schutzbunker she says sternly facing us on tagesshau public television paid with our taxes both parts of this untranslatable german noun a blatant lie there is no bunker in gaza for the maimed, hurt, terrorized, killed, abandoned, starving, crazy with terror and fear palestinian all-gender people and their children nor is there protection because...
Beyond Politicians
As Israel’s war on the Palestinian people escalated, in the aftermath of Hamas’ October 7 attack on a rave and two kibbutzim in southern Israel, protests erupted around the globe. Educators and grassroots activists organized teach-ins. Everyone who had ever signed a petition calling for justice in Palestine received dozens of emails asking them to call their representatives and sign yet more petitions. By early 2024, a number of cities across the USA, as well as some professional associations and trade unions, had issued resolutions calling for a ceasefire, and demanding that the United States stop funding the genocide.
Audre Lorde taught us that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the...
Malak Mattar, When Family Is the Only Shelter
(painted during the 2021 assault on Gaza).
A massacre is unfolding in Rafah, where the population of two-thirds of the besieged Gaza strip—over 1.5 million Palestinians—has been forcibly displaced. News that the Egyptian state is building a prison camp to receive Palestinians, presumably after the impending Israeli ground invasion will have shocked the conscience of many, while footage already emerging day after day is harrowing: body parts strewn on the road; families, their homes, and a mosque burned to piles of ash; the shredded corpse of a young girl hanging off a wall, where it had been thrown by a blast. For Palestinians across the globe who are waiting, watching, and hanging on every moment, the feeling of...
I had grown accustomed to earthy alpine soils, with their scent of moss and sap. Then, without warning, I suddenly found myself dealing with the soils of a valley lined with the disciplined rows of apple orchards covering every wedge of the wavy hillsides, even the steepest slices, as far as the eye could see. The growers evidently had zero tolerance for sloping or uneven terrain: before lining up their rows of dwarf trees, they’d shave down the slopes with heavy machinery, leaving them perfectly flat. They clearly wanted them to keep up with the times, to fit in with the geometrically shaped concrete warehouses used for sorting and conserving the produce, and with the futuristic malls of the more flourishing cities.
With such measures, they managed to ravage forever lands...
(Photo by Giacomo Sartori: North Algeria, a typical Mediterranean sequence. Light-colored bumps caused by erosion, red soil on the hillsides, dark soil in the hollows.)
The hues we have in our heads for landscapes often spring forth from the colors of their soils. Left uncultivated, vegetation would cover such shades over, but plowing and working the soil slam them in our face, as happens with open wounds. At that point, they have the upper hand—proud of their autocratic imprint on the surroundings, of their claim to be the source of beauty. One thinks of the blood-red soils of the Mediterranean or the dazzling clays cut into Appenine ravines. Often, however, the impact is...
