it's kinda terrifying to see people forget about the events that have transpired in gaza since oct 2023. every tragedy that once created mass outrage was soon forgotten as another tragedy took place.
it's just so disturbing to realise that no palestinian has emerged from this unscathed. everyone has a family member they lost, a friend they miss dearly, a home they long to return to but cannot because it no longer exists.
a very huge part of gaza is rubble. the recent ceasefire has allowed people the chance to attempt to rebuild their lost homes. my friend alaa is one of them. she wants her children to live under a proper roof. please consider helping her out. her fundraiser is verified.
While cleaning out my room I found a paper that my therapist gave me some time ago to deal with obsessive and intrusive thoughts. Sorry the paper is a little crinkled and stained, but I figured I’d post it in hopes that it will help someone like it helped me.
Mohammed El Kurd's book Perfect Victims is on sale through Haymarket books for only $5.99 for an ebook or $14.36 for paperback (with ebook included).
This is not an affiliate link, I just wanted to share. Summary:
Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.
Palestine is a microcosm of the world: on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured—the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.
Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.
How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple demand: dignity for the Palestinian.
If you have a local library, most have the ability to suggest a purchase. Worth asking them to get the paperback and the e-version if you can, to support the author!
On November 7, 2024, Denmark used a racist, culturally biased "parenting competency" test to remove a 2 hour old baby, Zammi, from her loving indigenous Greenlandic Inuit mother, Keira, because her native language, which uses minute facial expressions to communicate, will not be able to "[prepare] the child for the social expectations and codes that are necessary to navigate in Danish society." This test had been recommended not to be used at the federal level before this happened but certain municipalities, including the one this happened in, chose to continue to use it regardless. Not only is this blatantly racist but also violates multiple declarations and conventions that Denmark has signed that protect the rights of indigenous people.
Please sign this petition to help Keira to get her baby back.
Hey, it's really important for Keira to get 50,000 signatures on this petition before her court date in early April 2025. Please sign if you haven't already to help a mother and a people stand up to colonialism and for indigenous rights.
I will share a list of recommended books at some point but until then just hear me out and pick up Mohammed El-Kurd's Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal as soon as you can because if there's one book you should read this year, it should absolutely be this one.
very glad no other land won and seeing it at a local palestinian film festival last year was one of the most impactful experiences i've ever had in a theater like when the text of final end card came up on screen you could feel it hit the whole room, but even in that moment while watching it it was so obvious why the film was framed the way it was and every time i've seen yuval speak during the press tour or read his writing since it's made it more grating… truly hate that to get this film to see the light of day and get even the limited distribution it's had that basel has to like. humor him in this way. and constantly share every stage and platform the film affords them because it is a Shared Project even though it's absolutely basel's story it's his community and family and home and his fucking life
basel even comments on it in the film itself, the lib zionist perspective yuval has about the problem and how it's going to be solved, but that framework is what the entire premise of this film's existence is built around and especially central to how it's been promoted and talked about globally. it's about their friendship it's about them coming to an understanding, the underlying implication you can fix oppression by making friends with an individual Good Guy who materially benefits from your oppression, whose place in society depends entirely on the existence of this oppressive structure, who decries violent resistance as Just As Bad as the violence committed by the occupation, but he feels bad about it so he has a dream where everyone can one day just get along. that the best way forward is to get this story in front of the right eyeballs in the West, to appeal to the sympathies of global audiences that they might speak out enough to change something… in that way it's very much an oscar film that hollywood typically loves, but because it's about palestine it feels like a miracle that it was acknowledged at all. idk just feels bad man
The Palestinian-Israeli documentary indulges in a familiar kind of wishful thinking.
The film’s title begs the question, no other land for whom? We hear it in the Palestinians pleading with the Israeli soldier aiming a bulldozer at their homes. But its echoes are also the film’s subtext, the possibility of a future shared between settler and native. A settler has come to help the natives, hoping to redeem himself and, implicitly, the horizons of the settler-state. Where are we supposed to go?, we can imagine an Israeli asking a Palestinian, having been made a guest in their home, once political reality enters their conversation.
