Read Palestine Week thru 5 December

We’re about halfway through this year’s Read Palestine Week, organized by Publishers for Palestine to encourage people around the world to read fiction and poetry by Palestinian and Palestinian diaspora authors, as well as nonfiction about Palestinians and Palestinian history, politics, arts, culture, and life, and other books about organizing, resistance, and solidarity for a Free Palestine: in short, to read - publicly and in community - as part of the global resistance to genocide.

Publishers for Palestine have assembled an extensive list of free books by writers like Mahmoud Darwish, Hala Ayan, Zeina Sleiman, and many others, thru December 5. The broader campaign also aims to raise funds for writers who are in Gaza or recently left Gaza.

Check out Publishers for Palestine on Instagram for the full series of global events for Read Palestine Week.

VIRTUAL: Wasim Said on Witness to the Hellfire of Genocide, 6 December

Wasim Said wrote Witness to the Hellfire of Genocide from his tent after facing a series of displacements over the course of the genocide from his home in Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza. In the short gasps between bombardments starting in January of this year, Wasim picked up his pen to document the stories of the atrocities he encountered at every turn: his family scrambling for food and shelter under gunfire, friends and neighbors brutally murdered as they tried to retrieve flour, the experience of starvation and famine, and the untold stories of those martyred at hospitals, schools, homes.

Join the People’s Center for Palestine on December 6 for a virtual book talk and conversation with Wasim Said. Wasim will be in conversation with Thiago Ávila, Fady Joudah, Mousa AlSadah, and Danya Al-Saleh, bringing together organizers, writers, and scholars from across the Palestine movement to reflect on the book and its broader significance in this moment.

Find out more about the book and register here.

LONDON: Losing It, performance by Samaa Wakim and Samar Haddad King, 6 December

Can you still hear the bombs? I can hear them.

Growing up in a war zone means living and breathing politics.

Palestinian choreographer and performer Samaa Wakim questions the impact these experiences have on her identity in a new solo performance —Losing It — that explores how the trauma of previous generations manifests itself in her body through movement and sound.

In a journey to the moment when she began to fear for her freedom, the piece delves into her memories of growing up under occupation, exploring the various realities she lives in and the fantasies she has created out of fear and hope to survive. When fear takes hold of her, her world begins to disintegrate: the floor becomes unstable and sounds begin to warp, creating a world in which reality and fantasy become confused

Created in collaboration with a live soundtrack by Samar Haddad King, the soundscape features field recordings made throughout Palestine since 2010. Accompanied by Wakim’s voice, the sounds of fear and security merge to the point where the past and present blur the future.

Find out more and reserve your tickets here.

LOS ANGELES: Mizna Film Program at NFMLA, 13 December

NewFilmmakers Los Angeles (NFMLA) hosts the NFMLA Monthly Film Festival InFocus: Middle Eastern & Arab Cinema program. The weekend will showcase an international lineup of films by talented emerging Middle Eastern and Arab filmmakers across two short film programs, including one curated in partnership with Mizna, and will open with a selection from NFMLA’s ongoing monthly programming. 

For this year’s InFocus: Arab Cinema, Mizna curated a stand-out selection of short films in partnership with NFMLA for their monthly festival.  This selection of films includes thoughtful, meditative and engaging comedies, dramas, experimental and documentary works with stories, filmmakers and influences from Iraq, Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco and Saudi Arabia.

CURATED SHORTS PROGRAM:
My So-Called Iraqi Wedding (13m, Ayser Salman)
Dawn Every Day (20m, Amir Youssef)
she sings (15m, Ahmed Ragheb and Lily Ekimian)
Salma (8m, Mary Sherif Kamal Hanna)
Like a spiral (28m, Lamia Chraibi)
Khaled and Nema (18m, Sohail Dahdal)

Find full event details and get your tickets here.

Book of the Week

The Slightest Green is nothing short of magical … a story of the diaspora, of the eternal calling for Palestine, that is gorgeous and illuminating. The past lives on, it cradles us, it strengthens us. A must-read.

– Susan Muaddi Darraj

A moving multigenerational novel by the celebrated Palestinian American author of The Beauty of Your Face.

