Dear readers of DA,

Dilettante Army runs on a quasi-quarterly publication schedule, and we have not yet had the opportunity to directly cover the current crisis in Palestine. However, we have had the pleasure of featuring several writers on DA who have substantial expertise in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, global politics, fascism, violence, and other topics that inform these problems. 

We would like to use the tiny cultural platform we have to amplify work that DA writers are publishing elsewhere, along with lists of their recommended readings. Each person—Danielle Drori, Sophie Lewis, Sarah Jaffe, Dania Rajendra, and Suzanne Schneider—has highlighted thoughtful writing that takes a long view toward contextualizing and humanizing this crisis, helping to direct the reader’s anger in the right directions. 

We hope that these resources prove helpful in discussing complex issues. What is indisputable is that we are witnessing a massacre—the reliable reporting from Gaza that is listed here calls for nothing less than searing moral clarity.

Wishing you all peace,

The Editors
December 20, 2023

 

Authors’ recommendations (in alphabetical order):

 

 

Danielle Drori

 

Danielle contributed to our Spring 2023 issue, Wifey: “Ex-Wifey Dream Diary”

 

Danielle’s work:

 

• In this recorded lecture from 2022, I examine Zionism’s ruinous desires through a dream on the dispossession of Palestinian land and language.

• In this book review from 2019, I engage in a debate on the political unconscious of Israeli and Palestinian literatures.

 

Danielle’s recommended reading: 

 

Each of the sources I picked brings together Palestinian and Israeli voices against the occupation, oppression, dispossession, and mass murder of Palestinians; and against the idea that Israelis could – indeed, that they would want to – live forever in a Jewish ghetto surrounded by walls and a US-backed missile interception system. The first website documents Palestinian history while the second revolves around current affairs. 

• The NGO Zochrot (whose name means “We remember”) collects and disseminates historical information about the Palestinian Nakba in several languages. It seeks to promote Israeli accountability and has educated the Jewish public about the Palestinian right of return since the early 2000s: https://www.zochrot.org/welcome/index/en#

• +972 Magazine is an independent online platform run by Palestinian and Israeli journalists. It reports and analyzes the continuous violation of human rights in Palestine and Israel. It is made by, as well as spotlights, those who oppose the apartheid system in Israel-Palestine: https://www.972mag.com

 

Sophie Lewis

 

Sophie contributed to our Spring 2023 issue, Wifey: “Double-Shift: Dialectic of the Tradwife”

 

Sophie’s recommended reading: 

 

Besides the main obvious sources of good analysis right now – Jewish Currents and the Writers Against the War on Gaza social media feed – I recommend two things: (1) artist JB Brager‘s excellent “When Settler Becomes Native,” which breaks down the history of Zionism in cartoon form; and (2)  From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, edited by Sai Englert, Michal Schatz and Rosie Warren, and released by Verso as a free e-book. On the same day the collection was published, I heard the philosopher Alberto Toscano (who happens to be one of the two contributors who aren’t either Jewish or Palestinian) present his contribution, on fascism, and I hope that everyone will engage urgently with the antifascist prerogatives that spring from the current acceleration of Israeli settler-colonialism, as he and all the other contributors so brilliantly frame them. From the River to the Sea historicizes Israel’s genocidal campaign and appraises the attempts, all around the world, to repress an unprecedented eruption of anti-Zionist Jewish protest.

 

Sophie’s work:

 

As for my own writing on the subject, well, I have confined it to Patreon posts like this one, as I don’t think that my voice (certainly my by-line) is an important one right now. For what it’s worth, this month I published a post about the politics of food in relation to my hometown of Philadelphia’s Zionist-vs.-anti-Zionist “hummus wars” and the shameful tarring of protestors who stopped outside a restaurant called Goldie (owned by IDF fundraiser Michael Solomonov) during a pro-Palestinian march. You can read that here. Here are a few other links that I compiled for my Patreon subscribers in the early days of the war on Gaza:

• Hebh Jamal, “Despite what you think, Palestinians are not celebrating death.” 

