Over the past several weeks, Israel has ramped up its encroachments on the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem. Just last week 200 Israeli activists invaded the compound, raising the Israeli flag, singing the Israeli national anthem, and reciting Talmudic prayers. Also last week, a bill advanced past a key hurdle in the Knesset that would allow Israel to restrict the call to prayer from al-Aqsa and other mosques. These developments come amid reporting that the US and Israel are trying to strip Jordan of control over the affairs of al-Aqsa.

Here is an excerpt from Najwan Darwish’s poem “Jerusalem,” translated into English by Kareem James Abu-Zeid.

The murdered hum their poems on the hills
and the rebels reproach the tellers of their stories
while I leave the sea behind and come back
to you, come back
by this small river that flows in your despair

I hear the reciters of the Quran and the shrouders of corpses
I hear the dust of the condolers
I am not yet thirty, but you buried me, time and again
and each time, for your sake
I emerge from the earth

[keep reading]

Scroll down for:

As Long as There Is Football – Writing on the eve of the World Cup, Mohammed Mhawish considers the social history and cultural significance of football in Palestine.

A Place They’ve Never Seen: Imagining Palestine from Lebanon’s Camps – Sarah Al Shaladeh speaks to Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon to plumb their geographies of family history and imaginations of return.

Al-Aqsa: The Moment of Peril Is Here. Will the Muslim World Act? – Ismail Patel argues that a newly-revealed US/Israeli plan to strip Jordan of custodianship of Al-Aqsa Mosque and to turn the mosque into a “multi-faith centre” constitutes a “final act of colonisation” by Israel.

The Geography of Complicity: Supply Chains and Global Resistance – Following revelations that Italy has played a crucial role in the supply chain for Israel’s military, Alessandra Pellegrini maps a network of complicit ports, calling for acts of portworker solidarity and refusal like those during the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. 

As Israel Encroaches Upon Gaza, the UN Should Be Reckoning With Its Colonial Complicity – Ramona Wadi describes the fecklessness of the United Nations in Gaza, particularly as Israel continues to advance its so-called yellow line to 70 percent of the territory with the full support of the so-called Board of Peace.

Gaza Is Being Offered Coercion, Not Reconstruction – Said Arikat shows that the Board of Peace’s plan for the future of Gaza “does not aim to rebuild Gaza. It aims to coerce it. Reconstruction has been transformed from a humanitarian obligation into a political weapon.” 

“You Either Leave Right Now or You Die”—Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing of a Village in Lebanon – Reporting from southern Lebanon Lylla Younes writes about the forced expulsion of residents in Ain Arab, where Israeli soldiers went door to door and threatened residents at gunpoint. 

Israel Tortured These Activists. Now They're Speaking Out. – Saliha Bayrak reports on widespread experiences of violence, sexual abuse, and torture among participants in the latest freedom flotilla that aimed to break the Israeli siege on Gaza.

How the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism Is Being Used to Criminalize Palestine Solidarity Across Latin America –Blanca Missé examines how the criminalization of Palestine solidarity as antisemitic also targets the backbone of Latin America’s social movements.

If We Can Intifada the Poems… – Two new poems by George Abraham, from their forthcoming collection When the Arab Apocalypse Comes to America: “If we can believe in water, then we can believe in the un-countrying / of water, the un-surfacing of corpses, the lunar un-ease, for now. / If we can un-green the music, un-yellow the eyelids, un-red the impossible / wounds — if we can intifada the poems, they will only be elegies for now.”

One way everyone can support this free newsletter, every week, is with a quick click on the link below from Proton Mail. You don’t need to do anything else - just click.

ADVERTISEMENT:

Stop drowning in spam. Proton Mail keeps your inbox clean, private, and focused—without ads or filters.

Take control of your inbox

ADVERTISEMENT OVER.

Subscribers to the PalFest Bookshelf will this month be receiving Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life, just published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

We wanted to share a little bit more about this crucial book with you.

In Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life the Syrian writer Samar Yazbek brings together the first-person testimonies of survivors of the genocide in Palestine that she spent three months with after their evacuation from Gaza between March and June, 2024. In this act of gathering together the particularities of each person’s narrative, a collective history is built, one that tells of agonizing individual losses as well as revealing the patterned, structured brutality of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. The methods and technology of that genocide are usually talked about in factual, distant language. Yazbek brings us the consciously recounted experiences of human beings who have witnessed and survived mass killing by artificial intelligence, forcing that consciousness back into a method of war which, Yazbek writes, turns  life "into mere code...death into a human state digitally translated."

There is pain in this book, as well as a clinging to life. It is tempting to think of it as a book for future generations who will try to understand what happened in this dark time of over-exposed crimes against humanity. We think of it as a book for now, a book that works against the crude reduction of the suffering of the genocide, its normalization into the category of unavoidable, unstoppable atrocity, the pretense that we can understand anything at all about it, or about what it means for our shared futures, without sitting with the experiences of those who have been through hell, are still there, and still speak.

To receive the book please click through to the PalFest Bookshelf or subscribe through the Key.

That’s it for this week. We’ll be back on Monday morning with next week’s dispatch. Until then, if you’re still reading, then you must be glad to receive it - and you can support it with a final click from the sponsored ad from Protonmail below.

Gmail tracks you. Proton doesn’t. Get private email that puts your data — and your privacy — first.

Ditch the Gmail data grab