Shabbat
Reading List
Claire Schwartz (culture editor): On November 17th, the Palestinian poet Hala Alyan posted a 2011 photograph of children on the beach in Gaza, arms outstretched, the clear blue sky punctuated with brightly colored kites. The day the picture was taken, the children broke the Guinness world record for the most kites flown simultaneously: 12,350. The day Alyan shared the photograph, 12,350 was the estimated death toll from this iteration of Israel’s relentless assault on Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. There is, of course, no common measure to this confluence—only a devastating coincidence: The children’s insurgent exuberance recedes and Israel continues to kill, the world that might have been rattling horrifically inside the one that is.
I have been thinking of these children and their kites since yesterday, when I learned that the Israeli regime assassinated Palestinian writer and professor Refaat Alareer. I have been reading and rereading his final poem:
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
no even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale
In the wake of Alareer’s death, the opening line constricts, the conditional already fulfilled. Then: You must live. Trade what the poet left behind so that a Gazan child might have a vision of love beaming back at them. Alareer does not write “your kite,” or even only “my kite,” but “the kite, my kite you made.” He implores the reader: Stitch your life to the wake of my living and make of it something definite: “Let it be a tale.” A tale (like a tail) is what comes after. It is a doubled after that Alareer’s poem charges us with—not only the after of persisting in catastrophe’s wake, but also the after in “to look after,” to care for, to return. As poet and performance artist (and JC artist-in-residence) Fargo Nissim Tbakhi writes: “The past is a future we return to.” On the photograph she posted, the kites’ tails flying every which way in the wind, Alyan overlaid the words: “Oh, the promise of our long, unruly memories.” The glimpses of other worlds that persist might, if we bring them forward with our living, offer a route toward as-yet-unrealized liberated futures. This is the charge I am holding: To make of Alareer’s life a kite, to thrash with the others in the narrow aperture of the poem’s if until it widens toward other ways, until all Palestinians can again touch their sea.
David Klion (contributing editor): The death of Henry Kissinger last week at 100 has been a cause for celebration on the left, uniting those old enough to remember the Nixon and Ford administrations with a younger generation whose collective impression of Kissinger was best articulated by Anthony Bourdain. There are innumerable books on the former national security advisor and secretary of state; one that influenced my own thinking is Greg Grandin’s Kissinger’s Shadow (2016), which casts Kissinger as the prime architect of American empire as we know it today.
The book I want to recommend to Jewish Currents readers isn’t about Kissinger, but it tells us a lot about the tradition he belonged to. As I mention in my Kissinger remembrance in The New Republic, I happened to finish Fritz Stern’s Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire (1977), a hefty tome I had been making my way through for months, just days before Kissinger’s death was announced. Stern and Kissinger had much in common: Both were born to Jewish families in Germany in the 1920s, and both fled the Nazis in 1938 and settled in New York City. They both went on to have distinguished academic careers, and even ran in the same social circles. But unlike Kissinger, who pivoted to war crimes, Stern remained in academia, teaching history at Columbia for decades prior to his death in 2016. Stern and Kissinger were both leading figures of the German Jewish diaspora, a community set apart culturally and socially from the Yiddish-derived milieu of the majority of Ashkenazi Jews in New York. Much of Stern’s work concerns German Jewish history, and Gold and Iron functions almost as an origin story for modern German Jewry and its distinctive self-conception.
Gold and Iron is a history that reads like a 19th century novel about elite intrigue set against a backdrop of diplomacy, war, and social upheaval. It tells the story of Otto von Bismarck, the “Iron Chancellor” who unified the German states into a single empire in 1871, and his long relationship with Gerson von Bleichröder, a Jewish financier who had functioned as the Rothschild family’s agent in Berlin before becoming a power broker in his own right. Bismarck was a product of the Prussian Junker class—basically, a militarized landholding aristocracy whose way of life was increasingly out of step with the modernizing economy of 19th century Europe—and in order to preserve his class’s privileges, he was determined to build a sophisticated industrial economy in which finance capital would play a central role. The wealthy and continentally connected Bleichröder made this possible, financing Bismarck’s military victories over Austria and France and helping to establish Germany’s diplomatic position and overseas colonial empire over subsequent decades (a particularly fascinating chapter covers his lobbying for the basic civil rights of Jews in newly independent Romania, using German diplomatic recognition and trade ties as leverage). In the process, Bleichröder became one of the wealthiest men in Germany, and essentially the public face of a rapidly rising Jewish financial and professional class.
