Hello, and welcome to this week’s dispatch.

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The Land Conversations series at the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit continues with sociologist Soraya el-Kahlaoui, who brings experiences from Morocco and Tunisia into a comparative reading with the Palestinian land question. At stake is how colonial laws reshaped land tenure, transformed commons into new forms of property, and gave rise to social and political transformations whose effects remain present in struggles over land today.

How have colonial legal systems shaped the relationship between people and land? And what might these connected histories reveal about land: its meanings, its forms of belonging, and the paths through which it is claimed and reclaimed?

Drawing on the entangled histories of Palestine and North Africa, the conversation explores how land is reclaimed and how colonial legal legacies can be read anew. It also examines the political and cultural meanings of Palestinians of Morocco, a name adopted by some communities in Morocco to express shared histories of colonial dispossession and the enduring ways these histories shape relations to land.

Join the Palestinian Museum in person or virtually for a conversation that rethinks land beyond ownership: as history and memory, as a social and political relation, and as an enduring site of struggle, meaning, and redefinition.

Our latest issue of The Key came out last week, featuring some remarkable work by our contributors: a photo essay profiling the wife and daughter of the late Walid Daqqa, a meditation on Palestine solidarity at the World Cup, and a new poem from Gaza.

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Receiving the Wound – A thousand days since Al-Aqsa Flood, an anonymous writer takes stock of sacrifice, martyrdom, and the meaning of the world from the viewpoint of Gaza.

Beirut Fragments – An excerpt from Jean Said Makdisi’s Beirut Fragments, first published in 1990 and newly republished this month, about how Israel’s 1982 bombing campaign in Lebanon echoes through the decades: “I had a sense of timelessness, as though the siege had always been and would always be; as though I had known no other reality. There was no work and no play, no proper time for doing this or that, for sleep or waking. We slept when we could; we woke when we had to. The structure of time collapsed, and hours fell about us like stones off a broken building. Sundays, Mondays—all the days of the week were alike and lost their character, and all the dates of the month as well.”

Israel Is Trying To Extinguish Palestinian Cultural Life in East Jerusalem – Hala Gourani writes about Israeli crackdowns on cultural institutions in East Jerusalem such as El Hakawati Theatre, Educational Bookshop, and others, as part of its attempt to Judaize all of Jerusalem.

The Nakba Is an Inheritance for All Palestinians – Elias Jahshan speaks of his own family inheritance, and why it’s important to mourn and commemorate the Nakba. 

Sisterhood, Resistance, and Sumud: Lessons from Damon Prison – Zarefah Baroud profiles Palestinian women released from Israel’s Damon Prison through prisoner exchanges to show the forms of collective defiance and care which allow these women to survive the carceral violence of the Israeli state.

PEN America's "Silent Moratorium" Prompts Very Loud Criticism – Sohini Desai reports on the controversies surrounding PEN America after it issued a report on the so-called censorship of Israeli writers that framed BDS as discriminatory.

Between the Goalposts and the Genocide – Marah Abdel Jaber writes about the forms of Palestine solidarity on display at the World Cup, even as FIFA has tried to normalize Israel through sport.

In the West Bank, Religious Zionists Are Realizing a Long-Held Vision – Jared Hillel reports on the accelerating pace of Jewish settlement in the West Bank, leading to the demolition of more Palestinian homes and the ethnic cleansing of more Palestinians.

Law & Order: Higher Ed Unit – Huda Fakhreddine writes about how her life became twisted into a plot for the television show Law and Order in a manner that vilifies Palestinians and vindicates Zionism.

Paradise Way: Watching Sirāt after Gaza – Youssef Rakha reviews the film Sirāt, arguing that it orchestrates Sufi wisdom in a contemporary, apocalyptic setting to offer a powerful, ‘postmuslim’ response to the world after Gaza.

Ungrounding: A History of Genocide Written into the Soil – Selma Dabbagh reviews Eyal Weizman’s new book Ungrounding, which studies the mechanics behind Israel’s genocide in Gaza, arguing that the book provides “a methodology for the future that encourages us all to do what we can to alter the current course of destruction.”