"The racism embedded in colonial logic often creates 'differentiation' between those people who are allowed to have a category of childhood and those who are at the margins of humanity and so are denied such a category. The deployment of such a differentiation is not unique to Zionism and its racialized concepts of Israeli sovereignty. Mbembe suggests that the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized can only be one of violence and domination, since the animalized colonized people cannot have an existence that is in any way equal to that of the colonizers. Caging the colonized in spaces of nonexistence enables the colonial power to persist while maintaining an inhumane image of the colonized. Caging reveals inherent contradictions, especially in Hebron where the act of confining Palestinians within their houses and communities is justified as a necessary measure to protect Israelis and to maintain the state’s 'security' as a mode of 'separating' two 'contesting' groups and/or to 'protect' the Palestinians from the violence of the settlers. Arbitrary justifications are also one of the distinctive features of colonial power, and the dynamics of caging can serve both to validate the perception of the Palestinians as animals that must be controlled and also as a group that is receiving the ostensibly benevolent protection of the state that has encaged them in this manner. ... Children in cages are treated no different than their elders. In fact, more often than not, they are considered more dangerous than adults, since the children are the builders of the future, and their speech and silences ... convey thoughts and plans about what they might do to liberate themselves from such a cage. The refusal of children to accept humiliation as part of their reality was a vivid and daily reminder to the occupier that the land is stolen; this is one reason for their caging." Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2019)

my bed is my cloud and i’m the little angel that sleeps on it

the birds left, by sakir khader

The birds left the skies of Gaza and migrated. Buzzing fighter jets have occupied their clouds and are hunting the people of the land. The peaceful whistling has been replaced by loud explosions. The living streets are now filled with bodies wrapped in blood-soaked white sheets..

The sound of children playing is no more. Now it’s a mother's hoarse voice echoing through the Gazan streets as she’s desperately screaming her children’s names between the ruins of her bombed house, hoping a survivor will respond..

The birds have migrated. And now it’s the enemy drone hovering high in the sky between the clouds, looking for more dreams to shatter …

The birds have migrated and left the shore. It was once a peaceful place where many families would grill corn cobs for their children and enjoy the sounds of the waves. Now it’s a place where people all amass in search of safety.

The birds have migrated because they are privileged to leave. Their wings carry them wherever they want to go. The birds have migrated and left the people of Gaza stuck between the wall and the sea ...

The birds have migrated and left the angel to take the souls of the Gazans. And now we say the Gazans are migrating. Migrating to heaven.

North Lebanon

Occupation forces have released 150 kidnapped Palestinians from the Gaza Strip after they were subjected to several months of detention and torture

Columbia University students at the Gaza solidarity encampment reading Wisam Rafeedie's The Trinity of Fundamentals and Ghassan Kanafani's The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine (ph. Ian Bartlett).

this is unbearable. just a little while ago when the baby was born we were lamenting that refaat never got to meet his grandkid and now his grandkid, son in law, and daughter are dead too?! ايه القهر ده!

“Gaza is not the most beautiful of cities. Her coast is not bluer than those of other Arab cities. Her oranges are not the best in the Mediterranean. Gaza is not the richest of cities. (Fish and oranges and sand and tents forsaken by the winds, smuggled goods and hands for hire.) And Gaza is not the most polished of cities, or the largest. But she is equivalent to the history of a nation, because she is the most repulsive among us in the eyes of the enemy – the poorest, the most desperate, and the most ferocious. Because she is a nightmare. Because she is oranges that explode, children without a childhood, aged men without an old age, and women without desire. Because she is all that, she is the most beautiful among us, the purest, the richest, and most worthy of love.”

— Journal of an Ordinary Grief - Mahmoud Darwish

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This is all the more remarkable given that maps are perhaps the most alluring artefacts of geography and the most persuasive descriptions of world politics (Kwan, 2004). They are not merely a reflection of power but power itself: visual statements and narratives about the political topics they picture or, in other words, visual discourses. Their production is ‘controlled, selected, organised, and redistributed’ by procedures of exclusion that establish what is reasonable, true and acceptable to say – or depict – and what is not (Foucault, 1981, 52–53). 

– Henk van Houtum & Rodrigo Bueno Lacy

una suciedad divina

Napping underneath the fig tree like it’s some kind of normal now

wild horses crossing a river in iran, eydi heydari

Paul Celan, from a poem titled "Twelve Years," featured in Selected Poems & Prose

“I prayed and fasted. I read the mystics. I studied the martyrs. I began to think I was someone thirsting for God.”

— Anne Carson, The Anthropology of Water (via antigonick)