Al-Aqsa Flood, Two Years On

By now the statistics are too familiar, too speculative, indeed too vulgar, to recapitulate here, as we approach the two-year anniversary of October 7. Countless martyrs known and unknown, whole lineages, entire worlds, decimated in the blink of an eye by imperial weapons designed to exact maximal suffering and destruction. The incalculable cost of the Zionist genocide in Gaza as Israel seeks to consummate its vision for the Palestinian people: total eradication.

But with the two-year anniversary of Al-Aqsa Flood upon us, the two-year anniversary of a prison break that tore the world in two, let us remember that Gaza and its people have ushered in the last throes of a dying colonialism. In commemorating this anniversary, we note that Gaza teaches us that the world empire made can be unmade, that it is our collective duty to unmake it.

Below we share “Silence for Gaza,” a piece of prose by the late Mahmoud Darwish, translated into English by Sinan Antoon, from the collection The Hesitant Homecomer (حيرة العائد), published by Riad Al Rayyes Books in 2007. Darwish celebrates Gaza’s resistance but argues that “we do injustice to Gaza when we turn it into a myth.” Mythologies aside, Darwish shows, Gaza’s indomitable spirit has always prevailed. After all, Gaza was there long before Israel existed, and it will remain there after Israel ceases to exist too.

Silence for Gaza by Mahmoud Darwish

translated by Sinan Antoon

Gaza is far from its relatives and close to its enemies, because whenever Gaza explodes, it becomes an island and it never stops exploding. It scratched the enemy’s face, broke his dreams and stopped his satisfaction with time.

Because in Gaza time is something different.

Because in Gaza time is not a neutral element.

It does not compel people to cool contemplation, but rather to explosion and a collision with reality.

Time there does not take children from childhood to old age, but rather makes them men in their first confrontation with the enemy.

Time in Gaza is not relaxation, but storming the burning noon. Because in Gaza values are different, different, different.

The only value for the occupied is the extent of his resistance to occupation. That is the only competition there. Gaza has been addicted to knowing this cruel, noble value. It did not learn it from books, hasty school seminars, loud propaganda megaphones, or songs. It learned it through experience alone and through work that is not done for advertisement and image.

Gaza has no throat. Its pores are the ones that speak in sweat, blood, and fires. Hence the enemy hates it to death and fears it to criminality, and tries to sink it into the sea, the desert, or blood. And hence its relatives and friends love it with a coyness that amounts to jealousy and fear at times, because Gaza is the brutal lesson and the shining example for enemies and friends alike.

Gaza is not the most beautiful city.

Its shore is not bluer than the shores of Arab cities.

Its oranges are not the most beautiful in the Mediterranean basin.

Gaza is not the richest city.

It is not the most elegant or the biggest, but it equals the history of an entire homeland, because it is more ugly, impoverished, miserable, and vicious in the eyes of enemies. Because it is the most capable, among us, of disturbing the enemy’s mood and his comfort. Because it is his nightmare. Because it is mined oranges, children without a childhood, old men without old age and women without desires. Because of all this it is the most beautiful, the purest and richest among us and the one most worthy of love.

We do injustice to Gaza when we look for its poems, so let us not disfigure Gaza’s beauty. What is most beautiful in it is that it is devoid of poetry at a time when we tried to triumph over the enemy with poems, so we believed ourselves and were overjoyed to see the enemy letting us sing. We let him triumph, then when we dried our lips of poems we saw that the enemy had finished building cities, forts and streets. We do injustice to Gaza when we turn it into a myth, because we will hate it when we discover that it is no more than a small poor city that resists.

We do injustice when we wonder: What made it into a myth? If we had dignity, we would break all our mirrors and cry or curse it if we refuse to revolt against ourselves. We do injustice to Gaza if we glorify it, because being enchanted by it will take us to the edge of waiting and Gaza doesn’t come to us. Gaza does not liberate us. Gaza has no horses, airplanes, magic wands, or offices in capital cities. Gaza liberates itself from our attributes and liberates our language from its Gazas at the same time. When we meet it – in a dream – perhaps it won’t recognize us, because Gaza was born out of fire, while we were born out of waiting and crying over abandoned homes.

It is true that Gaza has its special circumstances and its own revolutionary traditions. But its secret is not a mystery: Its resistance is popular and firmly joined together and knows what it wants (it wants to expel the enemy out of its clothes). The relationship of resistance to the people is that of skin to bones and not a teacher to students. Resistance in Gaza did not turn into a profession or an institution.

It did not accept anyone’s tutelage and did not leave its fate hinging on anyone’s signature or stamp.

It does not care that much if we know its name, picture, or eloquence. It did not believe that it was material for media. It did not prepare for cameras and did not put smiling paste on its face.

