Hello, and welcome to our weekly dispatch. This week we pay tribute to Edward Said on the anniversary of his death, share with you an urgent new diary from Gaza, and preview Mahmoud Khalil’s new memoir. You’ll also findour usual media round-up and our expanded, global list of Palestine-related events.
Last Friday marked twenty-three years since the untimely passing of the towering Palestinian intellectual Edward Said. Born in Jerusalem in 1935, Said spent most of his life living in exile in the United States.
A highly acclaimed scholar of Western literatures and music, Said was an incisive political commentator and fearless advocate of Palestinian liberation for his entire life. He wrote presciently about the dangers of normalization, the failure of the Oslo accords, and the fallacy of the two-state solution.
Said passed after a long struggle with leukemia, two years after the September 11 attacks and just six months after the US invasion of Iraq. Since his death, his work has remained essential for understanding the spectre of Islamophobia, the global war on terror, and the imperial role that Israel plays in shoring up Western foreign policy across the Middle East.
Below, you can read an excerpt of Said’s 2002 essay “What Israel Has Done,” written in the wake of the Jenin massacre in April of that year, which led to the near-total destruction of the Jenin refugee camp. The essay’s reflections on Israeli statecraft and Western complicity remain troublingly relevant today.
Despite Israel’s effort to restrict coverage of its destructive invasion of the West Bank’s Palestinian towns and refugee camps, information and images have nevertheless seeped through. The Internet has provided hundreds of verbal as well as pictorial eyewitness reports, as have Arab and European TV coverage, most of it unavailable or blocked or spun out of existence from the mainstream US media. That evidence provides stunning proof of what Israel’s campaign has actually – has always – been about: the irreversible conquest of Palestinian land and society. The official line (which Washington has basically supported, along with nearly every US media commentator) is that Israel has been defending itself by retaliating against the suicide bombings that have undermined its security and even threatened its existence. That claim has gained the status of an absolute truth, moderated neither by what Israel has done nor by what in fact has been done to it.
Phrases such as “plucking out the terrorist network,” “destroying the terrorist infrastructure” and “attacking terrorist nests” (note the total dehumanization involved) are repeated so often and so unthinkingly that they have given Israel the right to destroy Palestinian civil life, with a shocking degree of sheer wanton destruction, killing, humiliation and vandalism.[...]
By what inhuman calculus did Israel’s army, using dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers, along with hundreds of missile strikes from US-supplied Apache helicopter gunships, besiege Jenin’s refugee camp for over a week, a one-square-kilometer patch of shacks housing 15,000 refugees and a few dozen men armed with automatic rifles and no missiles or tanks, and call it a response to terrorist violence and a threat to Israel’s survival? There are reported to be hundreds buried in the rubble, which Israeli bulldozers began heaping over the camp’s ruins after the fighting ended. Are Palestinian civilian men, women and children no more than rats or cockroaches that can be attacked and killed in the thousands without so much as a word of compassion or in their defense? And what about the capture of thousands of men who have been taken off by Israeli soldiers, the destitution and homelessness of so many ordinary people trying to survive in the ruins created by Israeli bulldozers all over the West Bank, the siege that has now gone on for months and months, the cutting off of electricity and water in Palestinian towns, the long days of total curfew, the shortage of food and medicine, the wounded who have bled to death, the systematic attacks on ambulances and aid workers that even the mild-mannered Kofi Annan has decried as outrageous? Those actions will not be pushed so easily into the memory hole. Its friends must ask Israel how its suicidal policies can possibly gain it peace, acceptance and security.
The monstrous transformation of an entire people by a formidable and feared propaganda machine into little more than militants and terrorists has allowed not just Israel’s military but its fleet of writers and defenders to efface a terrible history of injustice, suffering and abuse in order to destroy the civil existence of the Palestinian people with impunity. Gone from public memory are the destruction of Palestinian society in 1948 and the creation of a dispossessed people; the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza and their military occupation since 1967; the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, with its 17,500 Lebanese and Palestinian dead and the Sabra and Shatila massacres; the continuous assault on Palestinian schools, refugee camps, hospitals, civil installations of every kind. What antiterrorist purpose is served by destroying the building and then removing the records of the ministry of education; the Ramallah municipality; the Central Bureau of Statistics; various institutes specializing in civil rights, health, culture and economic development; hospitals, radio and TV stations? Isn’t it clear that Sharon is bent not only on breaking the Palestinians but on trying to eliminate them as a people with national institutions?[...]
The profound question facing Israel and its people is this: Is it willing to assume the rights and obligations of being a country like any other, and forswear the kind of impossible colonial assertions for which Sharon and his parents and soldiers have been fighting since day one? In 1948 Palestinians lost 78 percent of Palestine. In 1967 they lost the remaining 22 percent. Now the international community must lay upon Israel the obligation to accept the principle of real, as opposed to fictional, partition, and to accept the principle of limiting Israel’s extraterritorial claims, those absurd, biblically based pretensions and laws that have so far allowed it to override another people. Why is that kind of fundamentalism unquestioningly tolerated? But so far all we hear is that Palestinians must give up violence and condemn terror. Is nothing substantive ever demanded of Israel, and can it go on doing what it has without a thought for the consequences? That is the real question of its existence, whether it can exist as a state like all others, or must always be above the constraints and duties of other states. The record is not reassuring.
