The Weekly Dispatch: “The sky is still larger than those occupying it”

Hello, and welcome to our weekly dispatch. We’re working to keep you abreast of what we’re up to and in the loop with the latest news, commentary, books, and events to do with Palestine.

This week marks forty-four years since the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982. Shatila is one of the first Palestinian refugee camps established in Lebanon, and was populated predominantly by refugees of the 1948 Nakba. Sabra is a poor neighborhood adjoining the camp. Over the course of 40 continuous hours between 16-18 September, right-wing Lebanese Christian militants, backed by Israel, killed between 2,000 and 3,500 people, mostly Palestinian refugees.

A culmination of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which began in June 1982, the Sabra and Shatila massacres represented Ariel Sharon’s attempt to extirpate the Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO, which was headquartered in Beirut at the time. As the massacre took place, Israeli forces surrounded the Sabra neighborhood and Shatila refugee camps to prevent people from escaping. They fired flares at night to illuminate the darkness and provided the Phalangists with bulldozers to dispose of the bodies. No one was ever held accountable.

There was enormous international outcry in the wake of the massacres. The United Nations General Assembly characterized the massacres as a genocide and called for sanctions against Israel. But it was also a catalyzing moment for solidarity from writers and artists all around the world. In her poem “Moving Towards Home,” the poet June Jordan wrote movingly about the horrors of the massacre and aligned herself, as a Black woman, with the cause of the Palestinian right of return. “I do not wish to speak about unspeakable events,” she wrote, “that must follow from those who dare ‘to purify’ a people those who dare ‘to exterminate’ a people.” The more urgent task, for Jordan, is to speak about home:

Read the rest of Moving Towards Home by June Jordan here.

Scroll down for the rest of our weekly dispatch:

The Sleep Thief, now on the PalFest Bookshelf, is the experimental first novel from International Booker Prize-longlisted Palestinian author Ibtisam Azem. The novel “deftly evokes,” per the Irish Times, “the daily grind of being an Arab in Israel.” Below, Preti Taneja reflects on the novel’s power and Azem’s mastery.

The Sleep Thief, by Ibtisam Azem, translated by Sinan Antoon, is Azem’s first novel, now published in a new edition by And Other Stories. It bears all the hallmarks of Azem’s singular prose style: both brutally spare and beautifully rich. Juxtaposing violence and longing often in the same sentence, Azem lays out the whole history of a people and a place through the complex body and life of one man: Gharib Haifawi – the thief of the title.

Haifawi, ‘Obsessed with the names of objects and the meanings of words;’ with his lost lover, Hamsa; with the implied authority of archives and what they wilfully omit; with an impossible return to dream of Haifa and building Palestine anew; recounts his life story as if he is both alive and dead at the same time. And, by structuring the novel as a nested narrative – in which Gharib’s story is told as if by him, but through an unnamed narrator, a professional story-teller perhaps – Azem presents a tale in the timeless register of a fable or an epic myth.

And Haifawi is an unlikely, and likeable, hero. Even as he communes with the gods, he loves sex and sensuality. He retains his full complex, funny, sad and raging humanity in the face of the dehumanising treatment he is subject to from Israeli army and border guards; the post-traumatic stress disorder that makes even feeling a splash of water into a horrific experience.

Azem paints all of this in a few sharp, masterfully absurdist strokes that blend time, memory, and mortality in a novel that is both fever dream and psychological thriller. Looking into Haifawi’s face has its risks, but Azem insists we see the future of Palestine through his eyes; no checkpoints or ID cards, no naming or classifications – only in so much ‘nada,’ she insists, can there be liberation.

— Preti Taneja

Subscribe to the Bookshelf now to receive The Sleep Thief as your first book.

In last week’s issue of The Key we were proud to publish previously untranslated writing from Mahmoud Darwish alongside an op-ed from former Columbia University student Maryam Alwan who forensically details the ways in which the campus became an actively hostile and racist environment for Palestinians after October 7.