In the middle of dinner one evening, Intisar Jaber receives a phone call that will upend her quiet life in Chicago: her father is dying and she must go to Palestine to pay her final respects. But Intisar hasn't seen or heard from Hafez for nearly two decades, ever since he abandoned her and her mother to join the resistance.

After a fateful mission, Hafez was thrown into the notorious Gahana Prison to serve a life sentence—permanently removed from her life. As soon as Intisar arrives in his village of Bayt al-Hawa, she discovers what it means to be a stranger in her ancestral land, the inheritance of loss, and the high price of freedom.

Meanwhile, Hafez’s mother Sundus battles to save the home that she built with her husband from thieving hands. Will Intisar, her estranged granddaughter, help Sundus fight to reclaim it? Can they close the gaping distance between them before it’s too late?

Powerfully etched in Sahar Mustafah’s honest and lyrical prose, The Slightest Green explores the place—and people—we call home and how far we will go to reach them.

The Slightest Green is out now from Interlink Books. You can get your copy from our Bookshop (US / UK).

Media Roundup

Two New Poems by Olivia Elias – Two new poems by Olivia Elias, translated by Jérémy Victor Robert: “along the shore of a sea that laments of no longer / being able to feed its children / & under a sky that doesn’t remember anymore.”

Palestine 36 with Annemarie Jacir – On the latest episode of Tarwida, Tala Elissa speaks to Annemarie Jacir about her latest film Palestine 36, which depicts the pivotal Palestinian revolt against the British in 1936 and which took nine years to research and produce.

Go to Palestine: A Report From the Ground – After a recent trip volunteering in Palestine, Nathan G. argues that the best way for westerners to support Palestinians is by going to Palestine as a “protective presence”, which discourages the excesses of IDF and settler violence.

Rebranding Genocide – Selma Dabbagh argues that the ceasefire has merely meant the continuation of genocide in Gaza, all while giving permission to Germany, France, and other western states to resume selling munitions to and through Israel.

Israel’s Collective Amnesia – Lee Mordechai examines how even liberal and progressive Israelis are engaged in “a quiet, collective act of forgetting, which aims to make the decimation of Palestinian life in Gaza simply disappear from Israeli memory.”

The Quiet Power of Gaza’s One More Show – Mohamed Hamama reviews the film One More Show about Gazan circus performers who have entertained children amid the genocide, praising it for shying away from depictions of violence and “[refusing] to partake in this stream of graphic imagery and our complex complicity in its normalization.”

The Security Council’s Resolution on Gaza Makes Trump Its New Overlord – Reviewing the unprecedented Security Council resolution recently passed as part of a putative “peace plan,” Phyllis Bennis argues that the resolution “says and does nothing that might provide UN or any other kind of oversight of the unlimited power it handed to Trump” to determine the future of Gaza.

Trump's UN-Backed 'Peace Plan': A New Front in the American Colonisation of Palestine – Joseph Massad situates the UN Security Council resolution on Gaza in a deeper history of “American crusades” in Palestine that extends as far back as the early 19th century, and compares Trump’s promised dominion over Palestine to the rule of King Leopold II over the Congo.

Child Amputees in Gaza Use Makeshift Prosthetics as Israel Restricts Medical Supplies – Abdel Qader Sabbah and Sharif Abdel Kouddous profile children in Gaza who are struggling to rehabilitate from blast wounds and lost limbs owing to Israel’s blockade on necessary medical equipment.

Who Are the Humanitarians? – Juliano Fiori looks back on the six months that the infamous Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was delivering aid in Gaza, suggesting that “the genocide in Gaza represents a foreboding model for the future management of superfluous populations everywhere.”

Mahmoud Saif al-Din al-Irani’s ‘My Secret Picture’ – A short story by Mahmoud Saif al-Din al-Irani, newly translated by Amr El-Zawawy, about love, loyalty, and gender expectations in early twentieth century Palestine.

Anti-Imperialism With Solidarity at Home – On the latest episode of Makdisi Street, the Makdisi brothers speak to Ali Abunimah about the growing divide between ordinary people and political elites and the shared sense that we are witnessing the terminal decline of Zionism in the West.

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