Pressenza was invited to participate in the Palestine International Forum for Media and Communication that took place on May 18-19, 2016 in Istanbul, Turkey. Our representative, Marianella Kloka, was given the opportunity to address with a short speech the audience, mainly Arab journalists and media consultants, during the final session: “Priorities of Palestinian Media”.
First of all I wish to thank you for your kind invitation. On behalf of the international humanist press agency PRESSENZA, I want to express our deep condolences to every single family that lost mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters during all the years of the on-going Israeli-Palestine conflict. To my understanding as a member of this international community that promotes peace and active non-violence, living for so many generations under a state of war and occupation must produce very heavy feelings and it is an experience that doesn’t only mark your past and present but also marks our past and our present as humanity as a whole. The same thing happens with every past and present violent conflict that mark in a negative way our history and our global consciousness, bringing fear to our hearts and making it difficult for our minds to be able to even imagine different living conditions. Therefore it is our duty to try, in collaboration with you and with every person on this planet that is committed to peace, to find a way out of this violent and vicious cycle.
You see, we strongly believe that the Israeli-Palestinian issue and the way governments treat it, fuelling it with more weapons, more attacks, more deaths, more hate, more revenge and again more weapons, is part of the expression of a violent system that wishes, one way or another, to control land and natural resources and, most importantly, to keep massively people under a state of constant fear, minimising the opportunities and the possibilities that human consciousness has towards liberation. If for just a moment you raise your look from the conflict that has been destroying your lives for decades and get a wider look at what is happening in the planet as we speak, you will be able to understand what I am telling you.
War zones and nuclear threats are everywhere. Europe, lives under an economic recession and keeps people under the same fear that makes every projection for the future almost impossible. Africa and some parts of Asia suffer from poverty, lack of basic services in health, social welfare and education. I dare say, this is the reality for almost every corner of the Earth. So, this system, as it was also stated yesterday during Orlando Perez’s speech, is in a severe crisis as all kinds of violence, pain and suffering are its characteristics.
On the other hand, we believe that as years go by, more and more people from every single country around the globe feel and share this interpretation. And there are not only signs of this but also actions that prove it. Social initiatives towards the construction of totally new forms of social life appear everyday. They are not based on any state or government. We talk about simple people who get together and try to find a way out. Some politicians are bright examples who understand this trend and multiply it with their actions too. If you browse our pages, which can be read in 7 languages – even though not in Arabic for the moment – you will be convinced that there is another movement, a grassroot movement that gets stronger day by day. I feel that we must bet on this new sensitivity.
There are some elements that help this international movement to grow:
· People have lost faith in the governments and in the system; politicians who are part of this movement also lose faith in their political parties, at least in those structured in the traditional way.
· People are more and more interconnected through the use of social media and can share or even leak more information than before,
· There is a rising spirituality in the minds and in the hearts of these people, which seems to validate the words of poets, philosophers, scientists, even mystics, who talked about peace, harmony, liberation, energy and the energy flow, and generally gave us the possibility to “think out of the box”.
I call all of you, members of the Palestinian media, friends journalists, to spend half an hour a the day to start exercising this global look. More than that, I call you to bring this look within Palestine and send to us incidents and initiatives that try to bring light and hope in the constant darkness. Every mutual initiative that promotes actively a nonviolent resolution coming from both sides of the conflict is important. Keep in mind that this call will be also transmitted to the members of the Israeli media, to every single Israeli journalist who still keeps his or her heart open to a new world. This is not an action that only you have to do. This daily exercise that I suggest to you, is a daily exercise for the “other side” too, whichever this other side may be in this conflict.
Last but not least: don’t feel, not even for a second, that in this daily task you are alone because you are not. There is a big, very big family, a “new tribe” growing, full of solidarity, full of dreamers and visionaries. More than that: we are waiting for your local input, we are waiting to be enriched by your initiatives, your experience, your daily actions towards a nonviolent and liberated world. The Arab world of journalists who will find this as a major challenge is more than welcome to our global, humanist community, that sets the human being as the centre of any action and every preoccupation.
