London: Palestinian Childhoods – Solidarity and Ṣumūd, Sept. 1-14

Palestinian Childhoods: Solidarity and Ṣumūd is a public exhibition including art exhibit and series of events that counter the dehumanisation of Palestinians.

Tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza have been killed, wounded, displaced, and subjected to starvation by Israel since October 2023. But as young Palestinians remind the world: “We are not numbers.” This exhibition responds to their insights, seeking to witness and convey Palestinian children’s struggle for everyday life, love, play and learning in the face of loss and brutality. It is a testimony to ṣumūd – an Arabic word meaning steadfastness – and international solidarity in the face of genocide.

Palestinian Childhoods presents photography, illustration and sculptures by Palestinian artists Ahmed Al Daalsa, Samer Abdelnour, Aya Battiri, and Mahmoud Hussein alongside a collection of letters and drawings produced as part of the Letters for Palestinian Childhood project. From Ahmed Al Daalsa’s aerial, black and white photographs of children’s chalk games in Gaza, to Samer Abdelnour’s bronze sculpture memorialising UCL alumni, and Palestinian teacher and poet Refaat Alareer, the works presented here bear witness to the ongoing specificity of Palestinian life, resisting the silencing and repression of the movement for a liberated Palestine.

Also on display are a selection of the letters and images produced for the Letters for Palestinian Childhood project, by an international group of participants, from Poland to South Africa, Spain and the UK. These intimate, heartfelt and handmade letters summon the poignancy of international solidarity against the genocide. The internationalism of this exhibition is also captured in the soundscape, where the letters are read aloud in English, Arabic, and in some instances, Spanish.

Throughout the exhibition, there will be opportunities for audience members to contribute to the Letters for Palestinian Childhood project. Other aspects of the public programme also invite community contributions and develop the ambitions of the project to establish new lines of solidarity. From quilt making to film screenings, poetry readings to family activities, the exhibition calls on us to collectively participate in extending solidarity to Palestinians, and to recognise sumud in the face of so much suffering.

Palestinian Childhoods: Solidarity and Ṣumūd will be on display at UCL East (Marshgate Building) from 1-14th September 2025. Find the full program details here.

Save the Date: Mizna’s 19th Annual Arab Film Festival, September 24-28

Mizna’s 19th Twin Cities Arab Film Fest returns September 24–28, 2025 at the Main Cinema in Minneapolis, with a closing day of special films and programs at the Walker Art Center.

As we witness the world engulfed by preventable, human-made catastrophe––from Palestine to Sudan to Northern Minnesota––we draw each other near and we work together to rebuild a shared world. Drawing inspiration from Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Gate A-4,” we take this line as our charge for this year’s Twin Cities Arab Film Festival, which will present a selection of films that encourage us to gather more inclusively, to build more intentionally, to unite more readily, and to see more clearly.

The films in this year’s festival remind us to value one another and to imagine relationships that extend beyond human-made boundaries, like race, nation, gender, species, and family. This year’s lineup visualizes and enacts solidarity––politically, spiritually, and relationally––and the films envision a shared world, where our connections become tools to dismantle systems of oppression and reimagine our liberated future.

The full line-up for the festival will be launching soon. Keep up with the program here.

New York: Voices for Gaza Benefit, 21 September

Join writers Viet Thanh Nguyen, Mosab Abu Toha, Hala Alyan, Hannah Lillith Assadi, and Seema Jilani for an evening of readings and conversation in solidarity with Gaza, emceed by Aasif Mandvi, and featuring a film by Nan Goldin and a performance by the Resistance Revival Chorus. Through poetry, prose, and dialogue, these voices join to bear witness and affirm the power of storytelling in times of crisis, while raising critical funds for the children of Gaza through INARA.

This event is cosponsored by INARA, McNally Jackson, and Town Hall NY, with support from AAWW and PalFest.

Find more details and reserve your tickets here.

