Translator’s Note: The French adjective populaire, used here to qualify quartier (neighborhood, area, district, ward),is a translation conundrum. Not to be confused with “popular,” populaire is often translated as “working class,” but the Marxist overtones of this term are misleading, erasing the way the term has morphed into a racial euphemism to . . .
Read More
FOOTSTEPS RUNNING AWAY FROM THEMSELVES Rapid under the feet of children whogrew up too soonand changed their shoesand their featuresin a hurry Time was rushinglike the ambulancesstruggling to run after explosions In the streets that tear their clothesand the birds that change their shapes There is death on both sidesand death is . . .
Read More
Photo courtesy of the Author Something that makes me fall in love with Gaza even more each day is the unspoken I-have-little-you-have-little-let’s-share-it attitude that thrives among households. I have a neighbour, a wife and mother of five, whose financial situation is visibly difficult. Yet from the very first day I moved into . . .
Read More
Photo credit: Oxford Union In my final week as President of the Oxford Union, former Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf – the first Muslim to hold the office – began his address in the House Chamber to me with these words: “You’ve not had the easiest time as president, and I’m saying . . .
Read More
Photo Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/SWinxy. This letter was dictated by Mahmoud Khalil from ICE Detention in Louisiana to his lawyer over the phone. My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and . . .
Read More
These days—the days of the genocide on Palestinians—I go to coffeeshops. Instead of reading a book, I scroll through my phone and witness in real time the death and destruction of Palestinians and Palestine. My people and my homeland. At times, when I hear the word Palestine, I start to eavesdrop. After the news . . .
Read More
Lecture by Rashid Al-Khalidi at the University of Vienna, May, 2024. Photo courtesy of Sofia Bempeza Let me tell you a story about how working on knowledge production about Palestine in Austria is walking on a minefield. You can (and will) encounter a wave of ignorance and hatred that may explode your . . .
Read More
Lisa Suhair Majaj in Amman, Jordan, circa 1968.Photo courtesy of the author. Through the tent flap the child saw bomb-lightstreak the sky, heard the drum of thunderthat was not thunder. She should have beentoo young to grasp the proximity of death,but this was Gaza. She asked her mother pensively, What if I . . .
Read More
Leyla Moushbeck and friends at the protest on May 7. Photo courtesy of the author Around midnight on May 7, 2024, I was arrested on the UMass campus alongside over 130 students, faculty and fellow community members. Up until the moment of my arrest, I’d been sitting on the ground, singing protest . . .
Read More