Much of the film, which is ostensibly about the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian villages, is spent tracing the friendship of Adra and Abraham. Several scenes find Adra and Abraham driving in a car, smoking hookah in a restaurant, sitting simply in conversation about the present and the future (the past, beyond that of Masafer Yatta, is generally left alone). Toward the film’s end, during one of these heart-to-hearts, Abraham offers a vision of Israel that no longer denies Adra his rights. He asks Adra to dream with him of a future in which Palestinians and Israelis live side by side. “Inshallah,” Adra half-humors his friend. Over the course of the documentary, by talking to Palestinians and witnessing the actions of fellow Israelis, we see the settler growing, learning from the native. We see the settler recognizing, in his limited way, the nature of Zionism at a pace the Palestinian, here exceedingly patient, can’t afford.
While No Other Land tells the story of one Palestinian community’s depopulation, it also stands in for the liberal’s long-sought-after Roadmap for Peace. Abraham introduces himself to the Palestinians with whom he works as yahudi, Jewish. He offers them his time and energy, and risks his safety, to tell their story. “I need to write something about the protest today,” Abraham tells Adra from the passenger seat, while the latter, driving, focuses his eyes on the road. “I have to write more. The article I wrote on Harun’s mom didn’t get many views.” “I feel you’re a little enthusiastic…” Adra says, and Abraham asks him to clarify. “You want everything to happen quickly … as if you’ve come to solve everything in ten days, then go home.” Adra snaps his fingers before returning his hand to the wheel. Abraham remains committed to ending the program of ethnic cleansing committed in his name, but in the film and elsewhere, he attributes those horrors to the “occupation” rather than to Zionism. His condemnation of the former serves to preserve the latter. This distinction is artificial: from the standpoint of its victims, Israel is its occupation, the Zionist project necessarily one of ethnic cleansing and genocide, of total erasure.
Abraham attempts a rehabilitation of an iteration of Zionism that doesn’t exist but could, a familiar settler hope (think, imagine what America could be). In one clip, Abraham appears on Democracy Now! to say, “As an Israeli, it’s very, very important for me to stress that I don’t think we can have security if Palestinians do not have freedom.” The possibility of this future depends on the actions of individuals like Abraham, although the film itself reveals the futility of this vision. After the Democracy Now! clip, the film cuts to Abraham on Israeli TV. Here, Palestinians are the other: “They have no voting rights under military occupation,” Abraham says. “Basel, a guy my age who lives there, can’t even leave the West Bank, and we destroy their homes every week—” Here, he is cut off by another Israeli on the panel, calling in remotely: “You’re against Jewish people, in everything you do.” Abraham sighs, then pushes back, calling the man a liar, only to be interrupted by him again: “They’re invaders in a military training ground.” This thinking, not Abraham’s, is at the heart of Zionism. Israeli soldiers and settlers taunt Adra and Abraham repeatedly, goading them to upload the videos they record to see if this might change anything on the ground. In the final footage recorded for the film, we hear Adra on the phone with Israeli authorities, asking for protection. We see armed settlers descend on Masafer Yatta, then Adra’s cousin shot point-blank in his abdomen by a man in a T-shirt. Words flash across the screen, informing us that, since October 2023, many such attacks have continued to take place, prompting Palestinians to flee their homes.
…
The film doesn’t engage with other ways this suffering might end. The only resistance we see is nonviolent demonstration. Adra is an activist, a term whose configurations are vague except vis-à-vis violence. The film matter-of-factly captures plenty of violent Israelis, settlers and soldiers, armed and sustained by the state, their bulldozers and their unmoved expressions, or their twisted smiles as lives are destroyed, but no Palestinian fighters, no direct Palestinian response. Instead, Palestinians and their supporters are “armed” with their cameras, committed to capturing an aftermath to which a sympathetic Western audience might choose to respond on their behalf. At the film’s start, Adra’s father, who has been imprisoned and abused by the Israelis multiple times, describes a desire to throw rocks at Israeli soldiers, then apologizes to his Israeli guest, explaining that sometimes he finds himself so angry. The woman’s son was shot at a peaceful protest.
