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Grassroots Al-Quds is running this campaign to create the Arabic version of our book Wujood - The Grassroots Guide to Jerusalem. Wujood tells the Palestinian perspective on Jerusalem and promotes tourism in the marginalized eastern part of the city. Moreover, Wujood is an income generating tool for the organization, and part of our strategy to break free of conditional funding. This also helps our efforts to reach self-sustainability, a task which became extremely challenging due to the Covid-19 crisis. In the days prior to the pandemic, we were able to generate income through our books and tours, and we were hoping to significantly increase this income through expanding our basket of products with the new book and new tours over the past year. However, those activities had to stop because of the halting of tourism. We believe in the power of the crowds, our peer grassroots communities around the world who share our values and support our struggle against the Israeli occupation and policies of displacement. 

Please join and help us make a bigger impact in Al-Quds!

40% of Palestinians in Al-Quds made a living through tourism. COVID-19 changed that.

Al-Quds is a top tourist destination. It is one of the oldest cities in the world, with a rich history and high religious importance to billions of people around the world. For this reason, over 4 million tourists have been visiting the city in recent years and the numbers have been increasing over the past decade at a steady rate and were expected to continue in this pattern before the breakout of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

In normal days, 40 percent of the Palestinians of Al-Quds make their living doing jobs related to tourism, despite the oppressive policies designed by the occupation authorities to suffocate the Palestinian economy in Jerusalem. The tourism sector in the eastern part of Jerusalem is far from its potential, and its development in the Palestinian communities is hindered by the many policies imposed by the occupation. Moreover, the Zionist propaganda continuously and bluntly manipulates information to hide Palestinian communities from tourists. This causes a significant loss of income to the community that already faces a poverty rate of over 70 percent. Tourists do not visit most Palestinian communities in Jerusalem, and as a result, they do not witness the occupation and its implications on Palestinians in Jerusalem and most of their money goes to the Israeli markets.

Help them recover. Help us tell their stories.

Grassroots Al-Quds is a platform for research and community mobilization in Jerusalem. In recent years, our focus has been Emancipatory tourism: we research, mobilize and strategize around tourism with the lead of the communities we are here to serve. Our website provides detailed information about the history and reality of Al-Quds' Palestinian communities. We give tours across communities to show how the occupation policies manifest on the ground (available online now). We create maps that reflect Jerusalem and its issues. We published two editions of Wujood – the grassroots guide to Al-Quds in English. We are developing the Wujood mobile application, and coordinating a community-led project to promote tourism in the marginalized Palestinian communities of Al-Quds.

First we aim to strengthen the tourism infrastructure in our communities to improve their capacity to host tourists hence improving their economic situation: the basis for any other development. Economic strength for the communities would also provide them with needed extra space to organize their struggle for liberation. Secondly, build the knowledge and spread the information about the reality of their lives through an increasing exposure to the tourists who would see and hear them directly and not through manipulated media.  The true information provided to the visitors of the city, would help them to directly and responsibly support the communities of Al-Quds. 

​Spread their stories to the Arabic-speaking world, and support these Palestinians.

The next tool in this emancipatory tourism basket is the Arabic version of Wujood. We are part of the struggle against normalizing with the Israeli occupation especially by the Arab world, but we also understand the value of Al-Quds to Arabs everywhere, and the purpose of this book would be to bring the experience of the city  to them in the best way possible. Needless to say, it is our duty to do so for to the millions of Palestinians who cannot access their capital, whether they are a few kilometers away in the West Bank and Gaza, or further away in the refugees camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan as well as the rest of the refugees who are spread around the world.

Some of the Perks: