This week marks three years of Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians of Gaza. In retaliation for the attack launched by Hamas and other armed resistance groups on October 7th, Israel unleashed an onslaught of bombardment, starvation, collective punishment and wanton cruelty that has claimed – according to official figures – nearly 75,000 lives. Since the so-called ceasefire in October of 2025, nearly 1,500 Palestinians have been killed. True figures are likely much higher.
The ghastly images coming out of Gaza have revealed the true face of Zionism. Unprecedented formations of popular solidarity with Palestine have swept the globe since 2023, despite the astronomical sums Israel and its supporters have poured into propaganda and suppression. Israel is, in the words of Palestinian scholar Nasser Abourahme, “a defeated project.”
And so even as we mourn the martyrs of Gaza, we are duty bound to honor their memory by ensuring the steadfastness of our own commitments to Palestinian liberation.
Below, you can read an excerpt from Sarah Aziza’s “Doomsday Diaries,” a series of fragments written over the first ten days after October 7, 2023. Aziza vacillates between the terror of Israeli violence – “it is a sorrow lifetimes larger than words” – and the certainty of Palestinian freedom. These two axes of feeling have come to define Palestine and Palestinian solidarity over the past three years.
An image: a bulldozer rams into a fence cordoning off the Gaza Strip from Israel, and bodies rush through the aperture. Off camera, a hoarse man screams in Arabic, “Break it! God is great! Break it!” For an instant, Gaza no longer means unreachable, trapped, inert. All my life, that name has been an ache, beloved and impenetrable, intimate and out of reach. It is the land where my father was born as a refugee, a place he loved despite the larger tragedy that stranded his family there. Gaza, a place that was born in me the first time he told me stories of the sea. As a six-year-old, he’d sneak a swim in the Mediterranean on the way home from school, splashing naked in the water until his brother arrived to haul him back. I see Gaza return in his eyes each time he glimpses waves.
Gaza, also the place my father watched my grandmother dig trenches as the Six Day War of 1967 approached. He did not understand the ditches until the planes ripped overhead. For a lifetime I have mourned the family members held captive there, their lives more desperate with each passing year of a siege that began in 2007. I have held my breath with them through four wars, their bodies trapped under falling skies, sealed off from all escape. Their slaughter so routine Israel calls it “mowing the lawn.” My family, and two million others, caged by a nuclear power that refers to them as weeds. I often despaired that I would ever live to see them free.
Yet for an instant, watching those bodies running under the sun, it seems absurdly simple. A wall is just a wall.
⦿
The math of apocalypse: 1.1 million asked to evacuate from the north in twenty-four hours. Over one million asked to push their bodies into a scrap of land where over one million bodies already are.
This is not something human bodies can do. News of our non-existence comes and comes again.
⦿
What does it feel like to stand at the edge of annihilation? I can only speak from my vantage a few degrees from the epicenter of war. Here, it feels like falling through an endless throat. It is disbelief mingled with the feeling that this day has already come. It is knowing that any possible survival will live inside the knowledge that this planet is one where your extermination was called for, and millions welcomed it.
⦿
“I used to have hope,” my father tells me over the phone.
“And now?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know. But I do know that we will go on.”
I know this truth, though I do not know its shape. It is not necessary to name it hope, but there is no denying the Palestinian ethos is overwhelmingly one of life. We insist on surviving, on loving even the shattered versions of existence granted us. We are masters of paradox, creating beauty and care inside cages, beneath debris. We are fluent in absurdity, shapeshifting to sustain our humanity within ever-contracting walls. Seventy-five years of deferred justice have not extinguished our determination to build, rebuild, write, marry, birth, dance, remain.
Even so, we know we deserve so much better, and so we press against our oppression with imagination and defiant love. As Palestinian scholar Sophia Azeb puts it, “We are not beholden to structure our epistemologies and aesthetics and politics solely within the architecture of this catastrophe.” Though we have never known a free Palestine, no number of bombs can extinguish the inborn will to live in dignity. In this way, our resistance is, to quote Mahmoud Darwish, incurable.
This is the heart of Israel’s problem—not one of Palestinian savagery but of Palestinian life. It is a scourge on the Zionist project, our century-long refusal to disappear. It will remain a scourge so long as the state of Israel exists as a structure predicated on our death. The moment we face now is apocalyptic, the engines of destruction roaring at our gates and in our skies. Each moment is an atrocity. Genocide has begun. But Israel is mistaken if it believes this will be the final word. Palestine will live.
