Hello, and welcome to this week’s dispatch.
Scroll down for:
A film screening and fundraiser for Gaza in San Francisco;
A virtual artist talk hosted by Dar Jacir in Bethlehem;
A book talk on The Gaza Tribunal with Jeremy Corbyn and others in London;
Ghassan Zaqtan’s The Town I Never Told You About as your book of the week; and
Your weekly media roundup.
San Francisco: Solidarity Cinema, 31 July
Join Bay2Gaza Mutual Aid for the August edition of Solidarity Cinema, a new monthly film series at KALW Public Media — an evening of short films.
Films on view this month:
A Boy, A Wall, and A Donkey (Dir. Hany Abu-Assad) Three young boys want to make a film in a village without cameras.
Cyber Palestine (Dir. Elia Suleiman) A parable about a modern-day Mary and Joseph, two Palestinian returnees living in Gaza, and their tribulations with the Israeli occupation.
I Signed the Petition (Dir. Mahdi Fleifel) A conversation between two friends about the effectiveness and implications of publicly supporting the cultural boycott of Israel.
Mnemosyne (Dir. Inas Halabi) A project considering the construction of memory and oral history through a family’s (re)telling of the story of a scar on the forehead of the filmmaker’s grandfather.
Nation Estate (Dir. Larissa Sansour) A sci-fi film exploring a dystopian world where one colossal high-rise houses the entire Palestinian population.
Virtual: Outside/Inside the Place: Postcards from Gaza, 1 August
Following their six-week residency as part of Don't Ask the Trees About Their Names with Dar Jacir for Art and Research, Samaa Abu Allaban and Alaa Khadar come together to speak about their practices and the forms of communication they have had to invent between them. Alaa is in Gaza; Samaa is in Paris. Together, they have been corresponding through drawings and writing, a correspondence that attempts to reconstruct fragments of memory, of times and places erased in the wake of the genocide in Gaza.
In this talk on 1 August at 4pm Palestine time, curator Ahmed Alaqra will speak with them online about what it means to be inside and outside now, and about the construction of memory and emotion through their practices.
This event is part of the Don't Ask the Trees about Their Names program. Curated by Ahmad Al-Aqra Supported by AFAC and the Dar Jacir Family Council.
London: The Gaza Tribunal, 4 August
Neve Gordon, Shahd Hammouri and Jeremy Corbyn will visit Foyles to discuss their book The Gaza Tribunal.
The Gaza Tribunal brings together testimony from Palestinian survivors, journalists, human rights campaigners, international legal experts, and whistleblowers, with afterword by Sally Rooney.
The discussion will be followed by an audience Q&A.
Book of the Week
A haunting, lyrical meditation on memory, loss, and homeland, with the poems threading together the personal and the collective in a Palestine shaped by conflict and beauty.
The Town I Never Told You About gathers poems written by celebrated Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan between 2022 and 2024, at a time of intensifying conflict ravaging his homeland. Emerging from both memory and imagination, these poems trace the contours of hillscapes and villages, mapping a Palestine that is both historical and mythic, personal and collective. In Zaqtan’s hands, language threads its way through time—winding across landscapes marked by war, displacement, and enduring beauty. Each poem feels like part of a longer thread: a moment lifted from an ongoing inner epic, stitched into being with dreamlike clarity and haunting precision.
Long meditative pieces drift through shadow and sunlight, while other poems strike with the sharpness of remembered incident. This is poetry as pilgrimage—quiet, persistent, and full of echoes. A book that doesn’t so much end as continue resonating long after the last page is turned.
The Town I Never Told You About, written by Ghassan Zaqtan and translated by Robin Moger, is out now from Seagull Books.
Media Roundup
Gaza and the Problem of Moral Stupidity – Abdaljawad Omar theorizes the forms of wilful misunderstanding that characterize the liberal response to the genocide in Gaza: “The truth presses too close. Moral stupidity, understood this way, signals the unbearable in negative form, marking the place where recognition was refused precisely because recognition was available. These people act morally stupidly not because they know nothing, but because they know too much – and because what they know, if inhabited fully, would cost them their world.”
Target Practice – Sophia Goodfriend studies how artificial intelligence has not only automated Israeli bombing but has also altered the means through which Israel surveils and polices the everyday lives of Palestinians.
Palestinians Brace for Sweeping Israeli Offensive Across the West Bank – Qassam Muaddi analyzes plans for a “large-scale offensive” that Israel is planning in the West Bank in the aftermath of a settler attack on the village of Tell where four Palestinians and two Israelis were killed.
Israel’s Illegal Settlements Are Europe’s Credibility Test – Majed al-Zeer examines how the EU has documented and described the illegality of Israeli settlements while failing to mitigate their violence and displacement in Palestine.
UNRWA Terminations Leave Many Struggling in Exile – Khuloud Rabah Sulaiman reports on how US-Israeli pressure on the refugee agency has resulted in a financial crisis that has affected not just those dependent on UNRWA services but those delivering them.
Adeeb Farhat's Fight for Collective Memory – Dana Hourany interviews Adeeb Farhat to discuss his archival work preserving traces of Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon and his commitment to the memory of the South.
'The Rats Come At Night': What Goes On Unseen in Gaza's Displacement Camps – Hassan Herzallah describes the environmental and public health disaster taking place across the camps of the displaced in Gaza.
Starmer is Gone. Will His Disastrous Approach to Palestine Go With Him? – Iqbal Mohamed appraises former Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s legacy of complicity in Israel’s genocide, and highlights the emerging continuities taking shape under the new Prime Minister Andy Burnham.
In Southern Lebanon, a Gloss of Diplomacy Can't Hide the Reality of Occupation – Katrine Dige Houmøller reports from villages in the south of Lebanon that are are being attacked from the air or destroyed on the ground on a near-daily basis, in violation of the so-called ceasefire agreement that Israel signed with Lebanon a month ago.
Who Rebuilds Gaza? Indigenous Reconstruction and Resistance – Nour Joudah and Dena Qaddumi explore why reconstruction must begin with Palestinian agency and reclamation rather than externally designed colonial master plans; and how rebuilding is already taking place through everyday forms of Indigenous endurance, social organization, and spatial resistance under conditions of ongoing genocide.
Thanks for reading. More next week.