London: Against Erasure - Photographs from Gaza, opening 24 September

P21 Gallery is proud to present Against Erasure - Photographs from Gaza, a group exhibition co-curated by Yahya Zaloom, Photo Humanity Grant and Razan AlSarraf, featuring 11 artists: Mahmoud Abu Hamda, Belal Alhams, Jehad Alshrafi, Hammam Younis Alzyatuniya, Anas Ayyad, Majdi Fathi Suleiman Qraiqea, Belal Khaled, Ahmed Salama, Fatima Alzahra Shbair, Ali Jadallah, and Abdul Rahman Zaqout.

Against Erasure – Photographs from Gaza brings to light the extraordinary work of Gaza-based photographers who document the realities of life under one of the world’s most violent genocides. This exhibition is a vivid portrayal of the immense hardships endured, the unwavering resistance displayed, and the indomitable spirit of survival in Gaza, Palestine.

Artistic photography, particularly within contexts of conflict, functions not only as documentation but as a complex mode of seeing, one that fuses perception, memory, and ethical engagement. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes distinguishes between the “studium” and the “punctum”, suggesting that a photograph’s true affective force emerges from the incidental detail that disrupts neutrality and elicits an involuntary and/ or emotional response.

The works in this exhibition draw on that rupture, where the image transcends representation to become a site of resonance and resistance. Against the reductive gaze of media spectacle, the photographer asserts their authorship not as a passive recorder, but as a conscious mediator of lived experience. Through formal sensitivity and conceptual clarity, these images reframe Gaza not as a spectacle of suffering, but as a landscape of humanity, where creativity becomes both a mode of survival and a claim to visibility.

Featuring the works of eleven exceptional photographers, the exhibition provides an intimate look into the human cost of genocide and the resilience of a people striving for dignity and justice. Through their lens, the photographers reveal stories that transcend borders, inviting viewers to reflect on themes of solidarity, hope, and the ongoing struggle for human rights.

For more details and information, visit the P21 Gallery.

Book of the Week

These words emerging from among the ruins of Gaza and from the devastation in the West Bank have an electric immediacy, a burning anger, a sadness over what has been lost, and a graphic sense of time and place which, for some of these poets, is a recording of their last moments of life. It is impossible to read these poems and remain unmoved, impossible not to feel awe for their courage, and impossible not to share their mixed anger and sadness. Like the greatest war poetry, more than any picture, any video, any reportage can, the words of these poets convey the full horror of life under siege.

– Rashid Khalidi

Bearing witness to the realities of the Palestinian genocide, You Must Live: New Poetry From Palestine is a bilingual anthology of recent poetry from Gaza and the West Bank. Translated from Arabic and edited by Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor, this collection gathers the voices of poets currently living in Palestinian territory, most of whom have never left.

Yet the poems in You Must Live refuse to cast their speakers as perpetual victims. Diverse voices and styles shine throughout—powerful, prayerful, theatrical, and even humorous—as poets write love letters to the landscape, elegies for martyrs and homes, and proclamations for the future.

Negotiating the interplay between aesthetics and politics, the individual and the collective, You Must Live sounds as an urgent call to the global community.

You Must Live publishes later this month in North America, and in October in the UK. You can preorder the book now in our Bookshop (US / UK).

Media Roundup

To Write Poetry After Gaza is a Necessity – Huda Fakhreddine narrates, in this essay translated by Kendall Dorland and Alex Tan, the ways in which she finds Gaza in all the poetry she reads and translates: “May Gaza be the ever-present moment of history—its beginning and its end, at once. May Gaza read the world on our behalf and translate it to us. May Gaza translate us, translate the tumult of history and all that humanity inherits. And if, after all of it, we are still to speak and to stammer out this language in ruins, may Gaza be our only word.”

Gaza Uninhabitable: Challenging Colonial Frames of Erasure – Abdalrahman Kittana suggests that narratives of Gaza’s “uninhabitability” work in the service of colonial rhetorics claiming Palestine as terra nullius, and argues for the need to narratively affirm Gaza’s recovery and “re-habitability” instead.

