This week’s newsletter is mostly a collection of excellent, thought-provoking articles about the current political moment. I will be back next week with more substantial writing, but before I go, a plea.

Mona, a young poet in Gaza I’ve been corresponding with, just had to evacuate her home in Gaza City. She should be celebrating her high school graduation now, and working on the novel she wants to publish someday. Instead, she and her family were forced to pile into a cramped, crowded van with what few belongings they could take with them, on a 14-hour drive to the south. Her Instagram stories chronicle the harrowing journey and constant fear.

Like so many other Palestinians who are now forced to evacuate Gaza City as the IOF closes in with tanks, snipers and quadcopters, Mona and her family have had to hastily gather their belongings and flee south to refugee camps. Evacuation is expensive and destabilizing. They now need funds for food, medication, and shelter.

You can contribute to Mona’s survival campaign here.

It’s my firm belief that because we are funding the destruction of Palestinian life with both our tax dollars and our consumer dollars, it’s our responsibility to move resources as often as possible from the imperial core to Gaza, to keep Palestinians alive. If you have the means to help Mona and her family today, you might be the difference between their suffering and their survival.

“Between Two Bombardments We Write a Song”
a poem by Mona

We plant a melody in the emptiness of the broken city
We gather letters from the corners of tears
and engrave on the walls the verse of the captive poem
Between two bombardments, there’s no time for prolonged sadness
We sew beauty from the voices of survivors
We draw a flower over the rubble of the door
and restore to the child a laugh from the melody of the departed
We write the window without glass, and the sun timidly peers through a hole in the wall
We write and the birds flee and the sky explodes
but the heart does not collapse
I still hold the pen, like someone clutching a lifeline in the depths fire
I write about an unfinished song, about a homeland that rises from its ashes every day
Sometimes I hide the poem in my pocket with a split loaf of bread and a picture of the faces of those who have passed away
Sometimes I read it to the wind, hoping it will reach the heart of a mother awaiting her loved ones
I know that poetry doesn’t stop a plane nor brings back a martyr from absence
but it keeps a person alive between one bombardment and another
Igniting in the heart the honor of remaining, despite the suffering
Between two bombardments, we write a song, for war kills, yes, but poetry is always born when words die.

Mona’s collection of poetry is available at monagaza.cargo.site.

If you make a $20 donation to her campaign and send me the screenshot, I will give you the password to the site so you can read more of her work.

Must-reads

Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds its Lost Cause - Ta-Nehisi Coates

“What are we to make of a man who called for the execution of the American president, and then was executed himself? What are we to make of an NFL that, on one hand, encourages us to “End Racism,” and, on the other, urges us to commemorate an unreconstructed white supremacist? And what of the writers, the thinkers, and the pundits who cannot separate the great crime of Kirk’s death from the malignancy of his public life? Can they truly be so ignorant to the words of a man they have so rushed to memorialize? I don’t know. But the most telling detail in [Ezra] Klein’s column was that, for all his praise, there was not a single word in the piece from Kirk himself.”

Charlie Kirk’s legacy deserves no mourning - Elizabeth Spiers

“There is no requirement to take part in this whitewashing campaign, and refusing to join in doesn’t make anyone a bad person. It’s a choice to write an obituary that begins “Joseph Goebbels was a gifted marketer and loving father to six children.”"

House Arab - Ismail Ibrahim

“I watched in real time as the consensus congealed; by Sunday morning, everyone seemed to agree that the events of the previous day could only be interpreted as senseless barbarism or perhaps an Iranian plot, but absolutely not as a legible expression of rage by a people the world had left to die. I felt like I was losing my mind.”

Never Again For All, Or For No One - Sean Pergola

“As fewer and fewer Americans support Israel’s onslaught, and as more and more scholars and human rights groups deem Israel to be committing genocide, it becomes increasingly impossible to exclude Gaza from universalist moral claims—which is precisely why so many Instagram users, especially those most outraged by the post, unquestioningly assumed the museum’s vague statement to be about Gaza. This leaves only one option for institutions to quell iterability and prevent accusations of hypocrisy: silence. Instead of risking an unintended statement about Palestine, they may decide not to speak. In their retraction, the Holocaust Museum LA chose this silence. Rather than risk the application of “never again” to Gaza, they renounced their utterance of “never again.”

What it takes to be a Palestinian journalist - Qassam Muaddi

“Although Palestine is one of the most heavily covered places on earth, much of its decades-long reality is just starting to become known to millions. The unprecedented advance of means of communication, the internet, social media, and independent media outlets are all part of this story, but at the heart of it are Palestinian journalists — not because of who they are, but because they cover Palestine from within.”

On the firing of Alan Sepinwall - Maureen Ryan

“But wearing an expensive tie or trendy sneakers while peddling white supremacy, transphobia, eugenics or any number of gross, bigoted beliefs? That, that can make you money. The rich have long been willing to throw a lot of resources at those projects. And part of the reason those lanes thrive is because a lot of the most influential people in mainstream media have decided that spreading odious beliefs on podcasts, in YouTube channels, on social media, via an endless array of "news" shows, websites and think tanks is all just part of healthy and productive public conversations.”

Disgruntled NYT journalist to ‘anti-woke’ power grab: how far can Bari Weiss go? - David Klion

“The pattern is clear: if you work at a liberal institution and you want the Trump-controlled federal government to step in and discipline it, Bari Weiss is there to help.”

A Document of Complicity - Sarah Khatry and April Zhu

“What is the weight of calling for mutual understanding while the subjugation of Palestinians is ongoing? This emphasis on mutual understanding slips into an argument for mutual accountability: a sleight of hand that primarily exists to disguise the colonial paradigm. Must the oppressed forgive the oppressor before the oppression can stop?”