“There has not been success in changing the perception of the Israeli public – to actually see us as humans and to accept we will not live in a cage. Whenever Israelis have an election, we brace ourselves because we know the only way you get polling numbers is by bombing, raiding, or arresting us senseless. Usually, when they bang the war drums, public support comes running. I am unsure how the colonized mind will decolonize itself to give us our freedom. It has not happened, and I don’t think it ever will. … I cannot condemn the militants if I believe even for a second that there might be a possibility of all of this finally coming to an end.”

Read here (Substack) or here (Mondoweiss)

• Mustafa Barghouti (speaking with CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria) | 8 October 2023.

In response to Zakaria’s suggestion that the Hamas offensive would turn Palestinians’ lives into a living hell, Dr Barghouti insisted: “Unfortunately, Fareed, what you have described is exactly what we already have. With 560 Israeli military checkpoints, the whole West Bank has been divided into 224 small ghettoes separated from each other, and the settlers are everywhere attacking Palestinians. Can we stop what’s going on now? Yes, of course, all these Israelis who are now in Gaza can be released tomorrow, if Israel also accepts to release our 5,300 Palestinian prisoners who are in Israeli jails, including 1,260 Palestinians who are in jail without knowing why under the under the so-called ‘administrative detention.'”

Watch here. Write-up at Common Dreams here.

• Noura Erakat in The Guardian and Opinio Juris  | 10 October 2023.

“Israel has subjected Palestinians to settler-colonial removal for 75 years, to the longest occupation in history for 56 years, and to a debilitating siege of Gaza holding 2.2 million Palestinians in an open-air prison for 16 years. In 2020, several Israeli and legacy international human rights organizations confirmed that Israel oversees an apartheid regime against Palestinians. Despite this, the US has continued to provide Israel with $3.6bn annually without conditions and made Israeli normalization with Arab states a top priority, thus normalizing apartheid. Worse, the US recently designated Israel as part of its visa waiver program, seemingly rewarding that apartheid rather than sanctioning it. This is part of a legacy of US complicity with Israeli aggression. Since 1967, the US has issued 43 vetoes on the UN security council to protect Israel from accountability or to prevent international resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

***

“After the deluge of bombs on Gaza, will European academic institutions and funding bodies initiate fellowships aimed at Palestinian researchers to help them escape the open-air prison they find themselves in? Will these same institutions issue declarations backing Palestinian resistance as they did with Ukraine, demanding Israel be held accountable for the occupation, apartheid, indiscriminate bombings, enforced population starvation, and other perverse violations of international humanitarian law? Will colleagues organise panels questioning the implications of Israel’s countless violations for the soul of international law? Or will they toe the line set by figures like von der Leyen and, with no small irony, Zelensky?”

Read here (Guardian), and here (Opinio Juris).

 

Sarah Jaffe

 

Sarah contributed to our Fall 2021 issue, Mission Accomplished: “Minor Victories: Labor Exploitation and the ‘Affirmation Trap’”

 

Sarah’s work:

 

A Long History of Antifascism Is Driving the Jewish Demand for Gaza Cease-Fire. My piece, which began as my anger at a Biden spokesperson comparing marches for Palestine to the fascists in Charlottesville, and an email to a few people I had interviewed after Unite the Right, Jewish organizers in Virginia, and grew into a look at Jewish antifascism, which I argue is at least as significant in modern Jewish history as Zionism, and useful for understanding why so many American Jews are standing with Palestine right now. 

 

Sarah’s recommended reading:

 
• ‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza at 972 magazine. A deep investigation into Israel’s AI-driven slaughter.

• ‘Grief Beyond Language,’ by Nicki Kattoura and Nada Abuasi at the Institute for Palestine Studies. An attempt to capture in words the uncapturable.

• ‘Combined and Uneven Catastrophe’: an interview with Kareem Rabie, a scholar of neoliberal development in Palestine, at The Baffler. (Also recommend his book, Palestine is Throwing a Party and the Whole World is Invited).