In this week’s Dispatch:
Announcing the Oct/Nov selection for the PalFest Bookshelf;
A curated calendar of upcoming Palestine-related events worldwide;
Ghassan Kanafani’s Palestinian Resistance Literature Under Occupation is Book of the Week;
Your weekly media roundup;
New on the PalFest Bookshelf
On the October/November PalFest Bookshelf is Tareq Baconi’s urgent new political treatise: What Now? On Palestine, Freedom and Our Global Future. Drawing from his extensive academic and organizing work with Palestinian and international activists, Tareq distills strategic principles for a free Palestine to guide activists and allies in the struggles ahead: refuse the prospect of a divided homeland, reclaim the historic revolutionary politics at the heart of the Palestinian struggle, and decompose Zionism.
Imagining a free Palestine is not the same as turning back the clock to pre-1948, Baconi writes, but a new struggle for a just future in the aftermath of Zionism - not by fighting Jewish presence in Palestine, but by ending Jewish political exclusivity. A free Palestine would heal the wounds left in the wake of the Second World War, by upturning the colonial and genocidal mindsets that continue to animate Western thought. The ramifications of justice would therefore extend far beyond the shores of Palestine.
Tareq Baconi is a Palestinian writer, scholar, and activist. He is the grandson of refugees from Jerusalem and Haifa and grew up between Amman and Beirut.
Alongside Tareq’s book, Bookshelf subscribers will receive a postcard of one of Adam Rouhana’s photographs from his upcoming photobook Before Freedom.
Upcoming PalFest events
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
6 October (London) – Disposable Palestinians: Israel’s Wars and Genocide in Gaza
7 October (London) – Palestinian Liberation and Anti-Colonial Solidarity
8 October (Philadelphia) – Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture: Poetry Open Mic & Reading by Ahmad Almallah
8 October (Edinburgh) & 9 October (St Andrews) - Book launch: Benjamin Moser’s Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History
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
15 October (New York) – The Power of Narrative in the Liberation of Palestine
16 October (San Francisco) – Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry
16-25 October (Boston) – Boston Palestine Film Festival
17 October (Manchester) – Palestine is a Disability Justice Issue
18 October (Palo Alto) – Book Launch & Lunch with Dr. Lara Sheehi
18 October (Minneapolis) – Palestinian Dress History: Makers, Meanings, and Motifs - Lecture by Wafa Ghnaim
20 October (Amherst, MA) – A Witness to Genocide
21 October (New York) – Zaina Arafat: Our Arab w/ Daniel Poppick
24 October (San Francisco) – Mornings in Jenin Musical: A Concert Presentation
24 October (Cairo) – 3 Seasons and 1 Body by Mohammed al-Qudwa, part of D-CAF Festival
24-25 October (London) – National Student Conference for Palestine️ 2026
25 October (Philadelphia) – Rami George: Screening + Artist Talk with Samantha Rise
27 October (Toronto) – Sarah Aziza, author of THE HOLLOW HALF (conversation with Rebecca Mangra)
29 October (Toronto) – One Book, Many Communities: Mohammed el-Kurd's Perfect Victims
20% off PalFest Supporter Tiers
As a special offer, we are offering a 20% discount to everyone who upgrades their subscription to a paid membership, at any tier, this week.
We’ve teamed up with allied organizations to put together an exciting range of perks for you. Join as a paying member today and you can get:
Access to all stories on The Key and our growing archive
10% discounts from great publishers and bookshops
10% off at the PalFest shop
Our curated book service, the PalFest Bookshelf
Early bird tickets to live Palestine Festival of Literature events
This offer is available until midnight, Jerusalem time, on Friday.
Book of the Week
Ghassan Kanafani’s remarkable extended essay Palestinian Resistance Literature Under Occupation, 1948–1968 is an unyielding act of cultural and political endurance. Writing in the wake of Israel’s devastating territorial expansion in 1967, Kanafani elaborates his theory of resistance literature and offers a visceral account of life under occupation. Translated for the first time into English by one of the greatest living translators from Arabic to English, Tarif Khalidi, Kanafani’s essay offers one of the sharpest social and political analyses of life in Palestine in this early period of occupation.
In the two decades following the Nakba, Palestinian writers undertook the gruelling task of advancing a cultural struggle to protect their language, culture, and heritage. In addition to Kanafani’s groundbreaking essay, the book includes a selection of poetry, prose, and dramatic writing curated by Ghassan Kanafani himself. Alongside writing from Mahmoud Darwish, Hanna Abu Hanna, and Samih al-Qasim, among many others, Kanafani’s essay and the accompanying pieces stand as a defiant declaration of cultural survival in the wake of Israeli expansion.
