London: Gaza Biennale, 14 January

The Gaza Biennale is a collective project of artists from Gaza that has emerged into a global art event. Since April 2024, artists from Gaza began to gather together under a single project, to find ways to utilize art to resist this genocide. Many artists in Gaza have been working throughout this war, defying all challenges, creating works that remind us that art is essential to life.

On the evening of January 14th, Palestinians, Arabs, and their allies plan to come together to respond to the call from artists in and from Gaza with a collective viewing of their work. This gathering is being held outside the ICA at this date and time not only to view and hear the Gaza Biennale but to also protest and question the roles that British art institutions play in prolonging the genocide and enabling Israeli apartheid.

You can find out more about the Gaza Biennale at their website, and about their upcoming slate of events in London on their Instagram.

Virtual: Mustafa Barghouti on Palestine and the Struggle for Justice in 2025, 21 January

How do we sustain the solidarity movement for Palestinian liberation after more than a year of this genocide and in the face of western complacency, the resurgence of Donald Trump, and the defensive mechanisms of Zionist institutions?

Labour + Palestine, along with Arise: A Festival of Left Ideas, are co-convening an in-depth briefing and discussion with Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian physician, activist, and politician who serves as General Secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative.

This virtual event is being held at 1:30pm EST / 6:30pm GMT on January 21. Reserve your ticket here.

New York: Special Screening of Elia Suleiman’s The Time That Remains, January 14 & 27

The Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn is mounting two special screenings of Elia Suleiman’s semi-autobiographical film The Time That Remains (2009) on January 14 and 27. The film is, per the director’s own words, “a family portrait and a social portrait” of Palestinian life in the decades following the Arab-Israeli war of 1948.

The Time That Remains casually mounts its drama as a succession of anecdotes which gather into gently traced narrative strands that detail the history of a family and their neighbors living through the second half of a century of tumult. Suleiman, who appears, wordlessly, in the latter half of the film, has often seen his films compared to those of Jacques Tati and Buster Keaton. The comparisons are apt, as his mild-mannered presence, ordered mise-en-scene, and laconic realism pull forth the blackly-comic absurdity of life under occupation.

Suleiman has referred to his presence in the film as a sort of “wingless angel” offering a neutralized gaze, but this is not to say the film is without deep currents of melancholy or anger. These feelings are profoundly present, evinced through the exhausting accumulation of injustice and violence, staged upon a landscape of such striking beauty that it can be difficult to imagine it could sustain such suffering.

Find out more and reserve your tickets here.

Book of the Week

A love letter to Gaza. A heartbreaking testament to the beauty and courage of Palestinian people in the face of extraordinary brutality.

– Isabella Hammad

‘A city so rich in trees it looks like a cloth of brocade spread out upon the land.’  Shamsaddin al-Dimashqi, geographer (1256–1327)

This is Gaza – a place of humanity and creativity, rich in culture and industry. A place now utterly devastated, its entire population displaced by a seemingly endless onslaught, its heritage destroyed.

Daybreak in Gaza is a record of an extraordinary place and people, and of a culture preserved by the people themselves. Vignettes of artists, acrobats, doctors, students, shopkeepers and teachers offer stories of love, life, loss and survival. They display the wealth of Gaza’s cultural landscape and the breadth of its history.

Daybreak in Gaza humanises the people dismissed as statistics. It stands as a mark of resistance to the destruction and as a testament to the people of Gaza.

You can get the book from our Bookshop (US / UK).

Reading Roundup

Doctors Without Politics – Mary Turfah analyzes how the ethic of neutrality narrativizing the medical humanitarianism of Doctors Without Borders serves to obfuscate the politics of the genocide and the specific targeting of Gaza’s civilian populations.

To Resist Annihilation: Paternity, Inheritance, and Love against Surveillance Medicine – Zoé Samudzi analyzes the state-sanctioned weaponization of healthcare against Black Americans as well as against Palestinians, mandating both populations acquiesce to their own deaths.

A Father's Grief – Fatima Elzahraa Marwan Shaat profiles Abu Fadi, who lost his six children, daughter-in-law, two granddaughters, and wife to a single Israeli airstrike in October 2023.

From Gaza to California: The Flames that Connect Us All – Ahmad Ibsais explores how the carbon emissions of Israel’s war infrastructure fan the flames of the climate crisis at the heart of the wildfires that are burning in Los Angeles, highlighting the ecological necessity of dismantling Zionism.

Hasbara Crisis: Has Israel Already Lost its Global PR War? – Jessica Buxbaum argues that, despite Israel increasing its hasbara budget twenty-fold for 2025, Israel cannot correct its image in global public opinion after more than a year of its genocide.

Free Dr. Hussam Abu Safiyeh – Seraj Assi grounds the Israeli kidnapping of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiyeh in the ongoing and wholesale destruction of Gaza’s health infrastructure.

The Bleak Future: Will The Gaza Genocide Come to an End? – Reporting from Gaza, Salman Alzraiy argues that the current reality in Gaza – ongoing bombardment, military occupation, settler incursions – appear no different from Israel’s so-called “day-after” plans for Gaza.

In Yarmouk's Ruins, Palestinians Mourn the Cost of Syria's War – Mawada Bahah reports from the Yarmouk Camp for Palestinian refugees, established outside Damascus in 1957, which was all but totally destroyed by the Assad regime over the past decade.

How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza – Writing of the moral abdication of virtually all western institutions since the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Didier Fassin anticipates the future rebirth of language that will restore voice to the Palestinians.

Despite Repression, the Campus Movement for Palestine Remains Strong – Amira Jarmakani surveys the landscape of pro-Palestine campus protests in the US amid heightening crackdowns on student and faculty solidarity.

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