Haya El-Refai: Laya’s first Eid
When war comes, it steals everything: souls, memories, homes, happiness, love and safety. Instead, it brings fear, blood, death, darkness and terror.
Hanan Abukmail: A Doctor’s Torment
Weeks have gone by since the fourth Israeli war on Gaza came to a close. And although the world has moved on, we in Gaza are left to pick up the pieces. And me? I find myself questioning my decision to become a physician.
Naomi Shihab Nye, Michael Simms & Friends: Poets for the People of Gaza
Naomi Shihab Nye, the current Young People’s Poet Laureate, and poet Michael Simms gather international poets to share works that navigate themes of identity, displacement, and home in Gaza.
Daniel Burston: An Open Letter to Steve Kowit on his poem “Intifada”
Right now, civil conversation on these subjects is difficult to impossible to sustain because both the Zionist and the Palestinian narratives have been carefully curated to highlight the harms that each side inflicted on the other, and to minimize or ignore the harms that they inflicted on their adversaries.
Steve Kowit: Intifada
bekippad Sabras dance thru the Tel Aviv streets chanting
gleefully: No school tomorrow in Gaza; all of their children are dead.
Tracey L. Rogers: Palestinian Lives Matter | We Must Reject Crimes Against Humanity
Just as Black Lives Matter, so do Palestinian Lives Matter. We cannot campaign for racial healing and justice on stolen land in our own country while simultaneously backing a campaign to occupy and displace people abroad.
Amira Hass: Israel Is Wiping Out Entire Palestinian Families on Purpose
The numerous incidents of killing entire families in Israeli bombings in Gaza—Parents and children, babies, grandparents, siblings—attest that these were not mistakes. The bombings follow a decision from higher up, backed by the approval of military jurists.
Patrick Gathara: Colonial Powers Have Long Demanded the ‘Right to Self-Defense’ Against the People They Have Colonized
Colonial occupiers have long claimed a “right” to defend themselves from the resistance of native communities, including by committing mass murder.
James L. Gelvin: As the Palestinian minority takes to the streets, Israel is having its own Black Lives Matter moment
As in the United States, a brutalized minority group, facing systemic racism and discriminatory acts has taken to the streets. And, as in the United States, the only way out starts with serious soul searching on the part of the majority.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Lullaby
We want things smaller than we know.
A vessel strong enough
to lift you into tomorrow,
Emily De Ferrari: Saturday January 16, 2010, revisited
This is not security, this is not madness, this is a concerted effort to rid the land of Palestinians.
Angele Ellis: In Lebanon, 2000 June
It was the summer the Israelis withdrew, leaving
behind
a landmined no-man’s-land of phosphorus orange groves,
blighted with white like the kingdom of the Snow Queen.
Abby Zimet: Israeli Soldiers Kill Autistic Man For No Discernible Reason
Israeli soldiers shot and killed at point-blank range Iyad Khairi Halak, a severely autistic, 32-year-old Palestinian man as he cowered on the ground, bleeding, terrified and uncomprehending, behind garbage cans.
Kathleen O’Toole: Starlings (corrected version)
My mind suddenly shifts
to tally one week’s arithmetic of grief:
eighty children among the hundreds killed
in a fine-tuned cone of shrapnel