“We will persevere on your path” (2008), from the Palestine Poster Project
In this week’s Dispatch:
The latest from The Key;
A curated calendar of upcoming Palestine-related events worldwide;
Mahmoud Khalil’s No Land to Stand On is Book of the Week;
Your weekly media roundup;
Featured items from the PalFest Shop.
The Latest from The Key
The latest issue of The Key features a diary from Gaza by Mayar Nateel. It was written while the author was fleeing along with her family from one shelter to another during Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The young writer and poet has been in France since August 2026. Her family remains in Gaza.
Here’s the first few paragraphs for you:
Diary from Gaza: “I Dream of an Ordinary Death”
Mayar Nateel, translated by Hadeel Jamal
After years of bombardment, my mother's fear left its mark on her skin. I've learned to carry mine – and to hope for a quiet and swift death.
I am familiar with fear in all its shapes and colors, and how it creeps up on us. I see its’ marks colors in my mother’s hands and I remember how, after the 2014 offensive, that fear appeared to turn her skin a different shade. I was in the seventh grade back then, and together we visited every dermatologist in Gaza. They all gave the same verdict: “It is likely vitiligo, triggered by the fear of loud bombardment. It is impossible to cure, but we can try to halt its spread.”
My mother longed to eliminate that fear from her hands and stop its progression. She hid it to avoid the prying eyes of strangers.
She feared losing one or all of us, or perhaps she feared leaving us behind, alone without her. With each passing year, the fear spread on her hands, darkening and taking shape. After October 2023, my mother no longer hid her dread: She would roll up her sleeves to cook and knead dough alongside other mothers in a house sheltering more than 50 displaced people, sharing her anxiety, sorrow, and worry with them. At the end of each day she would gently caress my face, as though wiping her anguish off it – protecting my features with the certainty that no harm would befall any of us.
She would raise her hands, praying for the genocide to cease and for death to spare those around her, until that first November in 2023, when she received a call from my uncle.
“The seven have been martyred,” he said. She tried to identify the seven in her mind – Who is gone? Who remains? The grief of those questions wrapped around her hands in coils, shackling them, tightening whenever she tried to wipe her tears. My mother confined herself to the room where we were sheltering and would not move, desperately trying to reach her niece still in northern Gaza. What do funerals and grieving look like during a genocide? Everything around us seemed to dictate that we were to weep in solitude without a true farewell to the bodies, without funeral prayers, and without a gathering to mourn the dead.
Upcoming PalFest events
3 October (London, Ibraaz) - Randa Abdel Fattah and Omar Robert Hamilton on Discipline
8 October (London, Brick Lane Bookshop) - Ibtisam Azem and Preti Taneja on The Sleep Thief
16 October (London, the Mosaic Rooms) - Fady Joudah and Zena Agha on Exhibit G
21 October (London, the Southbank Centre) - Tareq Baconi and Ta-Nehisi Coates in conversation with Nesrine Malik
17 November (London, The Light) - Noura Erakat and John Reynolds present Confronting Zionism, with Rafeef Ziadah
Upcoming Palestine events around the world
29 September (London) – The Complicit Lens
29 September (Bethlehem) – أثر الانقطاع، استعادة للمخرج كمال الجعفري
29 September-4 October (Minneapolis) – khalas fest
30 September (Ramallah) – خارج السياق، الصورة بين سلطة الأرشيف واحتمالات المعنى
30 September (Washington, DC) – Gaza, U.S. Complicity, and the Boomerang
30 September-9 October (Toronto) – Toronto Palestine Film Festival
3 October (New York) – Seeding Solidarity: Screening, Dinner, Fundraiser
3 October (Oakland) – Mahmoud Khalil on Palestine and resistance in the face of fascism
6 October (London) – Disposable Palestinians: Israel’s Wars and Genocide in Gaza
7 October (London) – Palestinian Liberation and Anti-Colonial Solidarity
8-11 October (New York) – Habibi Festival 2026
9 October (London) – Palestinian Resistance, 1917- 2026
9 October (London) – Heritage under occupation in Hebron, Palestine
10 October (London) – Living Through the Unimaginable - Continuing the Conversation
10 October (Manchester) – Manchester: Commemorating 3 Years of Genocide
11 October (London) – For the Martyrs, the Living and the Land: Fundraiser Performance
12 October (Bellingham, WA) – Nada Elia - Falastiniyyat: A Century of Palestinian Feminisms
13 October (London) – Book Talk: The Complicit Lens: US Media & Israel's Genocide
14 October (London) – Stand Up for Palestine Comedy Night at Palestine House
16 October (San Francisco) – Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry
16-25 October (Boston) – Boston Palestine Film Festival
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Book of the Week
“Are you Mahmoud Khalil?” The question marked the start of a politically charged odyssey that took the Palestinian graduate student and legal resident from his pregnant wife and home in New York City, transported him across the country, and locked him up in a Louisiana detention camp under threat of deportation. His “crime”: exercising his right to free speech at Columbia University, where he emerged as a leading voice against the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. No Land to Stand On is his indelible account, the story of a man confronting the reality that he had become target number one for a lawless regime shredding basic rights.
