Volume 20
Support Gaza Mutual Aid and the Palestinian Feminist Collective; Falasteen Focus, gathered wisdom by Sameerah; name that song
ACTION ITEMS
This week we are highlighting two action items referenced below in Falasteen Focus. Please consider following both groups and contributing.
Gaza Mutual Aid Collective will be sharing a fundraiser soon. Follow them on Insta for updates.
Follow and support the work of Palestinian Feminist Collective / and on insta @palestinianfeministcollective .
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
In this volume we are honored to once again feature the gathered wisdom of Sameerah. We featured our first Falasteen Focus in Volume 11 and longer excerpts from Eman Ghanayem’s essay “Proactive Grief: Palestinian Reflections on Death” in Volume 13. We are grateful for this ongoing collaboration with Sameerah and the necessary work they are doing in calling attention to experiences of living and dying under occupation.
Falasteen Focus features a handful of offerings on Palestinian death, grief, life, love, and culture, gathered by Sameerah, a Palestinian and Irish American death worker based out of Chicago.
She can be reached at witchykhalto@gmail.com
*This volume’s Falasteen Focus graphic includes a repeated quote by Mohammed El-Kurd: “Zionism is a death cult.” 33 Palestinians in Gaza have been murdered by Zionist occupation forces so far this week. Allah yerhamhom. Gaza Mutual Aid Collective will be sharing a fundraiser soon. Follow @gazamutualaid for updates.
On Tuesday, May 2nd, Sheikh Khader Adnan Mohammad Musa died in Israeli custody after an 87-day hunger strike protesting his arbitrary imprisonment. Allah yerhamo. In response, the WAED Prisoners Association in Gaza stated, "Khader Adnan has been executed in cold blood.”
From Khader Adnan’s martyrdom by Mariam Barghouti:
“On Tuesday morning, the Palestinian hunger striker and political activist, Sheikh Khader Adnan, died inside the Ramleh prison clinic. Since February 5 of this year, Adnan, 45, has been on hunger strike protesting his imprisonment by Israel, which has been targeting and harassing the Palestinian political figure and advocate for resistance over the past decade. Adnan is the veteran of eight hunger strikes, which he launched to protest his unlawful imprisonment by the Israeli authorities over the years, most of them without charge or trial.”
“By late Tuesday morning on the day of his death, Israeli authorities moved the hunger striker’s corpse to the Abu Kabir medical facility near Jerusalem. There, Israeli authorities moved forward to perform an autopsy on the hunger striker’s body, against Adnan’s final will that his body not be dissected and autopsied in the event of his death… Meanwhile, Adnan’s family awaits the ruling of Israeli authorities on whether the family will be able to receive and bury Adnan next to his father’s grave, in accordance with his final wishes.”
From Khader Adnan’s final will, written on April 2, 2023:
“...if I am martyred, do not let the occupier cut up my body, and bury me near my father, and write upon my grave ‘Here lies the impoverished servant of God, Khader Adnan’…and make my grave a simple one and ask of God to forgive me…”
In an act of utter depravity and cruelty towards his family, Israel violated the sheikh’s corpse with an unnecessary autopsy. And as I write this 11 days later, Sheikh Khader Adnan’s body has yet to be returned to his family for burial. His is one of hundreds of Palestinian corpses abducted by Israel, awaiting liberation from Zionist morgue freezers or cemeteries of numbers.
#ReturnOurChildren #بدنا_ولادنا
From The Jurisprudence of Death: Palestinian Corpses & the Israeli Legal Process by Noura Erakat and Rabea Eghbariah:
“Palestinians are not exempt from Israeli detention after death. The decision to withhold the body of deceased Palestinian prisoner Nasser Abu Hmeid, who died of cancer while in custody, is the most recent manifestation of the Israeli necropolitical regime that regulates the bodies of dead Palestinians. The history of withholding Palestinian bodies spans several decades. Since 1967, Israel has withheld hundreds of Palestinian corpses, which it has primarily used as “bargaining chips” in negotiations or potential prisoner swap deals.”
“Law after Death: The Legal Process & the Ritual of Death
The Israeli policies and court decisions that have enabled the State to withhold Palestinian bodies have formed a legal corpus that regulates Palestinians after death. We refer to this as the jurisprudence of death, a legal regime that attempts to provide justification for the detention of corpses in freezers and relegates Palestinian mourning to a liminal zone of non-burial and non-closure. Once a Palestinian body is withheld, Israeli law assumes a central role in regulating grief and suspending closure. In such cases, the jurisprudence of death has effectively replaced the ritual of death. The law’s violence becomes the ritual and the grave turns into a courtroom. The legal process takes over the dead bodies and controls the timeline of grief and closure.”
On May 11, 2022, Israeli occupation forces murdered journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Allah yerhamha. Israeli forces then attacked her funeral on Friday May 13th, beating mourners who struggled to keep her coffin lifted.
“The evidence is overwhelming. An Israeli soldier killed my aunt, a US citizen, while she was wearing a clearly marked press vest. After a year, it’s past time for accountability. We deserve justice.” --Lina Abu Akleh on Twitter
From Journalist witness to Shireen Abu Akleh’s murder vows to ‘honor’ her legacy by Farah-Silvana Kanaan:
“You know, when I arrived in Beirut, it was the first time I saw the sea?” Shatha Hanaysha muses, while she watches children chasing each other along the Corniche.
“Most of us in Palestine are denied a visit to the sea by the Israelis, so I was curious to know why people love it so much. The people who walk and run along the Corniche, the children swimming, the silent fishermen. I get it now. It’s the ultimate symbol of freedom.”
...Hanaysha still finds it difficult to talk about Abu Akleh, the young journalist’s role model… Hanaysha interrupts herself at times: “I’ll talk about Shireen later.”