Inevitably, this meant Bleichröder also became a prime target for the rapidly rising antisemitism of the Junker elite, who remained politically central in Bismarck’s Germany in spite of their declining economic fortunes. Despite a career spent bowing and scraping before the German state and ignoring constant antisemitic sleights including from Bismarck himself, Bleichröder never fully achieved the acceptance as a German that he desperately sought. As for his children and grandchildren in the 20th century, well, you can imagine where this story is headed.
Kissinger cast himself in the mold of Bismarck, imposing his realpolitik and grand strategy on the global chessboard. But the figure he more closely resembled was Bleichröder, the ambitious striver willing to endure elite antisemitism—in Kissinger’s case, that of Nixon and his Jew-baiting entourage—in exchange for proximity to the heights of power. As Stern shows, this was not Bleichröder’s unique character flaw, and nor was it Kissinger’s—it was the bargain that 19th century Germany and to some extent 20th century America offered its Jews, but it was, to put it in the most German terms, a Faustian bargain.
Jonathan Shamir (JC fellow): It’s strange to say that an academic article by two sociologists is a favorite that I frequently revisit, but the meticulous noticing of “Virtual Returns to Jaffa” (1998) by Salim Tamari and Rema Hammami creates a loving yet painful portrait of the city from which the authors’ families were expelled. In six vignettes, the writers vividly detail their visits to Jaffa alongside other Palestinian exiles, cataloging the emotional toll of returning to a place that has written you out of its history. It reads as an elegy of a city that has already been lost, but given the aggressive pace of gentrification in Jaffa since the article’s publication, it has itself come to feel like a precious artifact.
The inevitability of disappointment is conveyed throughout. Hammami’s discovery of her family’s home—transformed into an institution for the infirm—fails to deliver any catharsis. Tamari fulfills a modest desire to dine at a seaside Palestinian fish restaurant in Jaffa, only for new expectations to crop up—and to be dashed as quickly as they emerge. For the two writers and their fellow returnees, this “duty to the past” is as irrepressible as the present forces that are quashing it. Nowhere is this vicious cycle clearer than in the figure of Liza, a Palestinian who has joined them for the return and who “was taking pictures of everything that moved,” leaving her suspended between tenses: absent in the present, and already reliving the mediated past of a photograph from an indeterminate future. When Arab visitors reconstitute the past “using the rubble [of the old homes] as their nodes,” the present never seems to fit together properly.
For Hammami, abandoning the past would mean being “burned at the stake for collaborating with a reality built on the demolition of dreams,” yet the authors’ encounter with Murjana, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, troubles the nostalgic frame of their return. As a present-day inhabitant of Jaffa, Murjana pays no heed to the city’s repressed past, and her family seems more comfortable in Hebrew than in Arabic. Her invitation to the group to lunch at her family home forces them to live—however uneasily and temporarily—in the present.
In the final section, Tamari and Hammami resolve to “make greater efforts to observe the existing realities of Jaffa,” but their meandering into the present defies easy legibility. They obliquely discuss the Nakba and the displacement of Middle Eastern Jews using the Arabic word “tabadul” (“exchange”) with a Mizrahi shopkeeper named Shlomo. His slow and incomplete understanding of the word’s meaning (“You see,” he concludes unnervingly after pointing to his cassette collection, “we Arabs are like you”) is the closest the Palestinians come to any sort of recognition from those who have replaced them.
Aparna Gopalan (news editor): This week, I read perhaps the most important piece of journalism that has been published during Israel’s recent war on Gaza: “A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza” by +972 Magazine and Local Call, which uses interviews with Israeli intelligence sources to give readers an inside look at the death-dealing apparatus that has killed over 15,000 Palestinians in seven weeks. The investigation clearly establishes that these killings were not even the slightest bit accidental. “We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home,” one source told reporter Yuval Abraham in a chilling quote. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed.”
