Gazan Journalists Reflect on the Ceasefire

With the beginning of the ceasefire in Gaza yesterday and the reunion of Palestinian prisoners with their families, it is hard not to feel like a new chapter is dawning in the movement for Palestinian liberation. But in the days between the announcement of the deal and its implementation, the Israeli war machine continued its bombardment of Gaza, killing scores of people.

In this video from a couple days before the ceasefire began, Jeremy Cahill and Sharif Abdel Kouddous of Drop Site News speak with the journalist Abubaker Abed, who has been reporting on the ground from Gaza over the last fifteen months. Abed shares his perspective on what he anticipates with the ceasefire and how this moment fits into the larger movement for Palestine.

You can watch the full video here.

Abubaker Abed has also written a moving reflection — alongside those of four other Gazan journalists, Hossam Shabat, Shrouq Aila, Bilal Salem, and Rasha Abou Jalal — on the ceasefire and the future of Gaza:

The ceasefire announcement was a temporary reprieve from the hell we've been through, but it hasn't secured anything for us. We'll just go back to the same Gaza, that tiny, war-torn strip of land where over two million people and I will be subjugated, suffocated, occupied, and hurt. This won't usher in anything pleasant for us but maybe in the long-awaited liberation. As a journalist, I've been doing the impossible to report. I never stopped even though I was pained and traumatized. I feel that the ceasefire is just a mental game to play on our feelings and keep us trapped in a bubble of unendurable suffering, which I have always dreamt of bursting.

I was 20 when I began reporting on this genocide; now I am 22. My hope is to be free, to be like any 22-year-old around the world. I have documented the most horrifying scenes and the most excruciating stories. Although I was a football reporter and had to evolve into a war correspondent, I kept speaking the truth at the top of my lungs and sharing our tragedies with a world that has let us down for the last 15 months. Reporting on a genocide goes way beyond journalism. It's blending your agony with others' anguish.

You can read the rest here.

London: Refugee Camps and the Right of Return, 6 February

The Palestinian ‘right of return’ to their homes is a legally recognized right since December of 1948. More importantly, it is a physical right that all Palestinians have been working towards achieving while enduring what is now a 77 year occupation of their homeland and a forced displacement to other lands.

The UCL Institute for Global Prosperity presents a talk by Dr. Samar Maqusi, a scholar of architecture and a former architect for UNRWA on the intersection of the legal and physical aspect of the Palestinian ‘right of return’. From the onset, the Palestine camp has been one of resistance before it was one of refuge, which is why they have been places of destruction even outside Palestine. Dr. Maqusi offers a historical understanding of the Palestine refugee camp, alongside its contemporary conditions in creating and maintaining a spatial resistance to forced displacement.

The event will be held at UCL at 4:30 pm on 8 February. Reserve your ticket here.

Virtual: Palestine Film Platform’s Film of the Week

Last week, the Palestine Film Platform launched the fifth edition of its Film of the Week series, streaming Palestinian feature films for free. Every Wednesday at 5pm Jerusalem time, PFP will be making a new film available on their website.

The series kicks off with three weeks of films underlining the ties that bind Syria and Palestine. The first film of the series, streaming until this Wednesday, is Ayouni (2020).

Ayouni follows Noura and Machi search for answers about their loved ones – Palestinian Syrian Bassel Safadi and Italian Paolo Dall’Oglio, who were among over 130,000 forcibly disappeared in Syria. Faced with the limbo of an overwhelming absence of information, hope is the only thing their families have to hold on to. ‘Ayouni’ is a deeply resonant Arabic term of endearment - meaning ‘my eyes’ and understood as ‘my love’. Filmed over 6 years and across multiple countries in search of answers, Ayouni is an attempt to give numbers faces, to give silence a voice, and to make the invisible undeniably visible.

To watch Ayouni and all upcoming films in the series, visit their website starting at 5pm Jerusalem time every week.

Book of the Week

Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, lays bare and eviscerates the genocidal logics of fascism and liberalism. Here, language does what we need it to do: it clarifies, it condemns, it names, it grieves. Here, too, is a lexicon for what might survive this. Devastating and scathing; you will want to read, will want to have read, this book.
—Christina Sharpe

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is an urgent and necessary reckoning about what it means to live in the West today. As an immigrant, Omar El Akkad believed the West offered freedom and justice for all. Over the past twenty years he reported on the various Wars on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more. He won awards for his journalism and his fiction. But now, watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, he comes to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie.

This powerful book is a chronicle of Omar's painful realisation, a moral grappling with what it means - as a citizen, as a father - to carve out some sense of possibility during these devastating times. This is a book for those that have tired of moral emptiness. This is a book for everyone who wants something better.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This publishes next month. Preorder your copy from our Bookshop (US / UK).

Reading Roundup

What Are the Three Phases of the Gaza Ceasefire Deal? – Mohammed Mhawish spells out the details of the ceasefire deal, highlighting the points at which it is possible that Israel will renege on the agreement.

Gaza Ceasefire Reveals Israel's Fragility, and the Transformative Power of Resistance – Abdaljawad Omar argues that the ceasefire agreement cannot be simply read through the binary framework of victory and defeat, but should be understood as a vindication of the necessity of resistance.

This Will Not End with the Last Airstrike – Malak Hijazi writes about how the immense task of rebuilding Gaza, made much more difficult by Israel’s blockade, tempers the relief she feels about the ceasefire.

On the “Victims of the Victims” – Ussama Makdisi revisits Edward Said’s book The Question of Palestine to think through how discourses of Jewish victimhood continue to animate Israel’s victimization of Palestinians.

What Changed? – Mouin Rabbani speculates on what the ceasefire deal means for the coming years of Trump’s foreign policy toward Palestine, Israel, and the broader region.

A Cease-Fire in Gaza Is Far From Enough – Seraj Assi offers a sobering picture of the ceasefire deal, characterizing it merely as a brief interlude in the genocide that Israel whose terms Israeli leaders seem intent to violate.

In Gaza, A Moment Where Death and the Ceasefire Intersect – Hossam Shabat reports from Gaza City about the three day window before the ceasefire came into effect, during which time Israeli airstrikes intensified and scores of people were martyred.

Translating Arabic & Gaza – Huda Fakhreddine and Yasmeen Hanoosh discuss the work of writing in and translating from Arabic, and the need to speak with “Gaza’s tongue” in all acts of writing and translation.

Fady Joudah’s Poetry of Dislocation – Hussein Omar reviews Fady Joudah’s collection [...] as an attempt “to undermine the foundational antinomies of liberalism” that simultaneously issues its readers a call to act.

What Do Gazans Read During War? – Husam Maarouf profiles a bookseller in Gaza who describes how books became newly cherished and charged objects over the course of the genocide.

Whispers of the Walnut Tree – A new poem from Gazan poet Fatena Abu Mostafa: “Home will rise again, / the girls will return, the songs will be sung, / and all of it will be reborn / from beneath the rubble.”

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