London: On Palestine and Kashmir with Isabella Hammad & Mirza Waheed, 1 November

We're pleased to be presenting our next event in partnership with London's Southbank Centre: Isabella Hammad and Mirza Waheed in conversation on Palestine and Kashmir.

These two beloved previous guests of the festival will come together for a unique discussion about the parallels and divergences in Palestine and Kashmir's modern struggles with colonialism.

They'll discuss art and consciousness around the dual ruptures of 1948, reportage and narration of historical insurgency and their own roles as artists working from within the imperial core.

This is sure to sell out, so do get your ticket early.

Unboundable: BDS Mixtape, Vol. 3, out now

Amplify Palestine releases Unboundable as we mark twenty years since the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions went global; as Gaza’s people continue to endure genocidal siege, bombs, famine, and fire; and as repression of Palestine solidarity rapidly escalates.

But this third volume in the BDS Mixtape series also comes as support for Palestinians’ freedom struggle surges, especially among artists.

As curator and contributor Sonny Singh declares: “It is our responsibility as musicians to get louder. We refuse to live in fear, we refuse to be silent, we refuse to be complicit in genocide.” 

In this spirit of urgent, liberatory defiance, he and fellow curator-contributors Huda Asfour and db set out to investigate improvisation as a practice that interweaves their work as musicians and activists, asking: When we center deep listening, curiosity, and exploration – what new modes of solidarity and human connection emerge? 

Unboundable gathers over 20 celebrated musicians to engage this question on a double album with 13 improvisational tracks that braid jazz, Indian classical, and Arabic music (SIDE A) with experimental voice, avant electronica, and instruments from nature (SIDE B).

Unboundable: BDS Mixtape, Vol. 3 is out now on Bandcamp and other streaming services.

New York: Theory of Water Book Launch, 26 July

Join Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and PalFest co-curator Mahdi Sabbagh as they discuss Leanne's new book, Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead.

Water is the most abundant element on our planet and vital to our existence. What would it mean if we truly listened to it? What if we truly lived with and alongside it? How might a new theory of water help us form a radical rethinking of relationships between beings and forces in the world today? How might it help us consider paths for liberation and justice for trans and queer people? 

Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, musician and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson talks with writer, architect, and urbanist Mahdi Sabbagh about our multi-layered relationship with water and how we might reimagine water, in all its forms, as a catalyst for radical transformation, capable of birthing a new world. 

Find more details and RSVP here.

London: 0710 Journeys Exhibition, thru 5 September

P21 Gallery is pleased to present 0710 JOURNEYS, a powerful series of images by visual activist Wayne Campbell, documenting the landscape of protest through highlighting the protests for Gaza on British streets and the everyday landscape of the occupied West Bank.

July 9th – September 5th 2025, this immersive show tells the raw emotion, defiance, and unity of protest in Campbell's strong vision. The show, curated in collaboration with A Celebration of Demonstration and P21 Gallery, brings centre stage the voices of the masses while highlighting how visual activism is key to creating the narrative.

Campbell’s arresting images chronicle the Palestinian solidarity protests that swept across London from November 2023, alongside intimate portraits of life in the West Bank. His work transcends mere documentation, offering a deeply human perspective on struggle, hope, and the unifying force of shared experiences.

Find more details, including links to workshops and talks, via P21 Gallery.

Book of the Week

From the River to the Sea embodies a literary experience that transcends the limits of words, becoming an existential testament to the tragedy of the Palestinian people and humanity's bewilderment in the face of devastation and alienation.

—Samir Kasim

This new collection by Palestinian poet Samer Abu Hawwash was published in its original Arabic in the summer of 2024. The 24 poems are an intrepid literary journey into the genocide in Gaza, linking with Palestine’s long years of existential trauma, and documenting the universal human questions that so many are asking in today’s world. Living, since he was born, in a diaspora crowded with fellow Palestinians, the poet shares with readers the depths of his turmoil and anguish, searing their attention to human pain from the first poem, “The Ruins”, with the image of a girl’s hand jutting up from cracks in the rubble, to the last, “The Scream” – the roaring voice of dust consuming all.  In the poem, “Sitting in front of a TV screen, I watch the genocide”, the words he wants to say are torn from him, “language has become a torment” and he cannot say what he wants to say; senses are upturned, stupified, suspended, muffled, in a maze.

