Check out the live recording of the PalFest Podcast, featuring a conversation between Tareq Baconi and Ta-Nehisi Coates. ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏

Weekly Dispatch, 24 November

From the PalFest Podcast:

Tareq Baconi and Ta-Nehisi Coates on Fire in Every Direction

In this special live recording of The PalFest Podcast direct from Middle Church NYC, we bring you the launch of Fire in Every Direction: A Memoir, Tareq Baconi’s singular coming-of-age story about queer and political awakening from within the Palestinian diaspora. Baconi was joined by Ta-Nehisi Coates in a conversation about personal and political memoir.

You can watch the whole conversation on our Youtube channel, and you can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Patreon and everywhere else podcasts live.

Get your own copy of Fire in Every Direction here (US) or pre-order it here (UK).

Find out more about the PalFest Podcast, and look out for past (and future!) episodes, on our website.

 

Read Palestine Week, 29 November–5 December

Join Publishers for Palestine for this year’s READ PALESTINE WEEK, seven days when people around the world read – publicly and in community – as part of the global resistance to the genocide of the Palestinian people. To this end, publishers, librarians, & booksellers will share free reads, host events, and recommend books.

This year, Publishers for Palestine will have a particular focus on raising funds to support Palestinian writers in Gaza. As in past years, Read Palestine Week will also include free books and events.

Visit Publishers for Palestine to find out more about READ PALESTINE WEEK, including for virtual and in-person events, readings, free books and zines, and more.

 

Bethlehem: Dahaleez Collective, 3 December

In 2025 OTO Sound Museum and Dar Jacir for Art and Research partnered together to establish the first Palestinian art prize dedicated to sound and listening. The 2025 prize was awarded to Dahaleez Collective, a Gaza-based research art collective whose work sits at the intersection of sound, narrative, and political memory. Dahaleez is a multifaceted sonic-arts archive, collecting field recordings, oral testimonies, and historical material to counter erasure, evoke memory, and open futures. Rooted in Gaza yet resonating globally, Dahaleez create spaces of listening that amplify collective experience.

For the OTO Award x Dar Jacir for Art and Research, Dahaleez produced a new sound piece entitled From-To which testifies and reimagines one of Gaza City’s most vital arteries, Al-Rashid Street. Intertwining past, present, and future in a multidimensional sonic narrative, the piece weaves together sonic fragments, voices, and orchestral compositions to reconstruct the collective memory of the street. The piece draws on sonic matter and reflections gathered during workshops held by Dahaleez Collective in 2024-2025, where artists and cultural workers discussed the meaning and memory of the street. Original sounds from personal archives were woven together with music and symbolic sonic gestures to evoke layers of history and lived experience. At its core, the composition includes a musical piece by Mahmoud Abuwarda, originally written during the 11-day war in 2021 and later produced in 2025 with Lisbon Symphonic Orchestra. From–To becomes an auditory journey, an archive of place and time resonating between what was, what is, and what might be.

The work, conceived as a corridor through time, is accompanied by a bilingual booklet in English and Arabic, guiding listeners through the voices and narratives entwined into the piece. You can listen to it virtually now.

SAVE THE DATE  - BETHLEHEM PREMIERE ON DECEMBER 3

From–To will will be exhibited at at Dar Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem on December 3rd - presented by part of the jury Nicolas Jaar, Dirar Kalash and Emily Jacir.

Find out more about the premiere from Dar Jacir. And, if you’re not in Bethlehem, be sure to give the piece a listen.

 

LONDON: Race and the Question of Palestine, 2 December

What role does the issue of race play in understanding the question of Palestine? Drawing on a book of that title edited by the main speaker Lana Tatour (with Ronit Lentin), this event at LSE focuses on the colonisation of Palestine as something which – like other imperial and colonial projects – cannot be understood outside the grammar of race.

Race is the great unspoken in the field, yet it operates as a technology of power and colonial rule, a political and economic structure, and above all as set of legal and discursive practices. The law’s coercive power in Palestine draws its strength from, and is made sense of by, an understanding of the operation of race.

Lana Tatour will be in conversation with Neve Gordon, Ayça Çubukçu, and Ralph Wilde. The event is free but prior registration is required.

 

Book of the Week

Palestine and Feminist Liberation is a gorgeous and incisive vision for liberation grounded in care of our shared planet, Indigenous feminisms, and the centring of community over the individual. This is essential reading for our present moment and for feminists, scholars, students, and organizers concerned with the liberation of Palestine and a future outside of settler-colonial conquest.

–Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

How can we explain that Israel, despite its genocidal attacks in Gaza and its violation of international law, remains immune to criticism? Why do many feminists in the Global North, so quick to denounce the impact of "Islamic fundamentalism" on Palestinian women, remain silent when it comes to decrying the gendered impact of Israeli apartheid in Palestine?