She turns to the sea as her thoughts seem to slowly drift away.
“So, I often come here and video call my family to show them the sea while we talk … “You know the white foam that covers the waves? When I saw them for the first time, I thought they were fish.” She shakes her head and laughs. “This should be common knowledge for a Palestinian. But even that has been taken away from us. Another part of our soul.”
… Hanaysha lets out a deep sigh and adds in a half-whisper: “It all went so fast. One minute we were joking around with some kids on the street and, what felt like the next, I suddenly saw Shireen lying on the ground.” She tried to reach for Shireen but the bullets kept coming. “I didn’t even know whether she was dead or alive until someone risked his life to evacuate us,” she says. “But she just wouldn’t wake up.”
… Coming here, to Beirut’s Corniche, has a way of calming Hanaysha on days when it gets to be too much, she says. “I’ll sit down on one of the benches facing the sea and get lost in its endless movements.”
“I would give anything to be back in Palestine instead, if that meant that Shireen was still alive. But she’s not.”
“But I try to stop myself from going back to that moment and focus on the future instead,” she says. “Even if we will never get justice for Shireen, because the world is not interested in justice, then I will honor her by becoming the best journalist I can be and keep telling the truth. With bravery and compassion, just like she did.”
2023 marks the 75th anniversary of the Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic). Decolonize Palestine explains, “In mid May 1948, the state of Israel was officially established on the ruins of Palestine. Having ethnically cleansed approximately 80% of the Palestinians in its newly acquired territory, the following years would consolidate Zionist control of the land and pave the way for discriminatory ethnocratic laws and policies that would institutionalize the theft of everything Palestinian.”
A poem included in Poets Respond to the Anniversary of Nakba by Literary Hub in 2018:
MY GRANDMOTHER THE LEO TELLS ME ABOUT HER NINE LIVES
Jessica Abughattas
***
“The price of a kiss is your life” — Rumi
In my first life I was a speck
inside my mother, a chord
vaulted in the cathedral
of her throat; a homily.
In my next life I cropped my hair
like a man, worked late nights
in a sock factory.
Alhamdulillah,
I lived 100 lives
for you.
In my next life my husband
carved crosses from the wood
of olive trees.
Where a high rise
hotel stands, my love and I
peeled oranges
by the sea.
In my next life I was widowed
when my youngest
child was three.
My eldest married
under a veil of smoke,
only seventeen.
And I have died
100 more times.
My first death,
when barbed wire
kissed my scalp,
I walked to the medic
past men
who would have shot at me.
By my second death
I could afford a telephone.
I left my house
arranged perfectly.
Neighbors called
to ask how I could leave
before we kissed goodbye.
I told them god
has written this fate for me,
and when I go…
do not cry for me.
I have mustered
enough tears
to drown the shores
of Tel Aviv.
I do not wish for love;
I loved my husband.
I do not wish for wealth;
we had a palace…
we lived for 10 years
peacefully.
When we arrived
at the apartment, we slept ok
altogether
on one mattress at first,
your mother
and aunt and me.
I want nothing;
alhamdulillah
and everything good
I owe to you—
When I crossed
the border
into Amman
I fell on my knees
I kissed the ground 100 times.
The Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC) created the 2023 Palestinian Feminist Futures Calendar as part of “an embodied feminist grammar and poetics of land, life, love, and liberation.” This month the PFC commemorates al-Nakba.
“We affirm that our land and people are one, indivisible watan (homeland and peoplehood).
We aim to abolish Zionism’s systemic regime of rightlessness, dispossession, military occupation, apartheid, siege, war, and gendered and sexual violence that has been ongoing since before the 1948 Nakba. We resist erasure, subjugation, and fragmentation through the restoration of lost land, time, peoplehood, and cultures. We are committed to the reunion of our people, communities, and homeland, from the Northern Galilee to the southernmost tip of al-Naqab, from the Mediterranean coastal lands, to the sacred city of Jerusalem, to the terrain west of the Jordan River. Across historic Palestine, throughout the shatat, and through our intergenerational connections, diverse and rich traditions, histories, and organizing practices, we affirm that we are one people.”
The calendar’s art for May 2023, shown above, is a painting by Dalia Ali, a Jordan-based Palestinian visual artist. The painting is part of the collection “Once Upon a Time: Lifta,” which consists of paintings of displaced villages of Palestine. Dalia says that she painted Lifta as it is now, a green hill in spring, with the remains of the houses of evicted Palestinian families. She also included, as collage, old images of Lifta from 1898 and of Palestinians as they were evicted from their homes in 1948, as well as quotes from Ibrahim Nasrallah’s novel Shadows of the Keys expressing feelings of the Palestinians who couldn’t return to their villages in 1948. This way as the viewer looks at the details, they see the continuous dialogue between present and past.
You can stay up to date with the PFC by following @palestinianfeministcollective
Maqluba was recently screened at the Chicago Palestine Film Festival. The lighthearted short film centers around the main character’s grief hallucinations after his life is turned upside down by his father’s death.
“Maqluba tells the story of Jamal, a man who is searching for peace after the death of his father. He's getting married, awaiting the confirmation of his dental school acceptance, and struggling to find common ground with his older brother. Throughout these trials, Jamal learns about family, what a father truly is, and the acceptance of a loss that he was never ready for.” – Shady Mawajdeh, director. With Mona Aburmishan, Bassam Abdelfattah, Rami Abushhab, Ismail Taher. Produced by Kumail Alshahin.
SIMPLE PLEASURES
sounds that only Gen Xers / Millennials hear
teach us how to dougie, but make it drumline
liquid measurement hack, but make it a fairytale
crow knows how to ask for what it wants