MINNEAPOLIS: Upcoming Event with Mizna on December 9

Tickets are selling fast for our first-ever event in Minneapolis on December 9, where we have partnered with Mizna to bring together a dazzling group of writers for a conversation on Palestine and the solidarity work of the written word.

Join us for a panel discussion with Mosab Abu Toha, Sarah Aziza, Nick Estes, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Dina Omar, Sagirah Shahid, and Danez Smith.

This lineup is not to be missed, so grab your ticket ASAP.

Help Make Refaat Alareer’s Book a Bestseller

Today marks a year since Israel martyred Refaat Alareer. With his book If I Must Die officially being published by OR Books next week, Drop Site News has kicked off an initiative to make his book a bestseller.

“Seeing Refaat’s book flying there will be a small sign to Palestinians facing genocide that the world has not forgotten them,” they write, “and it will send a message to his assassins that we haven’t forgotten them either.”

Please consider purchasing Refaat’s book next week; all royalties will go to supporting his family in Gaza. Click here to find out more about the initiative and consider pledging to buy the book.

LONDON: Visualizing Palestine, December 16

Join designers Mona Chalabi and Ahmad Barclay at Kings College London on December 16 to discuss Visualizing Palestine: A Chronicle of Colonialism and the Struggle for Liberation. Published in September, the book is a striking collection of more than 200 full-color infographics and a vivid portrait of Israeli settler colonialism and the Palestinian struggle for freedom.

Mona and Ahmad will discuss their work as designers and visual storytellers, the importance of narrative shift, and the urgency of data visualisation in the current moment. The discussion will interrogate the role of media while exploring modes of repression and art as tool of resistance. Mona and Ahmad will be joined by Hazem Jamjoum, who will moderate the event, and Lama Tawakkol, who will act as chair.

Find out more and get tickets here.

Book of the Week

There’s a remarkable coiled power to this slim novel—it moves in unexpected directions, its characters’ lives tossed about by the collision of history and personality.

—Kamila Shamsie

No One Knows Their Blood Type is a novel of identity, belonging, and conflicting truths—of stories, secrets, songs, rumors, and lies. On the day that her father dies, Jumana makes a discovery about her blood type. Hers could not have been inherited from her father—the father she sometimes longed for, but always despised. This extraordinary novel of Palestine centers its narrative not on the battlefield of history, but on how women live every day and the colonial context of their embodied lives. With humor and exhilarating inventiveness, it asks: why aren’t questions of love, friendship, parenthood, and desire at the core of our conversations about liberty and freedom? How would this transform our ideas of resistance?

Written by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat and translated by Hazem Jamjoum, No One Knows Their Blood Type offers a gripping, textured vision of what it can feel like to be human amidst colonial dehumanization.

Reading Roundup

Gazan Poets Write To Survive – Nashwa Nasreldin surveys the Palestinian literature that has circulated over the past year, arguing that we need to see it as more than mere literature of witnessing and read it beyond times of crisis.

Before I Sleep – A poem from Mosab Abu Toha’s recent collection Forest of Noise: “Death is always / sitting on my windowsill.”

This Home Is Gaza – A new poem from Gazan poet Jomana Hesham Zaqout on how the meaning of home has changed: “I offer my past and present to you / to make fluency of silence.”

Trial By Fire – Lylla Younes plumbs the contradictions of the international legal order amid the ongoing genocide: how its rights-based frameworks can hamper the struggle for liberation, even as they may be used to facilitate the withdrawal of global state support for the Zionist project.

Benjamin Netanyahu Is Wanted for Crimes Against Humanity – Daniel Finn interviews John Reynolds, an expert on third world approaches to international law, about the implications of the ICC arrest warrants for the genocide, the ongoing occupation, and the end of blanket impunity for the Israeli state.

Death March from Beit Lahia – Gazan journalist Hossam Shabat reports on the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Beit Lahia on Wednesday as a next step in Israel’s extermination campaign in Northern Gaza.

The Most Important Thing You Need in Gaza Is a Backpack – Eman Alhaj Ali writes about how backpacks have become ubiquitous symbols of loss and hope in Gaza, signifying displacement even as they contain belongings and memories.

The UN Must Exorcise Its Colonial Demons for Palestinian Justice – Sara Troian calls into question the complicity of the international legal order not just in the genocide but in the wholesale colonization of Palestine since before the Nakba.

A Fragile Ceasefire as Lebanon Survives, Traumatized – Tarek Abi Samra writes, in Lina Mounzer’s translation, that the putative ceasefire in Lebanon does not mean that the fear of Israeli bombardment has left the body.

Poems from ‘Violation’ – Selections from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Abu Hashhash’s collection, translated by Wiam El-Tamami: “I am trying to withstand / the gales of your absence.”

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