What I’m reading to understand Gaza
A reading list to better understand what's happening in Gaza, Israel & more
Here is/are the stories, voices, art that I’ve shared in newsletters since October. This is the work on Palestine, Israel, Lebanon and the region at large that I’m seeking to learn from, works offering some semblance of clarity, knowledge, understanding or solidarity. This growing resource is free. If you’d like to help financially support Foreign Bodies by becoming a paying subscriber, click here.
Essays and opinion
‘We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other’ (Arielle Angel, Jewish Currents Mag): “The violence of apartheid and colonialism begets more violence. Many people have struggled with the straitjacket of this inevitability, straining to articulate that its recognition does not mean its embrace.” Editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents Arielle Angel on Jewish grief, the roots of this violence and “on recommitting to our movements in this moment.” Read here.
The More of Us There Are, The More of Us There Are (Harron Walker and Nan Goldin, n+1): “Solidarity is the answer. The more of us there are, the more of us there are. I feel a deep, tactile pain. The more of us there are, the more difficult it becomes for them to justify this genocide.” An essential interview with renowned photographer Nan Goldin, who recently boycotted the Times, about protesting Zionist institutions and disrupting business as usual on the cultural front. Read here.
Over 60 Journalists Have Been Killed in the Israel-Gaza War. My Friend Was One. (Lama Al-Arian, The New York Times Opinion): “As a journalist, I’m used to reporting the nightmares others live through… I used to think... the horrors I’ve seen others endure would allow me to bear my own with some perspective when it was my turn. But it hasn’t.” Lama, a good friend of friend and fellow vigil organizer Mat Skene, shared some words for us to read aloud, available to hear in the audio file above. Read Lama’s essay here.
Palestinian Suffering Is Never As Urgent As The Counterfactual (Samer Kalaf, Defector): “Hypothetical peril was treated more urgently than actual slaughter, and then it was mobilized in service of eradicating basic expressions of Palestinian consciousness and solidarity.” An essay that perfectly sums up what many of us are feeling. Read here.
‘The bombs are still falling. My heart breaks every day’ (Irish novelist Sally Rooney in conversation with British-Palestinian author Isabella Hammad, The Guardian): “I’m at a loss to understand this. Nothing can make sense of it. Everything in me rebels against what I’m witnessing. And I think of everything I’ve written to you until now, about geopolitics, about public opinion in the west, and I think: how pointless! Some celebrity said something on Instagram, and I’m asking you whether this is cause for optimism, really? When every time I pick up my phone I’m seeing footage of destroyed neighbourhoods, grieving mothers, mass graves. It makes everything I have to say feel absurd and disgusting. In these moments I lose faith in language, in conversation, dialogue, everything. The only word that means anything to me at such a moment is the word: No. And all I want to do is repeat it to myself again and again, seeing these images of devastation and suffering. No, no, no.” Read here.
I’m the child of a Holocaust survivor. I know the trauma inflicted on Gaza will last for generations (Elliot Kukla, Los Angeles Times): “It is a profound moral injury for me that the community that taught me to value resistance, peace and the sanctity of each human life is supporting violence and silencing dissent.” A powerful essay from Elliot Kukla, whose father was born in Nazi-occupied Belgium. Read here.
On Sharpening Contradictions (Fariha Róisín, How to Cure a Ghost): “We are finally witnessing everything without fear that we’ll be dismissed, because this time, we know the rest of the world is watching, too. Sharpening contradictions!” Raw, honest feelings and analysis from a writer I often look to for solidarity. Read here
Witnessing Gaza Through Instagram (Zaina Arafat, New York Mag): “At what stage do we become voyeurs? Are people just watching and not witnessing? To watch is to consume; to witness is to acknowledge, to bestow some degree of legitimacy. But what does it do to see it?” Zaina Arafat on witnessing witness. Read here.
How October 7 has changed us all — and what it signals for our struggle (Haggai Matar, 972mag): “Western governments have so far given Israel a free hand to commit these atrocities, showing a consistent double standard between the value of Israeli lives and Palestinian lives — which is part of what brought us to this situation in the first place.” Read here.
Palestinians are asking, ‘Are you with us?’ American Jews are showing we are(Josie Felt, 972mag): “We refused to let our religion be held solely in the hands of those who sought to discredit us.” As a rabbinical student, Felt is taking action alongside thousands to challenge the idea that Jewish safety must come at the expense of Palestinian liberation. Read here.