The investigation found that civilians were targeted not just knowingly but deliberately, with one source telling Abraham that Israel specifically targets high-rises in order to “[scare] the population” into creating “civil pressure” on Hamas—a logic as ludicrous as it is inhumane. Israel even has a special name for targets chosen specifically to maximize civilian casualties rather than due to militants’ presence: “power targets,” a grisly euphemism concealing massive loss of life.
The investigation also reveals how Israel has been using artificial intelligence (AI) to generate an ever-increasing number of bombing targets (a finding The Guardian has since separately confirmed). “In the past there were times in Gaza when we would create 50 targets per year,” one source told Abraham. “And here the machine produced 100 targets in one day.” With the AI machine, “we prepare the targets automatically and work according to a checklist,” the source told Abraham. “It really is like a factory. We work quickly and there is no time to delve deep into the target. The view is that we are judged according to how many targets we manage to generate.”
These findings read more like dystopian science fiction than reality; the AI machine being named Habsora (“the gospel”), or numbers of civilians likely to be killed appearing on bombers’ screens under a “collateral damage” column, all add to this feeling of unreality. And yet this is reality, and it is one we need to urgently grasp and spread the word about for there to be any hope of stopping it, which is why I highly recommend reading, re-reading, and widely sharing this crucial article.
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi (artist-in-residence): Henry Kissinger has died peacefully in his home at the age of 100. The flurry of online celebrations and jokes, however, were tempered by the realization that a man who was a “war criminal” by any objective sense of the phrase was able to live a long and peaceful life of prosperity and renown. What does it mean to understand Kissinger as a “war criminal” when that framing ultimately had no material consequences for him? Rabea Eghbariah’s damning essay on the failures of the legal framework of “genocide” as applied (or not) to Palestine, published in The Nation last week, speaks directly to this question.
Much of the attention paid to the piece had to do with the circumstances of its publication: the Harvard Law Review’s board nixed its publication in a decision described by an editor as “unprecedented.” Aside from serving as yet another example of the rampant repression exerted against Palestinian speech, Eghbariah’s piece itself is a vital corrective to how our discourse has appealed to frameworks of international law in the belief that they might finally do what they claim to do, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Eghbariah argues that the case of Palestine “brings to legal analysis an unmasking force: It unveils and reminds us of the ongoing colonial condition that underpins Western legal institutions.” Genocide, supposedly, is the gravest crime a state can commit; entire legal frameworks are dedicated to its identification, its prosecution, and ostensibly its prevention. Yet Eghbariah questions whether such a designation has any meaning when its victims are colonized, non-Western Others and its perpetrators a colonial power. Like calling Kissinger a war criminal, calling Israel’s actions genocidal fails not because it isn’t accurate, but because it has failed thus far to do anything.
So what terms, legal or otherwise, might do something against the structural forces dispossessing, starving, and murdering Palestinians across the span of a century? Eghbariah points us towards the language used by Palestinians themselves: “If the Holocaust is the paradigmatic case for the crime of genocide and South Africa for that of apartheid, then the crime against the Palestinian people must be called the Nakba.” Such language demands a more holistic turn that genuinely listens to Palestinian analysis, testimony, and theorizations. What that turn might make possible, hopefully, is a more responsible legal framework that can genuinely reckon with, address, and eventually end the perpetual violence of Zionism.
Alex Kane (senior reporter): In the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7th, and Israel’s subsequent bombardment of Gaza, US President Joe Biden was one of many figures who warned Israel not to repeat America’s “mistakes” after 9/11. Biden’s description of the Bush administration’s global killing and torture spree—however sanitized—are nevertheless prescient: Just as the United States couldn’t wipe out the Taliban in Afghanistan, Israel is not going to be able to “eradicate” Hamas. The invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, of course, was not the only “mistake” the US made after 9/11. The invasion of Iraq was perhaps an even bigger mistake.
I recently read Robert Draper’s book To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq to better understand the genesis of that invasion. Draper’s Washington insider tell-all draws on interviews with hundreds of US officials to explain how factional infighting, bureaucratic turf wars, ego, and hubris drove George W. Bush to invade Iraq. It is decidedly not a history of Iraq, of US imperialism in the Middle East, or of neoconservatism; those factors are certainly mentioned, but they are not the central focus. Instead, Draper explores the minutiae of how various government actors came to push Bush to reach the decision to invade Iraq. For instance, the book explains how CIA head George Tenet indulged the desire of the administration’s pro-war faction for evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, or was linked to al-Qaeda and 9/11, in order to regain access to the president that he lost under Bill Clinton. That evidence, of course, was cherry-picked and from dubious sources, but Tenet did not mention those important caveats to Bush, helping lead the president to conclude that Iraq was a dire threat. As Israel’s assault on Gaza continues, Draper’s book is a reminder of the contingencies of history, and the danger of letting crass concerns over political careers take precedence over issues of war and peace.