In Palestine and Feminist Liberation, Palestinian scholar-activist Nada Elia argues that Palestinian women, far from being powerless and submissive, have long played an important role in resisting their people’s dispossession, first by the British Mandate, then by Israel. Elia discusses the challenges diaspora Palestinian feminists face when organizing on Turtle Island, where the dominant discourse has long upheld the Zionist narrative, steeped in Orientalism and anti-Palestinian racism. She articulates a vision for liberation grounded in Indigenous feminism, with its focus on collective empowerment, rather than individual advancement.

Palestine and Feminist Liberation is out now from Between the Lines Books.

 

Media Roundup

The World Then and Now – Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta offers a prognosis of the social, political, and economic transformations that the world has undergone over the past two years, revealing Arab collaborationism, the imperial dimensions of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the force of capitalism, and the shortcomings of the global Palestine solidarity movement. 

Outside In – Nick Malherbe and Shahnaaz Suffla consider Zionism's inside/outside border-making project from the perspective of South Africa, arguing that it has reinvigorated social movements in South Africa with an internationalist ethos, heightening local contradictions in ways that run parallel to other nodes of global anti-Zionist struggle.

The Deluge: Gaza's Tunnels and the Esoteric Path – Lama Suleiman considers the metaphorical and literal significance of Gaza's tunnels through conceptions of being, knowledge, freedom, martyrdom, and disappearance, contemplating the tunnel as an epistemology through its relationship to the state, the law, and what may lie beyond.

To Fight Against the Annihilation of Thought: An Introduction to Of Weapons and Words – Faisal Al-Asaad writes, in the introduction to the new volume Of Weapons and Words, of the need to engage with and translate knowledge from and by Palestinian writers that is adequate to the scale and urgency of the genocide in Gaza and the ongoing Nakba of Palestine.

Trump’s UNSC Resolution 2803: Repackaged Colonial Rule – Yara Hawari describes how the newly-passed UN Security Council plan for Gaza relieves Israel of any responsibilities for its genocide in Gaza and revitalizes American imperial power in the Middle East.

The UN Embraces Colonialism: Unpacking the Security Council’s Mandate for the U.S. Colonial Administration of Gaza – On the new UN Security Council Plan, Craig Mokhiber writes that “the UN Security Council has granted a veto over Palestinian self-determination to the U.S., the Israeli regime’s chief sponsor and co-perpetrator of the genocide.”

The Life and Legacy of Sion Assidon – Driss Ksikes, Khalid Lyamlahy, Arthur Asseraf, and Michèle Sibony eulogize Sion Assidon, a Moroccan Jewish leftist for whom Palestine was a lodestar and who considered Morocco’s decolonization to be inextricable from the liberation of Palestine. Translations by Omar Berrada.

Trapped by Yellow – Malak Hijazi writes about how the so-called yellow line marking the boundary of Israel’s military withdrawal in Gaza has fluctuated and changed, leaving Palestinians subject to the whims of soldiers who may kill anyone they deem to have crossed the line.

How the UK Media Became Complicit in the Gaza Genocide – Evan Robins interviews Peter Oborne about the revisionist history of the BBC’s Gaza coverage and the British media’s role in the UK’s support for genocide.

First Raze Gaza, Then Build a Playground for Global Capital – Abe Asher examines inchoate plans, such as Trump’s widely-derided “Gaza Riviera,” to use Gulf money to develop Gaza and to incorporate it into a hierarchized global economy under the aegis of Western technocrats.

Pity and Fear – Hisham Matar situates a reading of a particular image of Israeli war crimes against the grain of the Western art canon to consider the steadfastness of Palestinian life in the face of Israel’s deepening violence: “What is clear is that Israel has lost much more than can ever be compensated by theft and murder, and notwithstanding this, or perhaps exactly because of it, the fanatical temptation for it to engage in more theft and murder has never been more irresistible.”

Weapons of Willpower: Hamas and Islamic Jihad on Trump's Gaza Plan – Jeremy Scahill and Jawa Ahmad report on how two of the leading factions of the Palestinian resistance in Gaza assess the state of the so-called “ceasefire” and the UN Security Council’s resolution over Gaza, which will retrench Israeli-American dominance over Gaza.

The Death that Keeps on Going – Kate Greenberg reports from Umm al-Khair, a village in the West Bank facing impending demolition by the Israeli government, where an Israeli settler shot and killed the prominent activist Awdah Hathaleen.

Future is a Weapon – In this hybrid essay, Devin George Atallah theorizes “infrastructures of healing and desire [that] are already present in the liberated future where Palestinians have already won.”

 

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