“My little son was jumping yesterday with extreme joy after the good news about the truce. Today we buried him.”

If, like me, you subjected yourself to that terrible Zadie Smith thing, read Steven Salaita's excellent response to her spurious and defamatory claims about our courageous students stevesalaita.com/our-your-pitif…

Update:

No one in Gaza is allowed to travel + all aid has been stopped from entering Gaza.

.Samah Hadid سماح: 'If a Rafah offensive takes place.. that would lead to the collapse of the aid response that is really reliant on the Rafah hub to distribute aid throughout that area'

One of the reasons Israel wants to destroy Rafah.

The death sentence is sent through the sky on paper. Leave or you will die. We all know that whether they left or not, the occupation will chase and kill them. The death sentence has already been taken decades ago and the only crime is being a Palestinian.

Zadie Smith. Now that I have your attention. Israel has dropped thousands of leaflets telling Palestinians trapped in Gaza to evacuate Rafah. Where will they go now? They are on the most southern point of Gaza already.

The people who are most demonstrably ignorant of the history of Palestine/the Middle East are also those who most smugly tell everyone else that we lack the necessary nuance and appreciation for complexity.

Zadie Smith’s essay has confirmed a feeling I’ve had every single day of my life: so many people feel compelled to write about or debate what Palestine is and what Palestinians are. The irony being, they have no idea what they’re talking about. We are real people, human beings.

A more organised thread with some thoughts on Zadie Smith, as someone whose spent a lot of time with her writing.

Zadie Smith has had consistently liberal (not leftist) politics, and has also consistently shown a belief in her own exceptionalism (as have critics at large)

something I’m learning as a young writer is to know when a topic isn’t in your lane, and to identify when writers are out of their depth. for example, Zadie Smith on Palestine encampments in the United States

Zadie Smith argues that protest slogans are “weapons of mass destruction” in a new pretentious and navel-gazing article and she does it while a literal genocide ravages Gaza. I am sick of ignorant and tone-deaf writers who feel like they can lecture us from their lavish homes.

I can’t stop thinking about the Israeli police officer who interrogated me when I was arrested for trying to bring food into Gaza who said to me there are no innocents in Gaza, not even a fetus in a womb.
I’ll continue to dedicate my life to solidarity for as long as it takes.

thinking of Mike Davis

A rare glimmer of great news! Congrats Gargi Bhattacharyya !!

America.

Fuck all has changed.

Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda shares a video in which she speaks on doctor Adnan al-Bursh’s final days and the condition under which he was detained.

So much hate, so much vitriol— just for standing up against the suffering of others.