12 May 2009
Tenweer – Palestinian Cultural Enlightenment Forum and the Women’s Union are working together to organize a campaign to boycott Israel in Nablus high schools.
By showing the movie The Exodus and the Odyssey made by Palestinian refugees Ismail Shammout and Tamam Al Akhal, Tenweer and the Women’s Union are visiting schools in Nablus to raise students’ awareness of the history of Palestine. At the same time they talk to students about how the Palestinian people can non-violently resist the Israeli occupation by boycotting Israeli goods.
They have visited 10 schools so far, and 100-200 students at each school have been able to watch The Exodus and the Odyssey. They will continue to show the film throughout the month of May. The campaign is a part of the commemoration of Al Nakba – 1948, the mass expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their cities and villages, the massacre of civilians, and the razing to the ground of hundreds of Palestinian villages.
Ismail Shammout is a famous Palestinian artist. He was one of the Palestinians who were expelled from their homeland in 1948. The Exodus and the Odyssey tells his story from the Nakba – when he and his family were uprooted from their home in the agricultural town of Lydda, and forced to flee and settle down in a refugee camp in Gaza. The films ends with the second intifada.