Maia Ipp (contributing editor): Last week I read the 2021 memoir In This Place Together: A Palestinian’s Journey to Collective Liberation by Penina Eilberg-Schwartz with Sulaiman Khatib. The book tells the story of Khatib’s life and his extraordinary political and spiritual education, including the 10 years he spent in Israeli jails for having attacked an Israeli he thought was a soldier when he was 14 years old. We get scenes from his early family life in the village of Hizma, which in Khatib’s youth is still only a 15-minute bus ride from Jerusalem’s Old City before the occupation’s walls and checkpoints would make the journey arduous if not impossible. We learn how and why he was drawn to Fatah as a boy, and how the books he reads in jail start to inform an orientation toward nonviolent resistance. This commitment leads him to dialogue work, and eventually to co-found the remarkable organization Combatants for Peace, in which Israelis and Palestinians who have “taken an active role in the cycle of violence” undertake nonviolent action against Israel’s apartheid system together.
The book engages seriously with questions of strategic political violence, and we see and hear Khatib’s pain of isolation from accusations of tatbi’a, normalization. The careful nuance allows us to understand why Khatib’s critics, even in his immediate family, at times find his work unforgivable. Khatib himself also questions what is lost in forming a shared identity. While the book takes these complex political questions seriously, the personal experience at its center makes those questions alive and felt. The book is also enriched by Eilberg-Schwartz’s own reflections about the process of interviewing and working with Khatib, and about her own journey of political change as a Jewish American. Despite experiencing violence in nearly every form, Khatib articulates a hopeful, if cautious, vision for shared futures in and through the struggle for justice.
Aparna Gopalan (news editor): In the past weeks, many of us have encountered international humanitarian law (IHL)—or the “laws of war”—at every turn as we try to make sense of the genocidal violence Israel is unleashing on Gaza. Concepts like “distinction,” “proportionality,” and “intentionality” have suffused the ether, making a clear understanding of each essential. To this end, I recommend the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP)’s recent article “Israel and the Laws of War,” which is a Q&A with IHL expert Neve Gordon.
Like previous MERIP pieces—for instance, Lisa Hajjar’s 2016 article on how Israel has managed to get IHL itself changed in its quest to normalize violence against Palestinians—the Gordon conversation “moves beyond the question of whether violence is legal to underscore the unevenness of humanitarian law as powerful states maneuver within it.” For instance, Gordon notes that “distinction”—the IHL concept that holds that parties to armed conflict must distinguish between combatants and civilians—has in practice cast some who do not abide by the principle as “uncivilized or barbaric,” with non-state actors and people on the wrong side of the “color line” bearing the brunt.
Most pertinently, Gordon discusses the recent Israeli attacks on hospitals, explaining that “claims that Shifa and Al Quds hospitals are located on top of Hamas’s headquarters are [not just] preparing the public for attacks . . . [but] also preparing a legal defense based on proportionality and military necessity”—yet another instance of Israel using the principles of IHL as tools of warcraft rather than treating them as absolute limits on violence. Gordon similarly explains the discourse of civilians being “human shields” as an effort to create “killable subjects,” as explored at length in his book with Nicole Perugini, Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire.
The interview concludes with Gordon reflecting on why IHL fails to protect people from state violence. IHL only regulates the technicalities of the fighting, Gordon explains, rather than addressing the structural violence that long precedes, and outlasts, open conflict. “We need to keep in mind that it could be the case that more people will die in Gaza in the aftermath of the war due to structural violence than those who have been and will be killed due to eruptive violence,” Gordon says. “The laws of war have nothing to say about that.”