Order Palestinian Resistance Literature Under Occupation from our Bookshop.org shopfronts:
Media Roundup
Love Letters from the End of Time – A sequence of poems from George Abraham’s forthcoming book When the Arab Apocalypse Comes to America: “Beyond survival, a holding / from which neither of us can let go. Forgive me — / beneath those waters, my eye contact was moments / too long. / Did desire lead us here, or are our deaths / already behind us? You, who descended this rotting / hell, who led me to the gates without glancing back?”
What PEN America Got Wrong About Antisemitism in Publishing –An urgent and comprehensive new report on the misleading anecdotes, flawed data, and oversimplified analyses at the heart of PEN America’s controversial claim that Jewish and Israeli writers face discrimination in American publishing.
Encountering Zionism – Barnaby Raine reviews Benjamin Moser’s recent book Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History, as less of a comprehensive history of Jewish anti-Zionism than a strategic genealogy for reorienting the contemporary Jewish struggle against Zionism.
Psychic Militancy: A Conversation with Lara Sheehi – Sarah Aziza interviews Lara Sheehi about her new book From the Clinic to the Streets, which suggests psychoanalysis might afford a set of tools to “reskill ourselves” for combat: “Power and particularly systems of extraction and domination, like settler colonialism, colonialism, and capitalism, work on foreclosures. They are meant to make us feel and live in a world that is in a foreclosed loop. Nothing can change.”
The Bottom Is Falling Out in the US – A new episode of the Makdisi Street podcast featuring a conversation with Ryan Grim about shifts in the American political landscape, the growing disillusionment with Israel and how AIPAC has become an index of political corruption.
From Gaza, Testimonies of Unthinkable Violence – Adrianne Kalfopoulou reviews Samar Yazbek’s recent book (and PalFest Bookshelf selection) Your Presence is A Danger to Your Life: “Samar Yazbek does the work of resisting the anatomization that seeks to dismember identity. As the physical bodies of Palestinians are being murdered, it is their stories that push back on the distancing of what these weapons do; the testimonies speak to what survives, what will not be sanitized in that distancing.”
How Britain's Colonial Playbook Shaped the Israeli Army – A recorded seminar with Rashid Khalidi on how British counterinsurgency doctrine was developed and used against civilians in Ireland and Palestine before it was passed down to the Zionist paramilitaries who formed the core of the Israeli army.
Sliman Mansour’s Art Captured the Palestinian Condition – Rana Anani writes about the legacy of the late Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour, chronicling his singular life and the innovations he brought to the tradition of Palestinian painting.
Israeli Settlers Target a Ramallah Road, and the City’s Future With It – Qassam Muaddi reports on the seizure of a main thoroughfare in Ramallah for use by Israeli settlers, a move that would bring checkpoints and gates to one of the West Bank’s last spaces of free Palestinian movement.
The West Wants Netanyahu Gone - So Palestinians Can Be Killed More Quietly Again – Jonathan Cook writes about how Netanyahu is increasingly seen as a liability to Western politicians amid the “rising tide of revulsion at the Gaza genocide.”
Britain Has Found its Voice on the Occupation, But Still Can’t Speak About its Own Record – Labour MP John McDonnell argues that recent British sanctions on Israeli settlements in the West Bank do not go far enough in rectifying British complicity in the establishment of the state of Israel and the occupation of Palestinian land.
Germany Offered to Fund Their Education. It Won’t Help Them Leave Gaza – Karim Natour reports on students who cannot attend mandatory in-person visa interviews at the German consulate in Cairo, and are therefore unable to enroll in German universities with scholarships that the German government offered them.
Intimacy as Futurity: A Conversation with Tareq Baconi and Saleem Haddad – George Abraham speaks to Tareq Baconi and Saleem Haddad about narrative form, memory and archives, writing beyond a Western ethnographic gaze, imperial violence, art as a means of survival, and much more
“Everything was forbidden except breathing and swift death”: Israel’s Sadism Up Close – Salah Saleh offers a firsthand account of three harrowing days of detention, interrogation, and torture by Israeli soldiers in the months after October 7.
The Day Palestine Was Liberated – Mona Kareem speculates on what it will have felt like to experience Palestinian liberation: “From every continent, a nation of Palestinians returned, waving their flag, waving their hearts, crying rivers and seas, a whole Mediterranean of tears, tears they never tasted before. They came back and they were some spectacle and we all felt one with them, and we also felt so jealous, so jealous, so jealous, yet so one with them. The heart of the world was finally free and now it could ring and pulse nonstop.”
Thanks for reading.
Until next week.