Back to the Iron Wall: Understanding Israel’s Consensus on War – In this essay translated by Shady Hamada, Sari Orabi analyzes the Iron Wall doctrine, first developed by Ze’ev Jabotinsky in the early 20th century and intended to “entrench the Israeli entity and annihilate the Arab will to resist.” Orabi argues that Netanyahu’s devotion to this theory of Zionist power is part of why the response to Al-Aqsa Flood has been so protracted and ruthless.

Gaza’s Unbroken Spirit: Asem Alnabih on Destruction and the Dream of Reconstruction – Anas Abu Samhan interviews Asem Alnabih, spokesperson for the Gaza Municipality's emergency committee, who describes how the municipality is planning for reconstruction even as Israel begins its full-scale invasion of Gaza City.

Mohammed Qraiqea's Life of Sorrow, Modesty and Quiet Triumph – Asem Alnabih eulogizes his lifelong friend the journalist Mohammed Qraiqea, killed by Israel in the same targeted airstrike that killed all of Al-Jazeera’s journalists in Gaza City, including Anas al-Sharif, commemorating his tenderness and humility and lamenting the inability to mourn: “Amid this ongoing genocide, there is no space to mourn, no pause to breathe. Each loss is followed by another, and we carry our sorrow silently, saving our tears for a future when we are allowed to feel the weight of what has been stolen from us.”

Palestinian Statehood Is Not the Answer – Arguing that “the moment for Palestinian statehood has already passed,” Manal A. Jamal shows how the Palestinian state that some western governments are debating recognizing would still be under the financial, territorial, and political control of Israel, ultimately retrenching Palestine’s lack of sovereignty.

To Resist is to Exist: Living and Creating Under Israeli Occupation – Dalal Radwan writes about how the Israeli apartheid wall severs Palestinians from their land, and how artists and farmers alike find ways of imagining and maintaining their connections to what lies behind the wall.

How Israel Is Funding Settler Violence To Overrun Palestinian Villages in the West Bank – Examining how Israel pays international Zionist organizations to help set up new settlements and pastoral outposts in the West Bank, Jessica Buxbaum shows how these settlers have grown more violent as the Israeli government has made clear its desire to fully annex the West Bank.

Why Arab Campaigns to Boycott Israel Aren’t Working – Amena al-Ashkar makes the case that boycott movements targeting Israel must necessarily target the business dealings and economic activities of Arab states engaged in normalization, since those states are centers of power in the region.

How to Prove Israel Is Not a Settler Colony Even as It Pursues 'Greater Israel' – Joseph Massad studies and debunks the emergent hasbara rhetorics that try to explain away the colonial project at the heart of Israeli expansionism.

In Gaza City, I Have Surrendered to an Unknown Fate – On the eve of Israel’s invasion of Gaza City, Rasha Abou Jalal refuses to displace herself and her family to the south of Gaza again, since nowhere is really safe from Israeli airstrikes: “I no longer have the strength to make the right decisions. There are no right decisions to make.”

“This is Eternal Displacement”: Israeli Onslaught on Gaza City Forcing Thousands to Flee With Nowhere to Go – Reporting amid Israel’s escalating assault on Gaza City, Abdel Qader Sabbah documents the impossible position that many Gazans are facing – unable or unwilling to flee south from Gaza City, the people have crowded into mass encampments on the Gaza shore.

Gaza’s Deadly Road – Shaimaa Eid profiles the “grieving mothers, orphaned children, and wounded survivors” of the road to Zikim where Israeli soldiers gun down those seeking food for themselves and their families.

‘I have no interest in the white gaze any more’: Randa Abdel-Fattah on Gaza, Boycotts and Her New Novel - Nour Haydar profiles the Palestinian-Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah,

From a Palestinian Love Story: ‘This Stone is Mine’ – An excerpt from Gazan writer Saga Hamdan's recent novel This Stone is Mine, translated here by Alaa Alqaisi, which tells the story of two journalists who fall in love while reporting between Gaza and Jenin: “Maybe we both believed that the earth is our resting place, and to it we belong. We are of it and to it. It makes no sense to drift far from it, even by a few inches.” 

Enter Palestinian Love – A new poem by Dalia Taha, translated by Sara Elkamel: “We Palestinians / love what we love / a little more than we should.”

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