CAIRO: A commemoration for the Palestinian “Al Nakhba, or “The Disaster, was held at American University in Cairo s (AUC) Greek Campus Wednesday.
The event was organized by lecturers from AUC s research writing course at the Department of Rhetoric and Composition, and was carried out by their students, who had been studying The Question of Palestine.
Beginning at 11am the event comprised a variety of activities, which included creating a separated area to symbolize Israel s separation barrier, and sealing off walkways to demonstrate Israeli checkpoints in the occupied territories.
According to organizers and participants, these activities aimed to raise awareness of the Palestinian situation amongst AUC students.
The students here are quite apathetic, Yasmine Maklad, one of the course lecturers, told The Daily Star Egypt.
So creating awareness of what is going on in Palestine is extremely important.
According to Maklad, the event was intended to be upbeat in order to attract greater attention, thus the playful activities.
We don t want to portray negative images like those we repeatedly see in the mass media, she said.
We wanted something that more people could relate to and get involved in.
One student who got involved was Heba Zaki. She was distributing labeled water bottles in order to illustrate the unequal access Israelis and Palestinians have to clean drinking water, with bottles labeled “Israeli full of water and those labeled “Palestinian full of sand.
Like most people here I really didn t know that much about the Palestinian situation before I took this course, she said.
But now I feel like people should know about it, and this is a nice way to raise awareness.
As the throngs began emerging from lectures to have their lunch in the sunshine, more people became involved in the activities, taking photographs and chatting to students running the event about Palestine and what the various activities meant.
Another course lecturer, Imam Hamam, was as pleased for the students on her course as she was for the level of interest they were helping to generate.
The students that walked into our classes at the start of the semester – after studying [Palestine] for 3 months – came out motivated and involved, she told The Daily Star Egypt.
Originally, she says, Al Nakhba was only going to be commemorated at AUC with posters, but the motivation of her students was so high that it expanded into a campaign.
This enthusiasm, she hopes, will rub off on those who attended the event.
The problem isn t so much that [students] don t know about Palestine, it s that they aren t interested, and that s what we re trying to overcome.
This is an experiment in the sense that when people are presented with the knowledge of what s going on in Palestine, what do they do with that knowledge.
