I Hope You Enjoy My Life!

Sandy Tolan Last Modified: 05 Mar 2011 14:55 GMT

On a cool January evening at the height of Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution, Najwan Berekdar and a few friends were sitting at a smoky café in Ramallah, puffing on water pipes and strategising. “We were talking about what’s happening in Tunisia, and we decided, maybe this is the momentum - we should use it,” Berekdar remembers weeks later from her office at Sharek, a youth-oriented Palestinian NGO. “We were, like, five people. We were sitting with our laptops and we said, ‘Okay, let’s make an event.’ We wanted something to encourage people to go out.”

Within days, masses of Egyptians began filling Tahrir Square, and 27-year-old Berekdar, her friends and like-minded Palestinian youths were even more inspired. “We wanted to send this message that it is time for us to do something. And obviously we can do it. Look at other people. If they managed to do it, we can do it.”

The demonstrations these Palestinian youths helped organise were quickly banned, sometimes with clubs, by a Palestinian Authority (PA) with deep historic and political ties to the Tunisian and Egyptian dictatorships. But then other groups began forming their own demonstrations. And Berekdar and her friends, through email loops and a face-to-face “thinking group” of about 20 academics and intellectuals, organised new protests. “We were suppressed by the PA a second time and a third time,” she says. Soon Palestinian authorities began to investigate the group.