Ramallah / Leigh Cuen for PNN - Armed with a box of black spray paint and a camera, Yousef Nijim and Faris Arouri are fighting for Palestine.

Arouri, a Ramallah native from a political family, helped found and now serves as chairperson of the Peace and Freedom Youth Forum. For the past two years he has also served as the spearhead and photographer for the Send a Message project.
 
In the beginning, Arouri used his arsenal of family friends and professional connections to get the word out about a collaborative experiment between the PFF and a Dutch NGO to use the Wall as a tool of nonviolent resistance. He spent hours every week calling different media outlets asking for press coverage – not of the armed resistance or settler violence – but of a few men spray painting on a wall. Two years later, international journalists are the ones hounding Arouri for an interview. His unique project has been featured by practically "every major media outlet," said Arouri, including BBC, Al Jazeera, CNN, and Time Magazine. "Media is contagious," Arouri said. The “Send a Message” website is now receiving messages from across the globe. "We've got messages from Fiji," he said. “We feel great.” 
 
In fact the initiative has been so successful that the “Send a Message Foundation” has decided not to stop after the two years they had originally planned. They will continue operating until the summer of 2010, after which Arouri and his foundation "wants to implement more projects within the same context."
 
Over the past two years the “Send a Message Foundation” has received over a thousand messages from contributors who paid 30 euro each to have their dictation sprayed onto the Wall in Nijim's pristine, free-hand script. "He got used to it. Trust me, he didn't start this way," Arouri said about Nijim's penmanship. Arouri then teased Nijim about his spelling in English "It's known world wide now," said Nijim, referring to jokes circulating on the internet via political bloggers. "I do misspell a lot."
 
The internet has played a crucial role in the success of Send a Message's project, as all the messages are paid for and submitted online. Since it's founding, the initiative's website has had over a half million unique visitors.
 
During our meeting Nijim dropped his box of spray paint to the ground and began working. They had seven pages worth of new messages to paint on the wall Friday - all in midnight-black. The messages are individual and personal, a kind of "say anything" platform for the global tech-savvy masses. They are not always in English, a spattering of European languages and, even less frequently, Hebrew or Arabic, can be seen across the campaign's trail of completed work.
 
Messages have ranged from marriage proposals to a 1,998 word letter by South African religious scholar and former anti-apartheid activist, Farid Esack. One notable message Arouri spoke of with a smile was from one neighbor's dog to another commenting on the lovely weather and asking him to "come out and play" signed "woof daddy the dog." As long as the messages are not inciting violence or advertising a business that Arouri feels would be inappropriate for his initiative, anything goes here. 
 
The unobstructed summer sun had already begun to seep into their noticeably flushed skin.  A salty sheen coated faces and forearms and lips were constantly being licked. No one is paying these Palestinian men to spend their weekends in the sun taking stage directions from scrutinizing strangers while they spray-paint blurbs onto the Wall. All the funds received for their work goes towards purchasing supplies, spray-paint, gas for the car, and towards non-profit initiatives for Palestinians. Namely, the founding of a youth cultural center in the West Bank’s Birzeit, which they hope will someday soon become a self-run resource for Palestinian youth. The work Nijim and Arouri do with “Send a Message” and other like-minded projects is completely voluntary and is done in addition to their jobs and family obligations. Through both organizational work and example, they hope to revive volunteering amongst the youth of Palestine. "The concept of doing something for nothing," said Nijim.
 
When Nijim began working with the “Send a Message” project, his family had reason to fear harassment from Israeli forces. Nijim said how his childhood home had been demolished as punishment for the political participation of his uncles in the first Intifada. "The UN was kind enough to give us a tent, it was a nice green one," said Nijim.  "My mom was scared in the beginning." 
 
But this time around, the Nijim family need not fear aggression by the Israeli military in the same way. The public nature of this work has changed the rules of the game. "I won't say harassed," Arouri replied when asked if Israeli forces had ever accosted them. "I would say a few face to face encounters. But the whole project is about media, so they stay way from us."
 
When Arouri and Nijim were arrested during one of their "encounters," the first thing Nijim told his interrogator was, "I take my coffee black." Nijim was honest and upfront with his questioners. He said he told them, between sips of coffee, that, "I am against the Wall and I'm trying to do something against it, to tell the whole world." The Israeli interrogator told him not to come back. He could plant trees in Ramallah all he wanted, but he was never to return to the Wall, an impossible feat considering the Wall swipes through a large portion of the West Bank. "I told him I'll try, but I won't promise. And well," Nijim laughed. "I tried.”
 
"It really goes to show the power of media," Arouri said. "When they see a camera…" He made a squishing noise with his lips to signify that the soldier's desire to hassle or arrest them is suddenly squashed. Arouri said that project has not been about commercializing the Wall or legitimizing it, but about using it as a tool to instigate discussion and connection. "The messages bond people to this place," he said.  Nijim said that he believes engaging with the Wall is the best way to resist it. "If you don't deal with it, it won't be gone," he said. "If you can't laugh about it with your friends, it won't go...We still have hope."
 
The goal of the “Send a Message” project is "getting non-political material about Palestine into international media" – to humanize Palestinians for the average citizens of the international community, according to Arouri. Nijim agrees. "By putting a spotlight on what's happening here, for the whole world," Nijim hopes people abroad can realize "there is something more behind it.”

Arouri has been the subject of harsh and personal criticism from fellow Palestinians, especially academics from the University in Birzeit, who view the initiative as an attempt to commercialize and profit from the Wall. But other reactions on the ground have been inspiring. Nijim gushed about the residents of Al Ram and how deeply impacted he was by their gratitude and hospitality. "I don't live near the Wall, I can't say anything," he said. But for these people whose day to day lives have been affected, the attention drawn by “Send a Message” has made wall-side communities "feel that someone care about them," said Nijim.
 
Arouri believes that "of course" the Wall will come down, and sooner rather than later. "History has already proven that segregation and oppression, apartheid cannot sustain...not only the Wall will collapse but this whole situation will not sustain much longer." Arouri also said that anti-occupation sentiment is rising in Europe at a rate that he believes "should be alarming for Israel."
 
"It's exhausting, frustrating at some point," Arouri said about the public nature of his projects. But when asked why he feels so driven to campaign for Palestinians, Arouri paused for a moment in disbelief. "There is no 'why' for such things....it gives our lives meaning," he answered.  In this way the men of the “Send a Message” initiative give their lives for Palestine again and again, every morning that they load the car with boxes of spray paint. 

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