Before the footage capturing the settler attack on Masafer Yatta, during which Adra’s cousin was shot, the producers inform the viewer through an intertitle, “We finished this film in October 2023.” The implications here are obvious, a Pandora’s box that the film, committed to the possibility of a future that accommodates both settler and native, must bend over backward not to touch.
also:
From Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd:
Take the genre of Israelis and Palestinians making films together. The Palestinian filmmaker is chaperoned to the film festival, allowed on stage as their authoritative cosignatory's charismatic sidekick. No one—not the producer of the festival, not the columnist writing a review—seems to care about the content of the film, whether it is good or garbage. What matters most is that the film was codirected, a mode that satisfies a libidinal urge in the viewers. They eavesdrop on a forbidden conversation, a titillating reconciliation between the slayer and the slain. Discussions about the film, reviews, the way it is promoted, and our excited elevator pitches to one another all become masturbatory, reducing the film to the fact that it was a collaboration between an Israeli and a Palestinian, fulfilling the viewer's fantasy of a happy ending to an otherwise miserable story. We turn it into a fetish.
The settler colony has restricted aid soon after the 1st phase of the ceasefire deal has ended. This means the prices for essentials will skyrocket! So please consider donating to my friend, Suad Ahmad. She is a computer engineer who has given birth to a baby boy named Khaled. He is 9 months old and he suffers from a respiratory illness! She and Khaled have returned to the North after 15 months, reuniting with her family. They need to rebuild their home as well as purchase basic necessities! Let's reach the short-term goal of 50K in the next 3 days! $49,295 USD has been raised. There is $705 left to go!
@suad-khaled (Verified: #279) (Donation Match)
A Tale of Strength and Determination: Suad Fights for a Better L… Mohammed Ahmad needs your support for Urgent: Help Suad and Her Newborn Es
$49,295 / $70,000 USD
Tagging for reach. Please leave a reply if you wish to be removed. Thank you.
Although the war in our region has stopped, humanitarian needs remain significant. We urgently need to buy a clay oven and firewood. The oven will help us prepare bread and make meals for my family’s 24 members, including 10 malnourished children.
We appreciate any support or help you can give us, whether by donating or reblogging, Thank you for your interest and continued support.
Donate🍁
The campaign is documented in Hussein's Document No. 219.✅
The goal is to reach €3,500 so we can buy the oven.🌷
We are 10 hours away from the beginning of the month of Ramadan. Unfortunately, I was not able to afford the price of a clay oven.😥
I do not know how to describe the difficulty of this situation for us, and the matter will be very harsh during the month of Ramadan. However, there is still hope for you to help me reach the goal of €3500 and buy the oven.
Mohammed is in a crisis situation, on which you can find more information under our “#mohammed al habil” tag.
Mohammed has been unable to attend his physical therapy due to lack of funds. The condition of his leg has deteriorated as a result.
He now requires an urgent operation in order to save the function in his leg. Mohammed is only 18, and he is terrified of spending the rest of his life with only 1 usable leg.
The operation costs $4,000. Currently, Mohammed's campaign is at just over €17,000. This represents the total funds raised over time, not the funds currently avallable.
New temporary goal: €21,000 EUR
Need to raise: €3,712 EUR (about $3,828 USD)
Please help Mohammed save his leg!
NOTE: I am unable to effectively fundraise for Mohammed. We are urgently hoping for bloggers who will be able to devote time and attention to promoting his campaign. Please consider making a post for Mohammed to promote his campaign so he can save his leg!
Hello, I am Muhammad Al-Hubail, the son of the martyr and my martyr brother, from G… Mohammed Alhabil needs your support for Please help me
As explained here, Mohammed underwent the first stage of the surgery he needs to return function to his leg. This has left him with serious medical debt that he must pay off urgently.
He remains stranded in southern Gaza, unable to walk due to his injury. He is all alone, and has no way to support himself. He desperately needs funds for food, his ongoing care regiment, his debt, and a future medical evacuation.
We have set a new temporary goal to raise €500 EUR (about $525 USD)
The month of Ramadan is approaching. Ramadan is the fourth pillar of Islam, and is the month in which Muslims abstain from eating, drinking, smoking and bad behavior during daylight hours, focusing instead on prayer, meditation and charity.
In Ramadan we need healthy food more than any other day of the year and we need your donations and support even more. Please help my family.
Racism isn’t saying an uncomfortable word. Racism is every news media reporting on the individual lives of the 33 adult settler hostages to be released in Phase 1, and not one mention of the 100+ Palestinians, 25 of whom are children, that Israel has murdered since announcing the ceasefire. They’ll try to kill as many as they can before Sunday.
I heard about this earlier but this is phenomenally good news because a lot of these manuscripts hold palestinian intellectual history dating back centuries and my friends who work in the Islamic book history field believed these all to be gone
i'm like if build a bear was a guy or something idk @flangg - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
