March 10, 2025

Reading Group Week 8

Hello, thanks for being with me this week.

Reading

This week, let's read and discuss the following pieces:

1. Without Consequences, Israel Will Continue to Murder Palestinians
2. To Our Friend in Letters Dareen Tatour
3. Raising Children Under Israel's Bombs
4. They Even Keep Our Corpses: Dying in Israeli Prisons
5. Spyware Exposé Lets Israel Off the Hook

As we read more pieces that are readily available online, I'll try to share them. The original interview behind "Raising Children Under Israel's Bombs" is available here:

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If you're already subscribed, you can help by sharing it with others; every book purchased via W4G raises money for Palestinians.

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Reflections

They Even Keep Our Corpses: Dying in Israeli Prisons

I want to offer a content warning for those of you who may not be fully prepared for this chapter. This piece is more detailed than many of the previous pieces we've read, namely in discussing crimes involving the remains of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons.

Oun had passed away.

The order of the Israeli military commander was that only the father, another family member, and the headman of the area (the mukhtar) could perform the burial rituals and lay Oun to rest. And it had to happen at night.

According to the headman's testimony, there was a massive gap in the back of Oun's skull, and his body showed a Y-shaped autopsy incision. The body told us that Oun's body parts may have been harvested. But what was certain was that Oun had been beaten to death.

In a post recently, Trump said that "only sick and twisted people keep bodies". In this essay, Alareer tells us about Israel's practice of keeping the dead bodies of Palestinians and denying their surviving relatives traditional death rites.

Refaat relays the painful story of the abduction and murder of Yasser's father, Oun. Oun was taken by Israeli occupation forces before Yasser was born. After his death, it was evident from a Y-incision characteristic of postmortems that he had likely been autopsied without the consent of his family.

Medical practices including autopsies on people without their consent are well-documented throughout history: taking cell samples from Henrietta Lacks after her death without her consent or the consent of her surviving family, the deliberate withholding of treatment from Black men with syphilis to observe its progression, the sterilization of Jewish and Romani women in concentration camps, and myriad other gruesome experiments on Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust come to mind.

This isn't a historical lesson, but a present one: Kelvin Moore was murdered in Alabama state prison a few years ago, and many of his internal organs inexplicably removed; thousands of Black women in California state prisons were sterilized without their consent under a recidivism program that only appears to have ended in 2010.

I caught a glimpse of something from Mohammed El-Kurd's book Perfect Victims, and I've been thinking a lot about it.

To be Palestinian today is to feel like you are caught in a fever dream — trapped in someone else's hallucination.

I said earlier that Trump posted "only sick and twisted people keep the bodies of the dead". Not only does Israel do this; there is evidence going back decades that Israel harvested corneas, skin, and other organs from Palestinian prisoners for medical transplants. Israeli medical doctors have acknowledged the practice, which they claim ended in the 90s (see also this report). There are now new reports of "organ theft" by Israeli soldiers in Gaza. Last year in Khan Younis and al-Shifa Hospital, bodies had been recovered from mass graves with apparent missing organs. Palestinians have been asking for explanations for decades, and the response has been either abject silence or repudiation for "blood libel".

I'm being very detailed in the accounting and citations around these allegations because I wanted to illustrate something that I felt Alareer pointed acutely to later in his review of Pegasus (in the piece titled "Spyware Exposé Lets Israel Off the Hook").

Palestinians have known, for decades, about prisoners' bodies being held even after death. Palestinians have known, for decades, about autopsies and other medical procedures being conducted on Palestinian prisoners without consent. Palestinians have known, for decades, about these sordid and harrowing stories of bodies opened, organs missing, eyelids glued shut.

In the interview, Mr Hiss described how his doctors would mask the removal of corneas from bodies. "We'd glue the eyelid shut," he said.

This was stuff Refaat grew up around. Stuff he wrote about. Palestinians have known. What on earth will it take to listen?

The way we privilege Israeli knowledge as categorically more reliable, more believable, more legitimate than Palestinian knowledge like this is conspicuous in its parallels to how we privilege white knowledge over Black knowledge in the US and around the world. The way we privilege the knowledge oppressors offer us, even privileging it over our own knowledge, is so conspicuous and so dangerous.

Bluesky, Mastodon

Twitter is having an outage at this moment, so I'm omitting it this week. Please consider checking Bluesky and/or Mastodon for now.

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Share your reflections

I'm keeping the reflection to this piece this week. This was one of the more emotionally draining readings for me, and I didn't want to do a second lap of that particular exercise. I would, however, appreciate reading what you thought about from this week's other readings.

If you're not interested in commenting on social media, I'd be grateful to read your thoughts in the Signal group chat, if you're interested in joining.

Otherwise, I'll hopefully hear or read from you on Saturday at 12pm ET, during our regular video chat.

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Standard Stuff

Get the book

If you haven't bought If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose by Refaat Alareer yet, you should buy it from the Open Poems bookstore as soon as you can.

You should also make haste to buy Perfect Victims by Mohammed El-Kurd.

We'll begin reading Perfect Victims on March 31, so please try to have your copy in hand by then!

Donate

Please consider donating to The Sameer Project directly if you can. If you have extra capacity to donate, you could also donate to Sudan Funds, a project to get money to Sudanese people surviving genocide, forced displacement, and extreme violence.

Support the reading group

You can also support the reading group if you have a few dollars to spare per month. Don't worry if you can't.

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Coda

Thank you for reading to the end, and thank you for being here in this reading group. If you're reading this at the time of this writing, you may also be aware of the arrest, detention, and efforts to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student at Columbia University.

Khalil has a green card, and neither his wife nor his lawyer is able to ascertain where he is (there have been rumors that he's being held in New Jersey, but I'm reading that his wife was told he's not there), let alone what crime (if any) he's being accused of.

I encourage you to get more current information about the situation, as I'm sure it's developing, but if you work in academia in the United States (as a student, as staff, or as faculty), you may be able to help by putting pressure on faculty and administrators at your institution to condemn Columbia University's apparent participation in the detention of (and efforts to deport) Mahmoud Khalil.