Monday Matter: Olive trees and woven wreaths
Your biweekly Foreign Bodies roundup (public)
Every other Monday, I send subscribers and gift recipients of immigrant mental health and storytelling newsletter Foreign Bodies stories I recently inhaled and adored. This is also a chance to do some housekeeping and give shout-outs and all that jazz. Today’s issue, a departure from the typical Monday letter, is public.
Taking some time to read and listen. Join me?
Friends, like many of you, I am overcome with grief. I simply do not have it in me to make words of my rage right now, but I do want to continue to share words from the writers, poets and others I’ve been reading and listening to. Beyond taking action, slowing down to really spend time understanding each other will do us much better than the onslaught of headlines teeming with the all-too-familiar, dehumanizing and passive voice. Some of these readings are from the last issue of the Monday Matter. I’ll be updating this list every now and then, and I welcome your own recommendations.
To start, a poem from Mahmoud Darwish:
Note: I’m also educating myself on the recent crisis in Sudan, which led to thousands killed and millions more displaced. I admit I didn’t see or read much prior to this week, and that really worries me; what else have I been ignoring? I’m learning. I hope you’ll join me.
What I’ve been reading
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.
‘A Desperate Situation Getting More Desperate’ (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.
‘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.
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.
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.
From the previous issue:
‘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.
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.
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 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.
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.
News sources I’m looking to for updates and analysis: AlJazeera.com, Haaretz.com, Jewish Currents Magazine.
What I’ve been watching/listening to
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
Al Jazeera English live on YouTube for news broadcast and analysis
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
Death toll reveals the scale of Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A troubling infographic from the New York Times
How the Israel war, blockade affect mental health of Palestinian children: An explainer from Indlieb Farazi Saber of Al Jazeera featuring insights from psychologists and psychiatrists
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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