I Joined Gaza’s Trail of Tears And Displacement (Hind Khoudary, The Intercept): “Everything was destroyed. Even the streets were damaged and destroyed. My eyes were trying to document everything, I tried my best to capture everything in my eyes. I wanted to cry my tears out, but I held them inside me. It’s not time to cry, I will cry later, I told myself.” Follow Palestinian journalist Hind Khoudary on Instagram and Twitter. Read here.
The Torture and Hope of the Palestinian Diaspora in the US (Maysa Mustafa, New Lines Mag): “To be American is to know, or finally realize, that you have been not only complicit but also a catalyst in this body’s torture for decades. And to be a Palestinian American feels as though you are yelling, between the stabs and punches, at those who are standing by: ‘Do you see this? Is anyone going to do anything? Do I deserve this?’” Read here.
No Human Being Can Exist (Saree Makdisi, n+1): “We who live in Western countries didn’t support or pay for any Palestinian to kill Israeli civilians, but every bomb dropped on Gaza from aircraft the US provided is added to a bill that we pay for.” My friends and I have been talking about this essay for days. Read here.
A Jewish Case Against Zionism (Joshua P. Hill, New Means): “As a child I did not question that Israel had a God-given right to exist. I did not question what I was told about heroic fighters defending the nascent state of Israel from the attacks that began with its founding in 1948 and continue to this day. I did not question the inevitable drum beat that came through in each discussion after Hamas of Hezbollah or others attacked. And it was easy and natural to support all this as a child when your teachers were telling you about their families hunkered in shelters in Tel Aviv. But then I got older.” I’ve been following Joshua on Twitter for a while now. And I’m grateful for his perspective. Read here.
Teaching Poetry in the Palestinian Apocalypse (George Abraham, Guernica Mag): “Teaching poetry while witnessing the horrors of ongoing murders of Black Americans by the police, anti-Asian violence surging in the pandemic, and medical apartheid policies of the Israeli state in the vaccine rollout, I often returned to Franny Choi’s ‘The World Keeps Ending and The World Goes On’ to open my lectures,” writes Palestinian American poet George Abraham. “The poem travels from the apocalypse of boats to the apocalypse of bombed mosques; from radioactive rain to settlement and soda machine (a reference to the Palestinian boycott campaign against the settler company SodaStream). In naming the collective(s) built in catastrophe’s shadow, the poem offered my students and I new possibilities of language for our grief, and for our survival of an apocalypse which mutates daily and without warning.” Read here.
‘I Feel a Human Deterioration’ (Etgar Keret in conversation with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, The New York Times): “If you occupy people, if you put them in a cage, in the end, they’re going to break that cage and go for your throat. If you let them live in a dignified way, at least there is a chance. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know. But I’m saying: All I want is for us to have a chance.” Israeli writer Etgar Keret tries to (but can’t) make sense of the violence and loss around him. Read here.
News coverage
Al Jazeera English live on YouTube for news broadcast and analysis
Among the Protesters (Adam Iscoe, The New Yorker): “Before another demonstration against Israel’s killing of civilians in Gaza, activists gather to make posters and paper poppies, and to discuss the danger of stating their views publicly.” Read here.
Why Israel imprisons so many Palestinians (Abdallah Fayyad, Vox): In Israel, detained Palestinians are routinely denied counsel, and cases are often based on specious and far-reaching charges. As part of Israel and Hamas’s recent hostage deal, 150 Palestinian prisoners are being released. But thousands more remain behind bars. In this must-read, Abdullah Fayyad reports on why. Read here.
Israel’s War on American Student Activists (James Bamford, The Nation): “For years the Israel on Campus Coalition—a little-known organization with links to Israeli intelligence—has used student informants to spy on pro-Palestinian campus groups.” What’s happening on American college campuses is not just infuriating, but a dangerous sign for what’s to come. Read here.
I Joined Gaza’s Trail of Tears And Displacement (Hind Khoudary, The Intercept): “Everything was destroyed. Even the streets were damaged and destroyed. My eyes were trying to document everything, I tried my best to capture everything in my eyes. I wanted to cry my tears out, but I held them inside me. It’s not time to cry, I will cry later, I told myself.” Follow Palestinian journalist Hind Khoudary on Instagram and Twitter. Read here.
