The Weekly Dispatch: “Suffering is not noble"

Hello, and welcome to this week’s dispatch. Welcome, too, to new subscribers who joined us after our latest issue of The Key. This weekly newsletter shares with you what PalFest is up to, but it also aims to educate, by keeping you up to date with the latest news, commentary, books, and events having to do with Palestine.

In a few days, twenty-one years will have passed since Israel officially withdrew from the Gaza Strip, when, on 12 September, the last Israeli soldier left. Although the “Gaza disengagement” emptied twenty-one settlements and removed more than 8000 Israeli settlers from Gaza, in reality it also served to fragment Gaza further from the rest of historic Palestine, to relieve international pressure on Israel after the Second Intifada, and to inject negotiations, in the words of one Israeli politician, with “formaldehyde,” indefinitely suspending the so-called “peace process.”

Despite Israel’s “disengagement,” the Israeli state has maintained tight control over the Gaza strip. Its siege and naval blockade have restricted the movement of goods and people into and out of Gaza, while intermittent and arbitrary bombings continued, killing thousands of Palestinians in the process.

This is the backdrop against which Operation Al-Aqsa Flood took place on October 7, 2023. And now, nearly three years into the genocide Israel and the United States are making plans for a permanent military presence, while settlers have designs of resettling the strip. Still, Gaza remains steadfast; in the words of Mahmoud Darwish, it “liberates itself and its history every hour.”

Scroll down for the rest of our weekly dispatch:

While the new issue of The Key launches later this week, we wanted to share with you a recent piece by Abdaljawad Omar that we recently featured. Part of our ongoing project on Refusing Complicity, which sits at the intersection of boycott and cultural production, Omar’s essay calls into question the complacency of writing in a time of genocide. You can read an excerpt of The Failure to Crossover below.

Writing does not write; it exscribes, leaks from a site that never consented to speak. One could say that writing begins already in failure — the failure to keep the promise that the word might accompany the deed, that the said could coincide with the done. Each sentence performs this impossibility: The performative trembles, the declarative exposes its own impotence. What if writing were not the cure but the cough — a reflex, an expulsion, the body’s protest against what it cannot metabolize in action? To write is to signal the infection of language, to become symptomatic of a grammar that refuses mastery. The “I” that writes arrives dispossessed, delayed, haunted by an address that precedes it and by a deed that never quite arrives.

Here — for us, in Palestine — such failure is not a theoretical abstraction. It enunciates our suspension, the paralysis between saying and doing, where each word testifies to the impossibility of its own realization. Words gather, organize, grieve, but they falter at the threshold of the deed — that impossible domain where the question what is to be done? remains both imperative and unanswerable. Writing, here, becomes an archive of hesitation, a record of the unspeakable labor of aligning utterance with survival — and of the betrayal entailed in that very alignment. To act here is also to be unmade. To resist is to fracture the order of the world while knowing that the world will not bend to one’s intention. Writing, then, stands as both witness and wound — the persistence of a voice that cannot heal, that will not cease, that remains faithful to its own undoing.

You can read the rest of Omar’s essay here, along with responses by other writers to questions of boycott, complicity, and the role of writers in a time of genocide. Please consider subscribing to The Key to allow us to continue publishing work like this.

Poems from When the Arab Apocalypse Comes to America – Three poems from the forthcoming collection When the Arab Apocalypse Comes to America by George Abraham: “In refusal, the sun became an image of / everywhere: a red sun staining a bag of flour, a hemorrhage / in the shape of a green sun, an abscess, a wound from the eye / of the wound of the yellowed sun, a blue-beaten sun, a kingdom / of jaundice.” 

Elemental Intifada: How Palestine Unmakes the Anthropocene – Sherena Razek writes about the ways in which the ecology of Palestine rebels against the Zionist project: “Elemental intifada is a shaking off of the violent, contrived human-nature divide; in that sense, it unmakes the Anthropocene. Elemental intifada is return.”

No Address – Hassan Ayman Herzallah writes about being unable to return from the tent where he lives to his home because it is too close to the so-called Yellow Line that Israel continues to move.

“Exhibit G”–Viewing Palestinian Interiority: A Conversation with Fady Joudah – David Palumbo-Liu speaks to Fady Joudah about his upcoming book Exhibit G, a collection of poems, essays, and photographs that depicts the grief and resilience of Palestinians during the genocide.

“It Feels Like a Death Sentence” – Basel Adra describes the settler attacks taking place in the South Hebron Hills, in the West Bank, in which settlers steal Palestinians’ livestock, and therefore their livelihoods.

How Israel Propagandists Twist UN Findings on Gaza Hunger – Maureen Clare Murphy analyzes how the findings of a UNICEF report on malnutrition in Gaza are being laundered by pro-Israel media to cover over the infrastructures of starvation that continue to leave Gaza in a state of “crisis-level food insecurity.”

In Jerusalem’s Mamilla Cemetery, an Entire Heritage Is Being Erased – Tawfiq Da’adli writes about the slow and ongoing destruction of a centuries-old cemetery in Jerusalem, including to build parking lots, parks and the “Museum of Tolerance.”

Israeli Settlers 'Hike' Through My West Bank Village. Next Is the Violent Land Grab – Fareed Taamallah describes the “methodical blueprint” by which “hikes” by Israeli settlers become scouting missions for new settlements, with his village the latest in their targets.

Qusra Under Siege – Reporting on illegal settler incursions into the village of Qusra, David Schulman describes the complicity of the Israeli army and police in protecting and abetting the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.

​​US Universities Rake in Millions Doing Israeli Military Research – Mila Halgren and Alex Rewegan report on how universities in the United States collaborate with the Israeli military to build military technologies including “drone swarms, missile guidance, fuel cells, and quantum sensing.”

Before We Are Erased: Why I Founded Gaza Publications During the Genocide – Husam Maarouf writes about the publishing house he started in Gaza as a way of “preserving humanity” amid the genocide.

Be Less Poetic – A new poem by Tariq Al-Arabi, translated by Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor: “The mother feeds her children the day’s honey / with affection and a little cunning.”

She Painted My Nails Red as I Wept – A new poem by Maya abu al-Hayyat, translated by Badar Salem: “Like all Palestinians, / I have been schooled in grief / to the brink of death. / Yet I swallow it, / choose hardness instead, / repeating to myself / the day’s mantra: / Suffering is not noble. / Suffering is not noble. / Suffering is not noble.”