Even more importantly, IHL is the product of an imperial project and is designed only to privilege certain lives at the expense of others. “The law helped cast [the colonized] as barbarians,” Gordon says, “and when they resisted the colonizer the laws of war were deemed inapplicable.” In this context, Gordon argues, IHL is useful not as a collective moral compass or legal strategy. Instead IHL is best used strategically, as a tool to mobilize public opinion against the worst excesses of violence, while always recalling that it is still the master’s tool, and will not destroy the master’s house—nor contain the master’s violence.
Cynthia Friedman (managing director): Since the morning of October 7th, I have been consumed by emotions—especially fear, grief, and rage for the fate of Palestinians in Gaza—as much as I have been consuming photographs, videos, text messages, news updates, “takes,” and in-depth analyses. It feels that there is so little I can do in the face of the massive pro-war machine. Alongside joining protests, donating, and calling my representatives, “bearing witness” to the words and images directly from people in Gaza becomes a fourth way to act. There is a pragmatic imperative to amplify these voices: the hope that circulating images and stories will humanize those under attack, and expedite a ceasefire. But beneath that, I feel an intense spiritual imperative as well: to ensure, at the very least, that they are not holding their pain alone.
In reflecting on this, I want to share the pieces and accounts that have held me. Just four days ago, n+1 published a small selection of translated and transcribed audio clips sent from people in Gaza. The two dozen testimonies range in length from a sentence to a page; the speakers range from youth to elders. The X account GazaMartyrs offers eulogies that would otherwise be eclipsed by the scale of loss: photos and stories about the personalities, dreams, and lives of individuals who have been killed. On Instagram, I follow photojournalists like Mohammed Zaanoun, Plestia Alaqad, and Motaz Azaiza to absorb difficult moments, such as people being dug out from underneath rubble, and joyous ones, especially the outpouring of love for young children.
Alongside the concrete “now,” art can reach into the future. I loved this tapestry from Arif Rafhan Othman; the illustrations of journalists by Nouri Flayhan and Peonica Fernando make me weep; the animated line drawings from James Thacher teach me new things. In trying to sustain my engagement for the long-haul, I have found artists’ work to be a welcome balm.
Mari Cohen (associate editor): Last year, when I reported a profile of US State Department envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt, I had a useful conversation with the historian David Feldman, who helped me understand the debate in the field of Jewish studies between “eternalist” and “contextualist” theories of antisemitism. As I wrote at the time, “ ‘eternalists’ . . . understand antisemitism as a phenomenon united by persistent features across geography and time” while “ ‘contextualists’ . . . caution against drawing broad connections between historically distinctive periods of anti-Jewish activity.” This isn’t just academic hairsplitting; these distinct approaches have a host of political consequences. When major Jewish organizations and figures like Lipstadt take an “eternalist” view of antisemitism—seeing it as an enduring virus that will always be with us—they seem to abdicate responsibility for actually figuring out how to fight it. And for such leaders, the logical conclusion of such a view is often that Jews need to have a strong nation-state. “If one accepts antisemitism to be eternal, and not a consequence of social or historical factors, then it is a fact of life that will forever push Jewish people into defensive postures. It will make us more nationalist, more reactionary, more militaristic, and more closed off from the rest of the world,” the historian Barry Trachtenberg told me at the time.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this historical debate since Hamas’s October 7th attacks. I’ve frequently heard Hamas’s massacres described as a “pogrom,” and thereby just another manifestation of the same antisemitism that has dogged Jews for centuries. While Hamas has at times espoused antisemitic ideas that draw from other antisemitic contexts, such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is the October 7th attack akin to the violence in the Pale of Settlement that targeted my ancestors? And should it prevent us from understanding the specific context of October 7th, including the 16-year siege on Gaza, the longtime delegitimization of Palestinian nonviolent resistance to occupation, and Israel’s historic efforts to cultivate Hamas as a counterweight to the Palestine Liberation Organization?
I was pleased, then, to see an interview this week between Feldman and The New Yorker staff writer Isaac Chotiner. Feldman challenges those who say that contextualizing instances of violence—both antisemitism around the world that has spiked since October 7th and Hamas’s attacks themselves—is the same as condoning them.“Either we give up or we try to understand why people are acting the way they’re acting. Otherwise, the humanities are not really serving a useful purpose,” he said.