Drawing on his prison diary and writing in vivid, page-turning detail, Mahmoud Khalil conjures the despair and cruelty of ICE detention, where prisoners can vanish overnight and visiting families risk their own deportation. There is humanity, too, in the men’s acts of care—their mutual help with documents, the prison cake they make after Mahmoud can only follow the birth of his son on the public payphone. In tandem, he tells the multi-generational story of a family expelled from Palestine to a Syrian refugee camp, of flight from Assad’s regime to Lebanon, of arrival in an America that promised permanence and protection, and of the enduring struggle for Palestine.
A work of courage and resistance, No Land to Stand On is a call to integrity, to staying true to one’s life’s mission, and to defending the inalienable right to safety, freedom, and a land to stand on.
Order No Land to Stand On from our Bookshop.org shopfronts:
Media Roundup
Songs of the Hills – A poem by Hussein Amri, accompanied by photography by Ahmad “Mouri” Zaghmouri: “How does the hillside rise with the story / without slipping away? / The sun will burn the pines / when it longs for the harvest, / and the valley will swallow / the bricks of the transient.”
The End of Things – A poem by Mahmoud Darwish, newly translated by Alaa Alqaisi: “Fruit on the verge of falling from the tree: / that is the ending and the beginning, / or a language for leaving. / At the far end of the tunnel, space cracks open and expands.”
Exit and Exception – Noura Erakat argues that the Board of Peace’s model for governing Palestine reflects designs for a new world order.
The Blueprint – An excerpt from Mahmoud Khalil’s new memoir: “For Palestinians, evidence has never been the point. We are the exception to every rule the ‘free world’ claims to hold sacred. Innocent until proven guilty – unless you are Palestinian. Due process – unless you are Palestinian. Free speech and academic freedom – unless you are Palestinian. The principles dissolve the moment a Palestinian enters the frame.”
Palestinian Horror Fiction Is Having a Moment – Madeline Edwards reviews a number of recent works of Palestinian fiction that examine the legacy of displacement and ethnic cleansing through the genre of horror.
The Infrastructure of Truth: A Conversation with Assal Rad – Lina Mounzer speaks to Assal Rad about the power of language in crafting narrative, journalistic responsibility, and more.
Israel’s Accountability Theatre – Liam Syed argues that “the Israeli military has designed the perfect sequence to protect itself from real accountability, while using selective investigations and admissions to deal with international condemnation.”
Genocide and the Limits of Israeli Elections – With weeks to go until the Israeli elections, Amjad Iraqi speaks to Tariq Kenney-Shawa about Israel’s electoral landscape, the limits of its so-called opposition camp, and what the election means for the future of the Palestinian struggle.
No Body, No Death Certificate: The Bureaucratic Limbo Trapping the Widows of Gaza’s Missing Men – Enas Abu Ghayad reports on Gazan women who, without death certificates for their husbands, have found themselves locked out of bank accounts, aid, and custody rights.
Palestine Through the Eyes of an Architect: Nadi Abusaada – A new episode of the Tarwida podcast, featuring architect and historian Nadi Abusaada to discuss how Palestinians reconstruct history through the traces that remain, the challenges of curating Palestinian heritage, and why romanticizing the past can obscure the realities of the present.
Am I in the Right Place? – Mohammed Al Ta’ban writes about how online education for his university studies feels like “just the shell of an education,” and hopes to make more visits to the campus of Islamic University of Gaza.
Israel Is Expanding and Upgrading Compounds for Palestinian Militias in Gaza – Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Forensic Architecture report on new facilities that Israel has built for the Palestinian militias it is backing in Gaza to loot aid and attack Palestinians living near the yellow line.
Weapon of Distraction: How Israel Uses Greenwashing to Mask Its Climate Crimes – Asma Barakat writes about food tech start-ups in Israel which are using resources pillaged from Palestinian communities to produce “environmentally friendly” foods.
Makdisi Street Reviews w/ Fady Joudah – A new episode of the Makdisi Street podcast featuring Fady Joudah for a conversation about his new book, Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza.
Fady Joudah’s Meditation on Language and Time Under Genocide – Bilal Urick reviews Fady Joudah’s new book Exhibit G: “Neither a museum nor an exhibition nor a criminal case document, Exhibit G highlights Gaza’s unceasing endurance, counter to the fleeting ‘exhibit’ that has been made of Palestinian suffering under the Western sun.”
From Exhibit G: Surviving Image – An excerpt from Fady Joudah’s new book: “What is enough childhood for a people to stay alive? What image of childhood is enough for a people to stay alive?”
One from the Shop
Before Freedom is the debut photography collection by Palestinian-American photographer Adam Rouhana. Playing with images that lie between fact and fiction, Before Freedom argues for expanded notions of subjectivity, offering an imaginary that envisions the inevitable freedom of Palestine.
We are excited to arranged signed copies of this beautiful book for buyers through the PalFest website, with worldwide shopping.
Thanks for reading.
Until next week.
