Israel’s assault on Gaza has been described as genocide by experts. Its overall control of Palestine is similarly viewed as apartheid. As famine sets in and world governments continue to support Israeli war crimes, public opinion is one of the few things that might alter the fate of oppressed Palestinians.
The opinion of public figures holds so much sway. Yet we still don’t know where many actually stand on the matter.
This is a project to gather information about the positions of public figures and people of professional standing on Palestine.
We use research and polite questioning to find out where they stand.
Because the kids will ask…
Here is what we’ve found out so far.
We focus on one public figure at a time. You can support by helping find out the below information, either through existing resources or by asking the person directly/publicly.
To make the project manageable we ask the following questions.
Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza?
Is Israel an apartheid state?
Do you back the boycott of Israel?
What have you done for Palestine?
The more people know about the project the more likely we are to get the info.
This is a crowd-sourced project. We rely on your contributions. Please make sure your contributions follow our data format (i.e. as answers to our four questions above), have proper evidence for every claim, do not include defamatory language, and have been researched through polite enquiries.
We specifically need your help to:
1) Select prominent people (and their contact details) to research. You can share suggestions as direct messages, or comments under relevant posts on Mastodon.
2) Politely approach these people, by email or otherwise. Send an initial message without information about the project, just to check that the account is active. We can provide email templates to help.
3) Follow up with them to ensure they have had a chance to respond. In some cases, multiple follow-ups from different people in unison may be effective.
4) Send us their responses with proof of correspondence (screenshots and forwarded emails).
Small contributions from lots of people will help us make a recognized database of support, silence and complicity.
It is quite simple to add to the database on the website Github where it is stored. We prefer people do this though it is very slightly more technical. These are the steps:
1) create a GitHub account
2) make a copy of the database by visiting this page https://github.com/whereyoustood/publicfiguresonpalestine and (technical term you don’t need to understand) then make a fork of the repository.
3) visit that copy at github.com/YOURUSERNAME/publicfiguresonpalestine.csv and click the Edit this file button (pencil symbol on the right).
4) for each person you would like to add an entry for, you should add a new line to the file. Your line should have information for each of the six columns in the table, with each column separated by a comma:
Name, Profession/Domain, Is Israel committing genocide?, Is it apartheid?, Do you back the boycott of Israel?, What have you done for Palestine?
for example:
Mr. Example Celebrity Politician, Singer and Politician, Opinion unknown, Person denies it is apartheid (archive.org link to undeniable evidence), Rejects the boycott of Israel (archive.org link to undeniable evidence), Nothing in support.
5) Now create a request for us to merge your entry into the main database. To do that click on the Pull request option. Please email us any additional notes about your entry.
6) We will see the pull request and merge the entry once we have checked it.
Send us a message here: https://kolektiva.social/@whereyoustood
Email coming soon.
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