Neither does it want that, nor we.

Hence, Gaza is bad business for merchants and hence it is an incomparable moral treasure for Arabs.

What is beautiful about Gaza is that our voices do not reach it. Nothing distracts it; nothing takes its fist away from the enemy’s face. Not the forms of the Palestinian state we will establish whether on the eastern side of the moon, or the western side of Mars when it is explored. Gaza is devoted to rejection… hunger and rejection, thirst and rejection, displacement and rejection, torture and rejection, siege and rejection, death and rejection.

Enemies might triumph over Gaza (the storming sea might triumph over an island… they might chop down all its trees).

They might break its bones.

They might implant tanks on the insides of its children and women. They might throw it into the sea, sand, or blood.

But it will not repeat lies and say “Yes” to invaders.

It will continue to explode.

It is neither death, nor suicide. It is Gaza’s way of declaring that it deserves to live.

It will continue to explode.

It is neither death, nor suicide. It is Gaza’s way of declaring that it deserves to live.

New York: Palestinian Knowledge Practices, 31 October

Join Palestinian Knowledge Practices, a forum co-sponsored by Palestine Festival of Literature that addresses the crisis of continuity in Palestinian history through various scholarly and artistic practices.

Participants: Basel Abbas, Ruane Abourahme, Alia Al Sabi, Lama Suleiman, Adam Haj Yahya, with a response by Nadia Abu El Haj, and moderated by Mahdi Sabbagh.

The speakers will discuss their work of collecting scattered archives and restoring displaced or stolen documents. Rooted in refusal and sumud, these are practices that aim to connect the destroyed past with the present and foster knowledge sovereignty for a liberated Palestinian future.

Presented in collaboration with the Center for Palestine Studies and Performance Space.

This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required. Seating is limited and on a first-come, first-served basis.

Find out more and reserve tickets here.

New York: Habibi Festival 2025, 8-12 October

Created with the goal of giving a snapshot of contemporary and traditional musics of the South West Asia North Africa (SWANA) region, Habibi Festival aims to take listeners on a journey of the sounds wafting through the airwaves and living rooms of cities spanning Marrakech to Baghdad. This performing arts festival, now in its fourth year, is a collaboration between the Director of Joe's Pub Alex Knowlton, artist/composer/curator Yacine Boulares, and curator/producer Meera Dugal who are bonded by the goal of creating more joyful spaces for performance, conversation, and storytelling from this part of the world.

Featured on the bill are Egyptian indie pioneer Maii Waleed, Palestinian rock rouser Rasha Nahas, and Palestinian revolutionary oudist and composer Huda Asfour, as well as Mai Elgizouli, Mohamed Abozekry Sextet, Maryam Turkey, and Layale Chaker.

Along with the live performances, the festival will also host a series of thought-provoking conversations and talks in collaboration with Afikra, highlighting the diversity of the Arab world’s cultures and histories.

Find more information and reserve your tickets for Habibi Festival here.

Frankfurt: Palestinian Liberatory Book Fair, 17-19 October

Save the date for the second Palestinian Liberatory Book Fair, three days of counter-programming against the Frankfurt Book Fair, which refuses to sever ties with the Israeli state. The PLBF promises three days of interviews, talks, panels, workshops and readings centering the Palestinian struggle.

The PLBF’s program is a call to action for the absolute urgency of military embargo in the horrific face of Israel’s intensifying genocide and ethnic cleansing of the people of Gaza and the West Bank. It is a call for environmental justice in the face of relentless ecocide and destruction. A call for dismantling apartheid and the neocoloniality of international law, in the face of Israeli impunity and US/EU complicity in war crimes. And a call to demand accountability for the shameful betrayal of journalistic ethics.

Pressing topics engaging local and international writers and thinkers, resistance in poetry, storytelling, and song. Activities for kids are planned for each day. Books in Arabic, German, and English from the ever-expanding Palestine Library Frankfurt’s collection of anticolonial literature and history will be on hand to page through, discuss, and activate.

The Frankfurt Book Fair has refused to assert and uphold the rights of the Palestinian people under international law, and has neither condemned nor severed economic and cultural ties with Israeli apartheid. The PLBF, by contrast centers local and international Palestinian authors, scholars, poets and activists.

Find more information on the book fair’s programming here. And you can read an interview with the organizers of the PLBF over at ArabLit.

Book of the Week

A magisterial and comprehensive analysis of Zionism from its earliest iterations to the present. Every person who claims to oppose Israeli genocide needs to read this book for a proper understanding of Zionist motivations and attitudes, told from the point of view of its primary victims. The translation of Jiryis's opus gives Anglophone observers of Palestine the opportunity to bypass the anguished dilemmas of one-time Zionists that dominate discourse in the Global North and instead engage with one of the finest texts of the Palestinian intellectual tradition.