How to possibly describe the deadly scenes, surreal visions, the revelations, nightmares, sounds, one after the other, except by reliving them?  And thus the poet brings to his poems what one critic has called a “dictionary of war”, a lexicon that expresses a graphic poetic sensibility set in the midst of a war that is exterminating a people. Alongside the lexicon, a way of “seeing” anew the unspeakable horrors through the gazes, the glances, the closed, open, dead eyes of famished families, of fragmented little corpses, children whose gazes are frozen, stunned, dead, scornful, fixed, dazed.

Robin Moger’s perceptive and passionate translation is profoundly sensitive to the “stuttering shock” of these poems that “explore the edge of what can be made out of poetry, that force us to confront the potential for loss and grief to be endless and unjustifiable”.  This is a poetry collection so necessary for humanity today.

Samer Abu Hawwash’s From the River to the Sea is out next week from Banipal Books.

Media Roundup

20 Years of BDS: An Interview with Omar Barghouti, a Co-Founder of the Movement – On the twentieth anniversary of the BDS movement, Michael Arria interviews Omar Barghouti about the history of BDS, its milestones over two decades, how the movement has adapted in tandem with shifting public opinion about Palestine, and what is next for BDS.

Who's Afraid of Palestine Action? – Huw Lemmey argues that the proscription of Palestine Action is an attempt to do away with the fundamental legal protections and processes afforded anyone who opposes the UK’s support and complicity for Israeli war crimes and genocide.

We Speak in the Plural: A Poem in Many Voices – Amanda Najib shares a poem written in a choral voice of women announcing their memory as her inheritance: “I had figs in my fists and salt in my braid. / Before borders cut the sky, I knew only the hills. / We baked bread at dawn, feet planted in the soil / as if we were trees, not women.”

Yousri Al-Ghoul Talks Back – Alex Foley profiles Yousri Al-Ghoul, a Gazan writer whose recent testimony was wilfully misrepresented on NPR, in order to show how the machinery of western journalism launders Zionist talking points and dehumanizes Palestinians.

The Politics of Recognition and the Erasure of Palestine: How the West Uses Recognition to Manage Palestine and Demand Israel’s Legitimacy – Jwan Zreiq writes about the hollowness of western, liberal “recognition” of Palestine, arguing against the politically expedient diplomacy of the current moment in favor of a decolonial politics grounded in the right to the land, the right to return, and the right to be free.

The Rules-Based Order Died in Gaza. Will International Law Live? – Describing the utter fecklessness of international legal institutions to address Israel’s many crimes in Gaza, Alonso Gurmendi tries to offer an alternative genealogy for international law that runs through anticolonial struggle, land sovereignty, and Indigenous self-determination. 

Beyond Glastonbury’s Gaza Controversy – Muhammad Idrees Ahmad suggests that mainstream British media are only too happy to drum up controversy over Palestine solidarity at music festivals like Glastonbury as a means of distracting from their role in manufacturing consent for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

How War Transformed My Literary Taste – Husam Maarouf, co-founder of the new publishing initiative Gaza Publications, weighs the books he has read since October 7, away from poetry and romance and toward “politics and its deceit.”

ICE Is Following the Lead of Anti-Palestinian Doxxing Groups – Chris Lehmann reports on how US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has relied on Zionist blacklists like Canary Mission in order to meet the deportation quotas that the Trump administration has set for the agency.

The War in Gaza as Told Through Dead Journalists – Ed Rampell interviews Robert Greenwald about his new documentary Gaza: Journalists Under Fire, which offers portraits of three Gazan journalists killed by Israel.  

“With Gaza, We are Beyond the Breaking Point” – Bhakti Shringarpure interviews Huda Fakhreddine about the role of literature in a time of genocide, her persecution by her university in the wake of October 7, and her refusal to separate politics from literature

Gaza: Pursuit of Survival – Areej Almashharawi writes a eulogy for her brother, Alaa, who was killed by the Israeli military as he attempted to collect flour from the so-called aid distribution sites to bring home to his family: “This is not only Alaa's story. This is the story of my people. My people and I, who are buried alive, who do not know if we will have the privilege of being buried when dead. This is a shame on the face of humanity. We do not forgive. We do not forget. We still survive. Gaza still resists.”

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