Learning as resistance // 3
Longer form resources on Palestine cont'd
Watching events unfold over the last 60 days has changed me deeply. I don’t look at the world, or my place in it, in the same way.
Hitting despair made me want to dig deeper, uncover more, find an answer. I started getting to roots, making connections. And as each thread leads to more questions, I’ve been finding my own mind open. Each question I have about the world gives me a question to ask myself.
First, if you haven’t seen this 15min video by
I highly recommend doing so. It helped to ground me, and give me hope.
The Slow Factory: Orientalism & Environmental Justice [1hr]
This seminar from ‘The Slow Factory’ was one of those illuminating moments that traced lines of colonialism back in history. But I also felt their traces in me now. How have these ideas shaped my own? How can I open up to something different?
Antony Loewenstein interview [17min]
Loewenstein’s book ’The Palestine Laboratory’ covers one of the most globally important aspects of the ongoing occupation. While waiting for his book to arrive, I have been listening to as many interviews as I can of his.
“Loewenstein explains that Israel's military-industrial complex has used the Occupied Palestinian Territories for decades as a testing ground for weaponry and surveillance technology that it then exports around the world for profit”
Mahmoud Darwish: The Butterfly’s Burden [Poetry]
A copy of ‘The Butterfly’s Burden’ arrived this week. And it has given me a much needed alternative way to connect with what’s happening in Palestine. Some antidote to the detached way in which news and articles report. I’m currently reading the long poem ‘A State of Siege’. It is beautiful and painful to read. The passage below stuck with me.
A woman said to a cloud: cover my dear one,
for my clothes are wet with his blood.If you are not rain, o dear one,
then be a tree,
fertile and verdant. Be a tree.
And if not a tree, o dear one
be a stone
laden with dew. Be a stone.
And if not a stone, o dear one,
be the moon itself
in the dreams of she who loves you. Be the moon itself.
[thus a woman said
to her son, in his funeral]
The Palestine Pod: How Zionism stole Jewish Identity [1hr]
Finishing with another of Lara Elborno’s projects. The Palestine pod had an episode exploring the roots of Zionism. This interview with Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro helped dispel some myths and explain why Zionism and Judaism are antithetical ideologies.
I’m grateful for the change that I have felt. Though I wish it had come sooner, and not at this cost. Palestinians, through their strength and vulnerability, have cut through centuries of conditioning. Exposing the colonialism embedded in our systems and in our own minds.