– Steven Salaita

Translated into English for the first time since its original publication by the PLO's Palestine Research Center, The Foundations of Zionism extensively details the origins of Zionism and its development as an ideology and political project that has wrought havoc in the Middle East and beyond over the last century.

The Foundations of Zionism chronicles this development from Zionism's early origins up to the establishment of the British mandate over Palestine in 1923, refuting many of the movement's own foundational myths - from its early relationship to the Palestinians to its exclusively religious character. Sabri Jiryis delves into Zionism's successive congresses and factional struggles, its early failures to settle in Palestine and the formation of armed militias, and its temporary alliances with the Ottoman Empire before the movement eventually secured support from Western colonial powers such as Britain. In a newly written conclusion, Jiryis reconsiders the Zionist project 100 years on from the Balfour Declaration and amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

The Foundations of Zionism is out tomorrow from Ebb Books. You can get your copy in our Bookshop (US / UK).

Media Roundup

Hunger and the Palestinian Womb – Profiling a Gazan woman attempting to have a child amid famine and genocide, Sarah Ihmoud contemplates the grammars of collective care that subtend Palestinian life: “The womb under occupation is where colonial violence and decolonial love collide, and where, despite everything, the promise of Palestine is carried forward.”

Given This Reality – Mary Turfah reviews the newly-published translation of Sabri Jiryis’ book The Foundations of Zionism, first published in two volumes by the PLO’s Palestine Research Center in 1977 and 1986 and newly-translated by Fida Jiryis. Jiryis, a Nakba survivor, “dissects the colonizer” over the course of “five hundred and fifty merciless pages of interwoven fact.”

‘My Poems Are Part of My Flesh’: Palestinian Poet Batool Abu Akleen on Life in Gaza – Claire Armistead profiles Batool Abu Akleen, who describes how the genocide has altered the stakes of her writing and her very sense of self.

‘We Refuse the World’s Nihilism’: Gaza Biennale Roundtable – Hussein Omar interviews Tasneem Shatat, Ghanem Alden, and two anonymous members of the artist collective Jabal Al Risan, about the onus for the globally decentralized Gaza Biennale, the displacement of artwork, and the censorship of Palestinian art in both Palestine and the West.

In Gaza, We Are Literally Losing Our Ability to Speak – Taqwa Ahmed Al-Wawi describes not just how words have lost their ability to meaningfully capture the depths of despair, but also how Gazans have resorted to psychic blunting – to silence – in order to cope with hunger, sleeplessness, cold, and trauma.

At the Institut du Monde Arabe: ‘Trésors Sauvés de Gaza’ – Reviewing an exhibition in Paris that features five thousand years’ worth of artifacts from Gaza, Josephine Quinn offers a brief but sweeping history of Gaza’s dynamic and layered past, a past which has been bombarded, ransacked, and destroyed by Israel.

Lament For My Dear Cousin and Friend in Tulkarm – Writing from the West Bank under a pen name, Thoth describes how the Israeli military offensive in Tulkarm has destroyed families and communities, including most recently by the murder of their cousin.

Portfolio of Stolen Memories – Rand Abdalqader attempts to trace, through scattered archives and piecemeal memories, the history of his family in Palestine and the circumstances of their exile. 

The Sumud Flotilla Has Succeeded in Making Israel a Pariah – Branko Marcetic suggests that the flotilla’s efforts to break the siege on Gaza have confounded some of the commonsense logics legitimizing Israel’s naval blockade, and have heightened contradictions between Israel and the states from which participants joined the flotilla.

Palestine Is Now the Conscience of the World. No Deal Will Change That – Soumaya Ghannoushi argues that the so-called peace plan proffered by the Trump administration to Hamas is an extension of the colonial logic of the Abraham Accords, meant to “strike deals over Palestine without Palestinians.”

Hamas’s Strategic Gamble – Jeremy Scahill offers a deep dive into Hamas’ response to Trump’s so-called peace plan, which attempted “to craft a response to Trump that would assert the Palestinian right to self-determination while persuading the erratic U.S. president to force Israel to cease its genocidal war.”

Two Poems from Gaza – Two poems by the Gazan poet Dana Flaifl, translated into English by Layla Salma, to support the translation and publication of a collection by Flaifl in France. “A tank invades the silence / that once saved me, / sweeping away the last traces of my paths, / while I am betrayed by / the pounding of my heart.”

Consider subscribing to the PalFest Bookshelf to receive a curated selection of the finest new and classic books by Palestinian writers.

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up to receive it in your inbox.