi Saleh and Ma’asara, and that’s valuable stuff to be able to hold up against IDF press releases and idle hacks ‘reporting’ from Jerusalem. In case you’re interested, the people you should be following on twitter include: @PSCC_Palestine, @ibnezra, @almagdela, @nsheizaf, @lisang, @ygurvitz, @tamarzandberg, @dimireider, @jessicadevaney, @itamar_b

Today was a DIY kind of day, before the DIY media from the heros of real reporting in Palestine kicked in. Husband and I managed to tear ourselves away from work for a few hours and see a bit of what Adelaide has to offer (but that the South Australia tourist board doesn’t tell you about). Like, for instance, the neat little zine shop, Format, tucked just off Hindley Street. It’s run by a collective which also has an independent press and a literature and zine festival. And like the Reading Room, further down Hindley Street, which is a cool space full of books and magazines and a few squishy old sofas where you can just sit and read anything you fancy from the shelves (or, in my case, struggle to do the last third of a Bust magazine crossword, a mistake when someone with terrible handwriting has already done the first two-thirds, but gotten half the answers wrong). It’s in a shopfront donated under a scheme called Renew Adelaide, which persuades the owners of unused buildings to let arts and community groups do summat useful with them.

Sadly, we then ruined the day by heading off to the weekly Palestine boycott demo outside the Myer Centre, against scummy Dead Sea cosmetics peddlars Seacrets. This week, as well as a few weird random Zionists, we got a hijack attempt by the antithesis of DIY ethic, a bunch of entryist ‘socialists’ from ‘Socialist Alternative.’ I can’t think of anything much less alternative than most of what they had to say, but I found a good set of resources for campaigners on how to resist such leeches, here. But it took fasoulia, baba ghanoush, felafel and namoora at the Jerusalem to cheer me up afterwards.