• ‘The goal is to eliminate Gaza’: an interview with Zoe Samudzi, a scholar of settler colonialism and genocide, at Prism.

• As a Union President, I Stand With Humanity in Calling for a Cease-Fire by Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, on his own family’s history with Israel and how it shaped his politics.

• What do Christian Zionists Think about Jews, Elle Hardy. Pretty self-explanatory, and unexpectedly funny.

• Jacqueline Rose, “You Made Me Do It,” at the London Review of Books, on violence and Israel.

• ‘On Mourning and Statehood’ by Gabriel Winant, part of a longer dialogue about grief but this one has stuck with me more than anything else I’ve read in this moment.

• Greg Grandin on ‘How to read the Israeli ‘Kidnapped’ Posters’

• UK factories help build the jets used by the Israeli military. They should be stopped by Amelia Horgan, on union members organizing protests blocking the arms factories that supply Israel.

• This Hanukkah especially, take inspiration from my family’s act of defiance by Dana Mills at 972 magazine, on Israeli soldiers’ use of Hanukkah as a weapon of war.

• Lessons of growing up Black and Jewish, by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, on how she learned and practices solidarity.

• Hostages’ Families Fight to be Heard, by Maya Rosen at Jewish Currents. A complicated look at the internal politics around hostage exchanges. (Well paired with Dan Berger’s piece which Dania also recommended.)

 

Sarah’s recommended podcasts:

 
Podcasts are a great way to get a deep download from an expert without the time it takes to read a whole book. Some of my favorites have been doing an expansive series over the past two months, here are some of my favorites: 

• Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain of Intercepted talk to Mouin Rabbani of Jadaliyya–an excellent overview of the past two months.

• Ash Sarkar at Novara Media talks to Rashid Khalidi and to Daniel Levy, both of whom in addition to being experts on the subject of Palestine have inside views of the “peace process” in recent decades.

• Daniel Denvir talks to Tareq Baconi on the history of Hamas, and Shaul Magid on the history of Zionism and anti-Zionism.

• An episode I did a couple of years ago, with Riya Al-Sanah on the general strike in Palestine and the history of strikes as resistance to Israeli occupation.

• And for when you are feeling despondent, exhausted, ruined, this episode of How to Survive the End of the World with adrienne maree brown talking to Hala Alyan about endurance is good for the soul.

 

Sarah’s recommended books: 

 
• A good primer is Ilan Pappe’s 10 Myths About Israel, free ebooks available from Verso right now.

• Jacqueline Rose, The Question of Zion and The Last Resistance. 

• Light in Gaza, also free now from Haymarket Books.

 

Sarah’s recommended teach-ins: 

 
There have been many, and most of them are archived. Here’s just two I’ve watched: 

• Christian Zionism 

• Solidarity Under Siege: Palestine and the Criminalization of Protest, with Ibrahim Husseini, Majed Abusalama, Aviah Sarah Day and Shanice Octavia McBean at Haymarket Books’s YouTube (you can find many more there as well.)

 

 

Dania Rajendra

 

Dania contributed to our Summer 2018 issue, Summer Fruit: “Austerity’s Fruit Ripens”

 

Dania’s work:

 

“Don’t Let the Flailing Center Box out the Left’s Powerful Possibilities,” In These Times. “Public fractures within Jewish communities provoked by Gaza genocide offer lessons—and paths forward—for progressives, Jewish and not.”

