Reading is Resistance
While Palestine is getting literally obliterated including from our maps. While Lebanon and Iran are being bombed. While Israeli bulldozers — built by Caterpillar Inc. — extend the grip on the entire region, Jordan included — the propaganda machine keeps running. It decides what we’re allowed to see, what we’re allowed to feel, and who gets to stand on the stage at all.
We started this reading circle to counter that machine, together. Every session, we read, question, and cross-check what we’re told — building an understanding of the region that isn’t handed to us pre-packaged. Come read with us.
Here, we create a space where we decide for ourselves what we see. Against the co-optation, we read Palestinian literature, poetry, and essays. We celebrate the voices of a people in all their depth: anti-colonial, queer, feminist. Our reading is resistance.
Come along and help shape this space with us. Join our Signal-Gruppe so that we can find the dates that work for all or most of us and come together as a community.
Your safety matters to us. On Signal, you don’t have to share your phone number with the other members of any group. You can hide it completely and use an anonymous username instead.
How to hide your phone number before joining:
- Open the Signal app and tap your profile picture in the top left.
- Go to Settings and tap your name at the top of your profile.
- Select “Username” and set up a personal pseudonym (e.g. “@palestine.48”).
- Go to Settings ➔ Privacy ➔ Phone Number.
- Set “Who can see my number?” to “Nobody.”
- Set “Who can find me by my number?” to “Nobody” as well.
- Join the signal safely and use your agency to better the world.
Once you’ve created a username, share that with other users and friends instead of your number — that’s what lets people add or message you without ever seeing your phone number.
Hilfreiche Links
YouTube Tutorial (Hide Phone Number & Set Up Username)
Official Signal Support Article (“Phone Number Privacy” directly from Signal)
Featured Book
Our first book is Unser erstes Buch ist „Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal” by Mohammed El-Kurd.
El-Kurd is a Palestinian journalist, poet, and author from Jerusalem. He was the first Palestinian correspondent at The Nation, serves as Editor-at-Large at Mondoweiss, and is the author of the poetry collection Rifqa.
In this anticolonial work of nonfiction, he takes aim at something most people today mostly don’t question: the expectations the West places on the colonized. The unspoken demand that Palestinians make their suffering palatable. That they perform grief in the right way and the right language, with the right tone and appearance, to the right audience — before they are even granted the right to be heard.
El-Kurd refuses this charade entirely. His argument is simple and uncompromising: Palestinians — like any other victims — should not have to be perfect victims. They should not have to soften their rage or justify their existence. They should not have to appeal to anyone’s conscience in order to claim what is already their right — dignity, freedom, and an end to occupation. A right that extends to every act of investigation: into the genocide in Gaza, into the land grabs across all of historic Palestine, and into every other crime that continues to be denied, buried, or reframed and the right of return for all the palestinian refugees.
Reviews & Context
The Left Berlin · Mizna Magazine · Goodreads
