Monday Matter: Sadness set on fire

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.

Thirty-seven days.

“I have never felt like this before. They tell me it’s anger.
I tell them it’s more sadness set on fire.” — Basma Alhajaj

Thirty-seven days of witnessing violence and betrayal, a revolutionary swallowing of bitter truths, the incessant poking at fresh and enduring wounds. Thirty seven days of betrayal lending itself to clarity: We get free together. We get free together. We get free together. My tired eyes make puddles on the ceramic-shielded 6.1-inch display in the palm of my hand and I am grateful to still feel the fire raging within. I will worry when I no longer feel warmth.

Today’s newsletter is public, and I’ll keep the issues public for as long as I feel desperate for healing, honest words. Here is/are the stories, voices, art that I am learning from, that are offering some semblance of clarity, knowledge, understanding or solidarity. If you’d like to help financially support Foreign Bodies by becoming a paying subscriber, click here.

To start, a poem from Palestinian poet Ghassan Kanafani:

What I’ve been watching/listening to

• 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.

• 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.

• Coverage from Gazan journalists

What I’ve been reading

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

From previous issue(s):

Poetry

• 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.

Expert analyses

• ‘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.

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.

• 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 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. | Also read: This Letter to the Editor in response to Segal’s piece

• 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

• 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.

What I’ve been watching/listening to

• Palestinian journalists based in Gaza, a list

• 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

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Notice any link snafus or grammatical issues? Open to criticism and suggestions.

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