Settler violence is erasing Palestinian communities in the West Bank (Louisa Loveluck, The Washington Post): “Adults make sure the children eat first. Children ask the adults why they’re not eating.” Violence by Israeli settlers, long aimed at depopulating rural Palestinian parts of the occupied West Bank, has surged since Hamas militants killed more than 1,400 people and plunged Israel into war on Oct. 7. Read here.
The Struggle to Save Lives Inside Gaza’s Hospitals (Sanya Mansoor, Time Magazine): “The conditions for medical care in Gaza are deteriorating across the besieged 140-sq.-mi. coastal strip. Surgeons are operating by flashlight and rationing water, anesthesia, and the generator fuel needed to perform surgeries, provide electricity for incubators, and care for kidney-dialysis patients… ‘Medical teams are on their knees.’” Read here.
The Extreme Ambitions of West Bank Settlers (Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker): A revealing, harrowing Q&A with Daniella Weiss, a West Bank settler and activist, “about how her religious views shape her view of the conflict, why she thinks human rights should not be considered universal, and her movement’s extreme plans for the region.” Read here.
Hundreds of journalists sign letter protesting coverage of Israel (Laura Wagner and Will Sommer, The Washington Post): More than 750 journalists from dozens of news organizations, myself included, signed an open letter condemning Israel’s killing of reporters in Gaza and criticizing Western media’s coverage of the war. Read here.
The Families of Israelis Held Hostage by Hamas Speak Out (Time Magazine): “Hamas is not only terrifying for the Israelis, but also for the Palestinians,” said Eyal Nouri, whose uncle was killed, and aunt kidnapped. “It is something I want the world to know. We love the Palestinians. We don't hate them. We want to live side by side.” Read here.
Letters from Gaza (Protean Mag): “With the power plants shut down, even the last vestiges of electricity—car batteries, personal generators—are running out. The internet has been cut, and now, with the Israeli government poised to expel Al Jazeera, one of the few media outlets with a presence in Gaza, communications from the strip, already chillingly few and far between, may cease altogether. As the Israeli military prepares to ramp up its genocidal assault on Gaza, every message that Palestinians manage to transmit may be the last.” In partnership with the Institute for Palestine Studies, Protean Magazine has been translating these messages “so the world can see the humanity buried under the rubble and the spirit of resistance of the Palestinian struggle.” Read here.
A Textbook Case of Genocide (Raz Segal, Jewish Currents Mag): “Under international law, the crime of genocide is defined by “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,” as noted in the December 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” writes Segal. “In its murderous attack on Gaza, Israel has loudly proclaimed this intent.” Read here.
Sources I’m looking to for updates and analysis: AlJazeera.com, AJ+, Vox, The New Yorker, n+1, 972mag, Haaretz.com, Jewish Currents Magazine.
Expert analyses
Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide (Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, Protean Mag): “We must be engaged in this kind of writing, which calls others into mobilization, generating feelings within our audiences that cannot be dispersed through the act of reading, but must be carried out into collective action. You sit, you read something, you feel grief or anger or joy, you get it all out, you put it down, you go about business as usual—this is the coercive affective system that Craft insists upon. We must write in such a way that there is no business, there is no usual.” Everything I needed to hear as a writer currently stuck in a silent academic institution. Thank you, Fargo. Read here.
‘A Desperate Situation Getting More Desperate’ (Rashid Khalidi, The Drift Mag): “If you believe this theoretical construct — the colony and the metropole — then what activists do here in the metropole counts. You have to win people over. You can’t just show that you are the most pure or the most revolutionary.” A fantastic, mobilizing interview with Rashid Khalidi, a scholar of modern Middle Eastern History and an editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies for over 20 years. He is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and the author of eight books, including, most recently, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. Read here.
How October 7 has changed us all — and what it signals for our struggle (Haggai Matar, 972mag): “Western governments have so far given Israel a free hand to commit these atrocities, showing a consistent double standard between the value of Israeli lives and Palestinian lives — which is part of what brought us to this situation in the first place.” Read here.