Feldman then considers Jewish relationships to state power in order to offer a useful corrective to the dominant narratives around Hamas’s attacks and the current climate of fear among Jewish minorities worldwide. He challenges the aforementioned “pogrom” framing: In Russia and Poland, he explains,“Jews were a racialized minority, relatively powerless,” whereas the “awful” violence against Israelis on October 7th took place in a “state in which Jews are a majority, in which they have state power.” By this logic, Feldman says, settler violence in the West Bank town of Huwara earlier this year is a more fitting example of a “pogrom.” Feldman also uses this frame to discuss the situation of the Jewish diaspora, where Western governments have been both institutionally supportive of Israel and vocally committed to opposing antisemitism. The Jewish community, it seems, is mostly taking issue not with our leaders or state policy, but with broader public sentiment. Feldman sees this in part as a result of the fact that since the post-Holocaust era, mainstream Jewish communities in the US and Europe have successfully made “vertical alliances” with governments, while “alliances with other racialized minorities . . . have often suffered and frayed.” Paradoxically, Feldman argues, this governmental protection could actually bring “danger if people think that Jews are being protected in ways that the other groups are not. And it brings danger because it angers people who are against the state or against the system, however they conceive it.” For a sober, thoughtful model of how to understand this complex dynamic, Feldman’s interview is a must-read.
Daniel May (publisher): Several days after October 7th, I was speaking with a Palestinian friend about how to understand the response to Hamas’s attacks among some of our mutual friends on the left. “Our language in the Palestinian diaspora has moved so quickly over the last decade,” she reflected. “From occupation, to apartheid, to settler colonialism, and now to decolonization. But we haven’t done the work of defining what we mean. Do we mean the end of a state of Jewish supremacy? Do we mean reparations? Do we mean the right of return? Do we mean ‘the colonists’ leaving…?”
In the weeks since our conversation, as hundreds of thousands have mobilized in the streets of the US and Europe to oppose Israel’s killing and dispossession, I’ve been replaying my friend’s questions in my mind. To some, the protests reflect the emergence of a broad and genuinely anti-imperial left; to others, and even to some Jewish progressives opposed to Israel’s war on Gaza, the language present in these demonstrations evinces something more troubling. Whatever one’s reaction, what is clear is that today’s left is explicitly “anti-colonial.” Those of us invested in that left must begin to wrestle through what that might mean.
On Twitter, Franz Fanon is most commonly cited in what passes for discussion on these matters. His most often-quoted work is the first chapter of the 1956 The Wretched of the Earth, which is generally taken to endorse the necessity of violence in decolonial struggle. Fanon suggests that anti-colonial violence is “de-intoxicating” (or, in the English mistranslation, a “cleansing force”) which liberates “the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction.” By some, Fanon is taken to explain Hamas’ violence; by others, he is taken to justify it.
In his superb essay in the London Review of Books, “Vengeful Pathologies,” Adam Shatz troubles these cursory nods to Fanon. Shatz, whose book on Fanon, The Rebel’s Clinic, will be released in January, points out that Fanon was above all a clinician who both participated in the anti-colonial struggle and sought to diagnose its pathologies. As Shatz explains, Fanon understood that violence was at the very center of colonial rule, and necessarily produces violence in response. But this was not, Shatz insists, meant to be an endorsement of this violence: Fanon notably lamented the devastating results of violence on those anti-colonial fighters that participated in it and warned against a politics that becomes defined by the “resentments” that violence produces and unleashes.
Shatz’s reading of Fanon challenges both those who justify or defend Hamas’ horrifying atrocities, as well as those who think that Hamas’ brutality can be stopped through military force. As Shatz writes, “the inescapable truth is that Israel cannot extinguish Palestinian resistance by violence, any more than the Palestinians can win an Algerian-style liberation war: Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs are stuck with each other, unless Israel, the far stronger party, drives the Palestinians into exile for good.” Amidst such overwhelming loss, it is helpful, even essential, to be reminded of that basic truth and that dark warning. The warning describes what must be stopped; the truth points towards the only future worth striving for, together.
