Linah Alsaafin and Heba Awadallah are students at Birzeit University near Ramallah in the West Bank, who started a blog together a year ago. Called Life On Bir Zeit Campus, the blog takes an incisive and entertaining look at student life and Palestinian politics amongst other topics. In this post Global Voices interviews Linah Alsaafin – who jokes that blogging saved her from more destructive paths… Linah Alsaafin (photo used with permission) First of all, Linah, can you tell us a little about your family situation – as I know it is complicated. My family and I are holders of British passports as a result of spending about 10 years there (my first ten years!). After brief stints in Abu Dhabi and Virginia, USA, my parents decided it was time to go home. When we first moved to Palestine, back in 2004, we were living on one year renewable work visas, as my dad is a journalist (his credentials had to be issued by Israel). I am a third-generation refugee; my grandparents were ethnically cleansed from their village Al-Falujah – which lies between Gaza and Hebron and is today known to Israelis as Kiryat Gat – in 1949, a year after Israel's so-called war of independence. My dad's family were shunted to the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza, where my grandparents are still living. My mother is originally from Ramallah's twin city Al-Bireh, and that is where we settled. A year later in 2005, reality caught up with us when my traveling older brother, the only one of my siblings to be born in Khan Younis, was told by Israeli authorities on the Allenby Bridge that he couldn't cross through to Amman in Jordan because of his Gaza ID. The next four years were tough on him, since he couldn't leave Ramallah or even its outskirts for fear of being arrested by the IDF. As you know, Palestinians with a Gaza ID are not permitted to be in the West Bank, and vice versa (unless you have a special permit from the military, which are notoriously difficult to come by). We felt bad whenever we went to Haifa or Akka, visiting the rest of our homeland that is now dubbed “Israel”, because he was missing out. In 2009, our world came crashing down, when my dad, whose movement around Palestine was made easier twofold because of the foreign visa and press card, was arrested at the Erez checkpoint on one of his routine visits to Gaza. The Israelis revoked his credentials, dismissed his visa, and told him that they knew he had a Gaza ID and would henceforth be treated as one. We now obviously couldn't renew our visas, so we finally opted to receive our Israeli-issued IDs, which took away so many of our basic human rights – freedom of movement, ability of my family to stay together, etc. It was hard to accept that my dad would never return to the West Bank. To make matters worse, my mother was inexplicably issued a Gaza ID, even though she still had her old West Bank ID. My other brother, sister, and I were issued West Bank IDs, culminating in our unbelievable calamity. This meant that she could not travel to Amman with us to visit my dad, who had finally settled there. If she did, the Israelis would take one look at her Gaza ID and deport her straight to Gaza. She immediately got in touch with the Israeli organization Gisha, who strove to get her to visit my dad and come back “legitimately”. That year was pretty shitty for all of us, but finally, in late 2010, my mother won her case of reverting her ID back to a West Bank one. [For the full story read the post “Reunification of My Parents“.] What made you decide to start a blog? It was about a year ago, back in February 2010. Remi Kanazi, the Palestinian-American poet, came to Ramallah to give the first part of a spoken word poetry workshop for the Palestine Writing Workshop. The PWW threw its first Poetry of Palestine night at La Vie Café, where Remi and Tala Aburahmeh performed. My friend Heba Awadallah and I were simply blown away by Remi's performance. He articulated so many fundamental points of Palestinian identity, the Israeli occupation, and imperialism so eloquently and angrily that there was no question of not being inspired, particularly since it echoed our very own sentiments and frustrations, inadequately expressed. We decided that we had to have a commodious outlet, or Freudian theory would have dictated that our frustrations would then be channeled in dangerous ways such as participating in normalizing dialogue with our Jewish Israeli cousins or becoming suicide bombers. A blog was decided. We're both a bit technologically challenged, but Blogger assured us that it would be easy.