 

Dania’s recommended reading:

 

• Omer Bartov, Christopher R. Browning, Jane Caplan, Debórah Dwork, Michael Rothberg, et al., “An Open Letter on the Misuse of Holocaust Memory,” New York Review of Books 

• Ben Lorber, “Toward a Sober Assessment of Campus Antisemitism,” Jewish Currents

• Dan Berger, “The Abolitionist Logic of “‘Everyone for Everyone,’” Jewish Currents 

• David Klion, “Neofascism After Trump: A conversation with political theorist Ajay Singh Chaudhary on contemporary fascism in a global context,” Jewish Currents 

• George Prochnik, Emily Dische-Becker & Eyal Weizman, “Once Again, Germany Defines Who Is a Jew | Part II,” Granta

• Adam Johnson, “The ‘Hunt for Hamas’ Narrative Is Obscuring Israel’s Real Plans for Gaza,” The Nation

• Basically anything from +972 https://www.972mag.com/

• Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), “Christian Zionism: the often-misunderstood political theology powering this moment” (video). Link to transcript

• William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, Empire (podcast)

 

 

Suzanne Schneider

 

Suzanne contributed to our Fall 2021 issue, Mission Accomplished: “‘Mission Accomplished’: Fictive Victories at the End of History” 

 

Suzanne’s work:

   

• “Light Among the Nations,” Jewish Currents

• “Zionism, World War I, and the Imperial Frame: Part I,” Doctor Small Talk   

 

Suzanne’s recommended reading:

 

• Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete – this beautifully written study of the British Mandate is incredible; it’s the first place I send people who are new to the field 

• Arthur Herzberg, The Zionist Idea – a classic compendium of early Zionist sources that should be required reading for anyone who hopes to speak cogently about the nature of this movement; pairs well with Jonathan Gribetz’s Reading Herzl in Beirut, a study of the PLO’s attempt to understand Zionism. 

• George Antonius, The Arab Awakening – Antonius’s study is worthy as both a secondary source and historical artifact from the age of Arab liberalism. He was the first to publish details of the Hussein-McMahon correspondence, which had pledged British support for an independent Arab state in the former Ottoman territories after the First World War, and this book is an indispensable historical source for tracking resistance to Zionism across the decades. 

• The War for Palestine, ed. Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim: the best collection of essays I know about 1948, the nakba, military campaigns and regional rivalries

• Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage. Rashid was my dissertation advisor and I have a great deal of respect for all his work, but this might still be my favorite: a concise distillation of Palestinian statelessness. 

• Seth Anziska, Preventing Palestine – an amazing study that reveals how the prevention of Palestinian sovereignty has been the goal of the so-called peace process, also with crucial insights on the rise of the Israeli right, Camp David, the war in Lebanon. 

• Mahmoud Darwish, “Exile is so strong within me, I may bring it to the land.” This 1996 interview with Helit Yeshurun is one of my favorites.

• Tareq Baconi, Hamas Contained. Tareq is the leading expert on Hamas working today, and has written and spoken widely since the attacks of Oct. 7. His 2018 book on Hamas is crucial for understanding the counterintuitive, almost dialectical, relationship between Hamas and the Israeli right. 

 

Ashima Yadava

 

The image that accompanies this list was made by Ashima Yadava (Instagram: @indigonyx)

Ashima’s statement: I made this image a couple of years ago, not knowing it would acquire a completely different meaning eventually. Seeing it in the context of the Palestinian struggle, the watermelon bears the national colors of the Palestinian flag which was banned in Gaza and the West Bank in 1967. It has since become a symbol of resistance and solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Ashima Yadava is an India-born conceptual documentary photographer and printmaker. With the camera as her conduit, Ashima believes in art as a means to social activism and reform. Her work is rooted in long-form stories focusing on issues of gender equality, race, and social justice. She is the founder of Huq : I Seek No Favor. Huq brings together over 100 artists and thinkers to respond to the abortion ban.

Ashima shares this additional resource list from Authority Collective + Women Photograph. 

 

From DA’s editors:

 

Many of our contributors (including Danielle, Sophie, and Suzanne) are affiliated with the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research (BISR). You can view BISR’s excellent teach-in on this subject here: Catastrophe in Context: a Teach-In on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and Beyond. 

For the teach-in, BISR compiled an extensive library on the geopolitics of the Middle East; the history of Palestine; and theories and histories of colonization, decolonization, and violence. You can find pdfs of those texts in this Google drive.