yesterday i attended the TEDxRamallah event in amman, an all-day marathon of speakers and performers participating from 3 cities (bethlehem (it had to be moved from ramallah), beirut, and amman) and all connected via live video streaming. the vast majority of the speakers were either palestinian in origin or now called palestine their home, and they shared inspirational stories of their personal successes in transcending the occupation.
for those of you who don’t know, TED is an american organization that puts on an annual convention in california during which people speak about their “ideas worth sharing.” in their spirit of what they call “radical openness” they have made all their lectures available for free online. and, in order to get the speakers’ inspirational messages to as wide an audience as possible, they have invited the online community to translate lectures from english into their home languages, which people now can enjoy as subtitles on the videos they stream from http://ted.com. TED has been such a success that there have been hundreds of TEDx events, or independently organized, TED inspired/endorsed events around the world. TEDxRamallah was one such event.
but its tri-city character was unique and an important component of the message this event sought to send. due to recently-imposed travel restrictions by israel in response to renewed violence (as well as long-standing bans on entry for many palestinians), many scheduled speakers were unable to make it into the west bank for the event. and so they transcended (buzzword of the day), using that ever-powerful tool called the internet, and showed up anyway, albeit in beirut or amman.
there were over 20 speakers and a handful of artists performing, including the infinitely wise alice walker (the color purple); palestine’s first hip hop crew and the startlingly clever DAM; huwaida arraf, founder of the international solidarity movement, which has been twice nominated for the nobel peace prize; and numerous other scholars, activists, CEOs, entrepreneurs, etc., all with an important and inspiring story or idea.
i have to say that my favorite lecture came from a woman named julia bacha, who is a brazilian of lebanese descent and an award-winning filmmaker. she talked about her 2009 film “budrus,” which told the story of the village by the same name in palestine that successfully staged a non-violent protest to resist the construction of the israeli dividing wall that, if built, would divide and demolish the town. she played for us the film’s trailer, and now i want nothing more than to see that film. it showed palestinians and israelis, men and women and even children, peacefully resisting the demolition of homes and olive trees (several women actually put their bodies between a bulldozer and an olive tree to keep it from being uprooted) and the construction of one of the most glaring symbols of oppression today.
bacha said that after her film came out it received a lot of attention from mass media. this surprised her, not because she didn’t have faith that budrus’ story would strike a chord with audiences, but because when budrus launched its non-violent campaign about 7 years earlier it received virtually no mainstream media coverage. she asked a journalist she knew why this was so, and he said something bacha found shocking coming from a respected and established journalist: at the height of the second intifada, budrus’ story “wasn’t part of the narrative at the time.” meaning because budrus showed nonviolence from palestinians, showed palestinians and israelis working together at a time when the dominant message was that palestinians were all stone-throwing terrorists, it wasn’t incorporated into the intifada’s history.
ms. bacha linked this back to a term she learned from a psychologist friend of hers: confirmation bias. this principle states that humans have the tendency to be attracted to, and accept, stories that confirm our narrative of understanding. this is related to another phenomenon bacha described for us called cognitive dissonance, or the uncomfortable feeling we get when we receive new information that challenges or runs counter to our internal narrative. when this happens, your brain actually physically and chemically generates/experiences pain, and you are forced to either ignore the pain-inducing information, or rewrite your narrative to incorporate it.
ms. bacha enlightened us the work of norman holland, who is a neurologist who studies the effect of literature on the brain (cool, right?!). he proved that there is neurological evidence that people, at least briefly, accept and believe stories. there is proof that people respond better to stories than to facts. that is exactly what julia bachus has tried to integrate into her filmmaking company JustVision: to use story-telling as a means of challenging people’s narratives, and to provide them with that moment of pain in the hopes that they will rewrite their narratives to incorporate a new bit of truth.
my other favorite presentation was by khaled al sabawi, a palestinian-canadian engineer and the father of geothermal energy in the middle east, who envisioned not a one- or two-state solution to the palestinian-israeli conflict, but a “green state solution.”
the palestinian territories are among the most densely populated in the entire world, and given their extremely high birth rates, growing denser by the minute. by 2050 they are projected to be more densely populated than bangladesh. palestinians also pay among the highest prices for energy in the entire middle east. so high that it has become unaffordable for many. but with the enormous population growth expected in the territories, new buildings will be needed, buildings that account for the largest segment of energy consumption in palestine (through heating/cooling). to make things worse, palestine is almost entirely (97%) dependent on israel for its energy.
and so al sabawi envisioned a solution that was not only extremely sustainable environmentally, but also would give the palestinian territories more energy independence. he titled his lecture: “keeping palestine cool: a different kind of underground movement.” his solution lay underneath the surface, 2 meters underneath to be exact.
the earth, solid ground, absorbs 50% of the sun’s energy and stores it under the surface. in the middle east, at 2 meters below the surface, the earth’s temperature remains constant throughout the year. in ramallah, it stays at a constant temperature of 17 degrees celsius/63 degrees farenheit. al sabawi’s geothermal system looks like this: a series of pipes pump water 2-plus meters below a house or other building. in the winter, the below-ground temp. of 63 degrees F is warmer than room temperature above ground. the water, when it is pumped below ground, absorbs this energy and carries it back up to heat the house. in the summer, it’s just the opposite: the 63 degrees F is cooler than the above-ground temp, and when water is pumped below-ground it loses heat and cools the house.
the only hitch in this ingenious plan is that the initial cost for installing this kind of system is very high, though it is a wise investment that more than pays for itself in the long run. in the US or canada, such a system would take 9-12 years to pay off. al sabawi recognized that this would never work in palestine, and so he took measures to make it more cost efficient and sustainable at the same time. for example, his system uses limestone powder as grout, which is a by-product of the limestone cutting industry already in place in palestine. a great recycling of materials, and a cost-cutter that helped reduce the payoff time from 9-12 years down to 3 or 4. so far, al sabawi’s company has installed 3 of these systems in buildings in ramallah, and it has cut their energy consumption by a whopping 75%!!
he spoke to the challenges of operating a business under occupation. one of the biggest challenges, he said, was making it a sustainable business in palestine; he finds it difficult to hire educated palestinians. this is not from lack of talent. on the contrary, palestinians are some of the most educated in the middle east. the problem is foreign aid: the amount of money being pumped into NGOs enables them to offer salaries 3-4 times higher than the rest of the private sector.
the TEDxRamallah event was long, sometimes frustrating due to technical difficulties, and was sometimes (literally) a pain in my butt (it was hard to sit for 12 hours!!). but it was at times extremely enlightening and indeed inspiring. the event is already up on the website (http://www.tedxramallah.com/eventday/) and i encourage all of you to check it out!
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