Jonathan Shamir (JC fellow): The liminal identity of Palestinian citizens of Israel has always been fertile ground for creative work, but few artists have come to define a milieu quite like the musician Faraj Suleiman and the writer and lyricist Majd Kayyal. While their first hit collaboration in 2020, Better Than Berlin, unpacked the lure and alienation of migrating to Europe, their 2023 album Upright Biano powerfully expresses the double consciousness of middle-class Palestinian citizens of Israel who stay behind. In the song “Wtf,” for example, each refrain of “our story” is followed by absurd vignettes—“our story is Charmander wanting to work as a firefighter/And Ashkenazis in Haaretz reviewing knafeh”—in what feel like maxims for their whole generation.
The opening song, “Down With London Bridge,” almost warrants a recommendation of its own. The hilarious 13-minute epic is told from the perspective of a son narrating the long-simmering tension that emerges between his parents due to their divergent responses to Princess Diana’s death: As tears stream down his mother’s face, his father becomes increasingly obsessed by the pursuit vengeance against Queen Elizabeth II for the British role in “destroying our homes.” The stripped-back piano—also the album’s titular symbol of bourgeois comfort—turns into a high-tempo, anthemic call for something beyond the relative comfort of their lives as Israeli citizens, as the father tells his son: “We were created to hope . . . that Elizabeth will fall off her horse and crash.” The son gradually comes to embrace his father’s righteous, addictive anger: “I thought I’d turn out different . . . Like my dad, I want to erase the entire works of Shakespeare . . . For Alice to never come out of the rabbit-hole/For Tony Blair to be bitten by a cobra . . . And for the empire on which the sun never sets to be eaten up by global warming.” Although the narrator’s father never drops his conviction, his parents reconcile after Queen Elizabeth’s death, and the heavy burden of political grievance on domestic life is lifted. Still, other straightforward love songs on the album—such as the tender “Never After” and “Little Thought”—serve as reminders that mundane romantic strife will soon rush into the vacuum. In the sardonically titled “Anthem of Arab Israel,” a chorus of voices sing about an ever-elusive “happiness at home,” yet the fact that “time never puts out the fire” could equally refer to the injustice itself, or the self-sustaining grievance—much like a father in the song who makes “excuses.”
Since October 7th, Palestinian citizens of Israel have been forced into silence by mass arrests, dismissals from jobs and universities, and incitement and mob violence against them. One far-right Israeli news presenter’s indictment seemed to speak to the sentiment underlying this repressive wave: “The age of the ‘Israeli-Palestinian’ is over. It’s Israeli or Palestinian.” While the songs on Upright Biano geographically span an area that stretches from the Mediterranean coast to the Sea of Galilee (it’s more “from the sea to the sea” than “from the river to the sea,” capturing the isolation of Palestinian citizens of Israel from their own people), the final song “If Only I Could,” resists this divided geography, even if the only unity it finds is hypothetical: “If only it would rain in Gaza and the Galilee/We will build your kingdom and take down our tents.”
Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): If you need to pry yourself away from the depressing and debilitating habit of obsessively following news and, worse, social media, but can’t quite bring yourself to escape entirely, I recommend poetry—specifically, the work of the late Palestinian citizen of Israel Taha Muhammad Ali. And along with Ali’s searing, deceptively straightforward poems, you might also read Adina Hoffman’s gorgeously layered biography of the poet, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness.
Ali was born in 1931 in Saffuriyya, in an area that had long been the Palestinian cultural center in the Galilee. When his village was razed during the Nakba, he fled with his family. He later wrote, in a voice speaking to a departing lover (or perhaps to the land): “We did not weep / when we were leaving — for we had neither / time nor tears, / and there was no farewell. / We did not know / at the moment of parting / that it was a parting, / so where would our weeping / have come from?” The family eventually settled in Nazareth, where Ali became proprietor of a souvenir shop—“a Muslim who sells Christian trinkets to Jews,” according to Hoffman—as well as a lover of reading. He taught himself to be a writer, and published his first book of poems at the age of 52.
Hoffman—an American-born Jew who has lived in Jerusalem, where she co-founded the (now shuttered) press that first published Ali in translation—set out to write the poet’s biography with a profound question. “I wanted to know how it was that an elderly Palestinian Muslim with four years of formal education, few teeth and a literary obsession . . . could ‘speak,’ as the idiom has it, so powerfully to my experience and to that of so many.” Hoffman’s book answers this question by telling Ali’s personal story with deep compassion and extensive context, mining the centuries-long history of Saffuriyya, the traditions and modern evolution of Palestinian poetry, and the squeezed experience of Palestinians in Israel after 1948.