On the Existential Threat of Palestinian Kites to Colonial Power – Ahmad Ibsais writes about the children of Gaza who imagine a sky beyond Israeli rule: “What can joy give a child inside a cage? The first knowledge that the cage is not the world. The will of the occupied will always outlive the will of the occupier. A child at play has already imagined a life beyond violence and, for a moment, begun to live there. The sky is still larger than those occupying it, and Palestine remains larger than the violence devoted to emptying it of Palestinians.”

E1: Not Just Another Colony – Zena Al Tahhan writes about new steps being taken to greenlight a massive settlement on the outskirts of east Jerusalem, stalled for two decades, would radically remake the landscape connecting Palestinian communities and the West Bank.

A First Step – Selma Dabbagh suggests that the UK’s new restrictions on goods from Israel’s illegal settlements are not enough to stop the urgent situation in the West Bank, even as it may mark the beginning of a broader policy shift.

Are the UK Sanctions on Israel Real Progress, or More Illusion? – Mitchell Plitnick argues that the new sanctions are insufficient measures, since international law already considers Israeli settlements to be illegal, and emphasizes the continuities between these settlements and the state.

'Judaise medicine': Palestinian Doctors Are Under Attack in Israel – Lubna Masarwa reports on Israeli efforts to purge hospitals in historic Palestine of Arab doctors and nurses because patients are uncomfortable hearing them speak Arabic.

From Gaza to Lebanon: The Same Media Playbook – Assal Rad compares how Israel’s invasion, bombardment, and destruction in Lebanon has been systematically underreported in ways that mirror Western media representations of Gaza.

Inside The U.S.-Israel-Lebanon Deal: A Critical Breakdown – Nicolas Sawaya appraises the Trilateral Agreement that the United States brokered between Israel and Lebanon this past summer, which ostensibly aims to provide for a peace process but which risks legitimizing the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon.

Israeli Strike in Lebanon Kills 12 People From a Single Family, Including 6 Children – Katrine Dige Houmøller reports on some of the latest Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon, in violation of its ceasefire agreement, which killed children that Israel has claimed were Hezbollah operatives.

Accountability for the Gaza Genocide Can’t Focus on Netanyahu Alone – Jeet Heer argues that American warhawks like Hillary Clinton seek to scapegoat Netanyahu as the sole problem with Israel, arguing instead for sanctions and war crimes trials.

"Uncontained Malice" – A new episode of the Makdisi Street podcast that discusses Israel's ongoing campaigns of genocidal destruction in southern Lebanon and Gaza; the regional consequences of the apparent stalemate in the US war on Iran; continuing shifts in Western public attitudes toward the question of Palestine; and more.

Health Sciences and Genocide Prevention in Gaza and Beyond – A wide-ranging policy brief from Al-Shabaka on the importance of the health sciences for collecting and interpreting evidence relevant to the prevention, prosecution, and punishment of genocide.

Archaeology, Architecture & the Politics of Glass – A new episode of the Tarwida podcast, featuring a conversation with Dima Srouji to discuss glassmaking traditions in Jaba' and Hebron, the politics of archaeology in Palestine, her Amman Design Week installation, and reclaiming looted heritage through replication.

This Is My Father – A story by Sami Michael, first published in the Arab Communist journal al-Jadid and newly translated by Hana Morgenstern, about an Arab Jewish immigrant in a transit camp in Palestine, where he witnesses the false boundaries that Zionism imposed between him and Palestinian Arabs: “Would the looming sense of catastrophe, the vague and constant fear of a sudden death, the premonition of ghosts who could jump out of any hiding place, would all that seep into his heart as well? And if not, what was this painful anxiety, and where did this feeling of loneliness come from?”

Our selection of children’s books from Palestine is now back in stock and available for international shipping.

We have six beautiful titles to choose from Tamer Publishing in Ramallah, from authors Walid Daqqa, Zakaria Mohammed, Ibtisam Barakat, Yahia Ashour, Majd Kayyal, Sonia Nimr.

You can buy individual titles or the whole collection from the PalFest shop.