Poetry
Intifada Incantation: Poem #8 for b.b.L. (June Jordan): “I SAID I LOVED YOU/AND I WANTED/GENOCIDE TO STOP/I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED AFFIRMATIVE/ACTION AND REACTION/I SAID I LOVED YOU/AND I WANTED MUSIC/OUT THE WINDOWS/I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED/NOBODY THIRST AND NOBODY/NOBODY COLD/I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED I WANTED/JUSTICE UNDER MY NOSE…” A poem from the late Jamaican American writer June Jordan. Read the full poem here.
prologue for now - Gaza (Dionne Brand, Jewish Currents): “the editors printed/their carnage again like welcome news/and I was in a ship again/with none of my belongings except my throat/I tell you, I was limbless and talking/I was going to a funeral every day/it was a tv series and I was human, animal…”Oh my gosh, this poem. Read it in full here.
i wish you knew (Anam Raheem, Liminal Fuzz): “I wish you knew Tala and Omar. Ishak and Farah. I wish you knew Mohammed, Haneen, Asmaa, Aya and Noor. Sereen and Abdallah. I wish you knew Iyad and Saed. I wish you knew Hani and Abdelbaset, Amna and Muhannad. I wish you knew all their stories; the times we bickered, the times we laughed. I will tell all these stories one day, but for now—I wish, I wish… I wish you knew that strawberry fields flourish in Gaza’s winter—heaps of tiny, beating hearts fill the fruit stands. I have always thought it to be a certain kind of mercy to offer the world strawberries in winter, a certain kind of devotion to raise fields of ruby amidst the missiles and drones.” <3 Read here.
To Our Land (Mahmoud Darwish): “And our land, in its bloodied night,/is a jewel that glimmers for the far upon the far/and illuminates what is outside it…/As for us, inside,/we suffocate more.” A snippet of poetry from late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who was born in Galilee, a village occupied and later razed by the Israeli army. Read the full poem here.
What else I’ve been watching/listening to
Israelism: Directed by two first-time Jewish filmmakers, Israelism uniquely explores how Jewish attitudes towards Israel are changing dramatically, with massive consequences for the region and for Judaism itself.
Tantura: Filmmakers investigate controversial events at the Palestinian village of Tantura in 1948, where survivors claimed to witness a massacre of civilians by Israeli troops.
Nima Elbagir, chief international investigative correspondent, CNN. In this particular video, she explains why Palestinian families who have had their family members released as part of the hostage deal with Israel may be too scared to celebrate their return.
Videos of hostages and “prisoners” released, both by Hamas and by Israeli authorities
Photos and videos of Palestinian love and joy: Here’s press member Hamza Chalan chanting and playing with children in a Gaza refugee camp. Journalist Hind Khoudary shares photos on Twitter of her visit to the sea during the truce. (Israeli authorities later announced that Palestinians are prohibited from returning to the sea during this humanitarian pause)
Can You Tell Us Why This Is Happening? (n+1): “Every day, we say that this is the heaviest day. Every night, we say this is the heaviest night. And then they surprise us. No: there is more.” A series of voice memos from Gaza, edited for length and clarity. Listen.
Vox and AJ+ explainers on TikTok: Answers to questions you’re too afraid to ask, history of Israel and Palestine, the meaning behind “From the River to the Sea” and more
Anna Mae on TikTok: This is an American Jewish woman’s experience, from what she was taught about Israel growing up here, what she saw during Birthright and what she’s feeling now
Holocaust survivor Gabor Maté on the Israel-Palestine conflict as the longest ethnic cleansing operation of the 20th/21st centuries
Jon Stewart opening up about Israel/Palestine with Talib Kweli on the People’s Party podcast
Resources on Israel-Palestine
Decolonize Palestine: a collection of resources for organizers and anyone who wants to learn more about Palestine, including a reading list
Breaking the Silence Israel: A group made up of Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) veterans that talks about Israel’s occupation with nuance
Media Resource Guide on Palestine and Israel from the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association
Jewish Voice for Peace: the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world
Watching war unfold is distressing — here's how to protect your mental health: NPR’s Malaka Gharib, who has reported on child trauma in Ukraine, Rohingya refugees and Bangladesh and the Syrian civil war, offers expert advice from psychiatrist Arash Javanbakht for those who feel guilty for looking away
How to help
Stop Gaza Genocide toolkit from the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights
Writers Against the War on Gaza: an ad hoc coalition committed to solidarity and liberation
Refer to NPR’s extensive list for humanitarian efforts in Israel and Gaza
Notice any link snafus or grammatical issues? Open to criticism and suggestions.
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