Hoffman writes with unflinching honesty about her own position with respect to the material she is covering. She began working on the book during the Second Intifada, mourning the loss of a friend in a suicide bus bombing and simultaneously aghast that many she knew “had converted their own fear of such a violent demise into the most unapologetic racism.” And throughout these reflections, Ali remains at the center of the story as a model for turning degradation and anger into an art, and expressing, in Hoffman’s words, “a generosity of feeling that seems almost to defy history.”
Jonathan Shamir (JC fellow): At a moment when events in Israel/Palestine are outpacing even the keenest observer, I have found myself thinking about the slowest Palestinian film I’ve ever seen: Kamal Aljafari’s Recollection (2015). The movie repurposes footage of the port city of Jaffa taken from Israeli and American cinema from the ’60s to the ’90s to produce a haunting collage of Palestinian life from the decades after the Nakba. Aljafari draws from source material ranging from the popular Israeli musical Kazablan (1976) to the American blockbuster The Delta Force (1986), digitally disappearing professional actors from the scenes and leaving behind only the unwitting extras—Jaffa’s Palestinian community—thus turning them and the remains of their disappearing city into the protagonists. By excavating deeply personal images from an Israeli and American cinematic oeuvre (including a picture of the home that once belonged to his grandmother, who was expelled from Jaffa, and a repeated, blurry image of his uncle), Aljafari defiantly ruptures the colonial fictions and reasserts instead the Palestinian reality, reclaiming permission to narrate his family’s history.
At 70 minutes long, without plot or character, Recollection quickly becomes excruciating to watch. Aljafari refuses the viewer any stable narrative mooring; even the anecdotes about his family that frame his project are relegated to the end credits. The film’s difficult, disorienting aesthetics force us to consider what it means to pay attention to a project of slow erasure. After all, many of Israel’s violent policies toward Palestinians have long been marked by slowness, which has characterized the infamous “calorie count” to limit food in Gaza, the gradual destruction of infrastructure in the West Bank, and the racialized gentrification in Jaffa that has transformed Aljafari’s spectral city beyond recognition. Given the competition for attention in a globalized world and the algorithmic bias for extremity, the measured strangulation of Palestinians is, frankly, too boring to capture Western attention for long. Only when violence speeds up is the Palestinian cause briefly remembered—and even then, scarcely understood. Recollection takes on the hard work of capturing the violence of the everyday, and Aljafari’s toil trawling through archival footage demands a corresponding labor from viewers as we try to bear witness.
Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): At the recommendation of my friend Stephanie Kraver, a scholar of Israeli and Palestinian poetry, I’ve been reading and rereading Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s bracing poem “The ‘Red Indian’s’ Penultimate Speech to the White Man” (translated by Fady Joudah). The poem itself is gently skeptical of my desire to take refuge in poetry, rhetorically asking its addressee: “Will you not memorize a bit of poetry to halt the slaughter?” And yet, Darwish’s poetry is not the kind that, to use W.H. Auden’s despairing phrase, “makes nothing happen.” Its very ventriloquism is scandalous to a white Jewish reader like me, accustomed to think of Native American voices as ethically unavailable for appropriation. Darwish riskily asserts the possibility of translation between experiences of Indigenous dispossession in radically different contexts—even as the poem’s dramatic conceit implies that it is also possible for the settler to hear from the native.
Although steeped in irony and melancholy, the poem’s core structure remains strikingly optimistic—as suggested by its epigraph, a Duwamish Chief’s self-qualification, “Did I say, The Dead? There is no Death / here, there is only a change of worlds.” There are numerous changes of world here—Indigenous people forced to migrate westward from the Mississippi; Native traditions about a next life; Columbus arriving in a “New World,” with the self-given “right to name our ghosts as pepper or Indian”; and then finally the change of worlds from Palestine to the Mississippi and Seattle, from the lovingly evoked natural world of North America to a world of “the dead and settlements, dead and bulldozers.” I can’t help but wonder whether we are supposed to imagine another sense of the phrase, too: the idea that we might be able, somehow, to change the world and put an end to—or at least somewhat mitigate—this ongoing catastrophe.
