Sometimes you feel out of place, but being in the middle is not a loss. It’s the point from where you can see two worlds, while others see only one. I feel I’m a crescent that doesn’t need to become sun to shine. 

These were the words of Tamara Al Zool, the 23 years old who goes by her art name TÄRA. She has reached millions of Italians through the mainstream TV-program Le Iene in May with a monologue on identity that soon became viral on social media. 

A week later, her debut EP “Zefiro” went out on a date that could not be more important for her: May 15, the day of the Nakba, a day and a history she has always known from her parents and grandparents who lived it. Today, touring Italy and Europe with concerts and events, she is taking on the Italian music scene with a style that, according to Rolling Stone MENA, “Italy has no category for”. 

To learn more about her artistic journey, UntoldMag sat with TÄRA for an exclusive interview. 

 

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Born in Italy to Palestinian parents, TÄRA is making waves with her own genre. She calls it Arab&B, a new type of R&B where she mixes Arabic, English, Italian (and at times also French) in such a natural way that one would not imagine that at one point in her life, she had challenges in feeling her identity.  It would not seem so either when, two years ago, at her very first appearance on TV for the music program X Factor Italia, she made it very clear why she was there: “I came to X-factor to represent, to be a voice”, she said, wearing a keffiyeh as she performed Ariana Grande’s song 7 Rings with some parts reinterpreted in Arabic. 

Palestine – and all that comes with it, from the ongoing genocide to resistance and memory –, the Arabic speaking world, and the Mediterranean as a whole are constant themes in her songs, through which the listener can soon appreciate that TÄRA makes music with universal messages. Like in “Diaspora”, which draws a line between the Palestinians expelled from their land and the Southern Italians who leave their homes behind out of necessity. 

In the “Petra” music video, shot in Tunis, within 3 minutes the music takes the listener through a romantic journey from Maghreb to Mashreq. Not to mention her rendition of Ya Helwa Ciao, her Arabic rendition of Bella Ciao, the song adopted by the Italian Resistance calling for freedom and an end to fascism, so popular among Palestinians (and generally among minorities fighting for their rights). 

Stefano Nanni: Identity is a recurrent topic in your songs. But who is TÄRA before and after becoming the artist, and has that helped in affirming your own identity?

TÄRA: The beauty of all that I’m living is that before, during and after, it’s always me. I can definitely say that my public persona is not a ‘character’ but genuinely who I am, expressing my values without fear. 

It has not always been easy to belong to different worlds at the same time, but I learned with time that being in the middle is an additional perspective rather than a deficiency. And I think I grew in awareness and courage to translate my innate self into art. Being able to represent all these middle lands is certainly not an easy task, but it’s like my whole world is made of many different points of view. 

For example, in the song “Petra” we chose Tunisia as a destination because it perfectly encompasses my multifaceted world, highlighting the beautiful similarities among seemingly different cultures and transcending societal divisions.

SN: Still on identity, in the very powerful music video “Beauty standards”, you seem to affirm something also about the type of aesthetic you want to embrace. 

T: With this EP I am going through a whole journey, including certain beauty standards because it is a theme that I have personally experienced, having felt ‘not beautiful enough’ according to certain norms imposed by society. 

I am sure many other girls have experienced and continue to experience this type of ‘discomfort’ – that’s what I call it. With that video I wanted to represent, through a short monologue, how the beauty you have today, even if it may not conform to mainstream models represented by the media, actually carries history and tradition. 

It is important to acknowledge and remember that the people before you have fought to make you be here, so you have to bring these unique features, with pride, not shame.

SN: Do you feel somehow that your music is able to represent people who often had no one to identify with? And can it contribute to more unity?

T: Let’s say that my goal is precisely to represent those often unrepresented: The too many Italians with foreign roots caught in the middle like me. If in my own small way, my music succeeded in attracting even two or three persons who feel I am doing something positive for them, then I am very happy and I hope it will go even better. 

I don’t want to sound too utopian, but it would be nice to get to a point where we don’t even have to make all these divisions among all of us anymore, and then be able to live in unity simply as human beings. I have a strong desire for my music to foster unity among all people, dreaming a world without such divisions, where cultural beauty is celebrated by all humans. I hope that my art will play a role in all this.

SN: How are you handling success? Did your direct relations with fans change by becoming so popular? 

T: When it comes to my relationship with fans I think it is even improving, as I continue to live the direct connection with them through social media, receiving immense support and love. I think it is a very beautiful way of living this experience. 

At the same time, it is obvious that social media can be a double-edged sword, as the toxicity of certain users brings also a lot of negativity. Sometimes it’s hard to confront that, especially hate speech and comments about Palestine, but I am learning to use indifference as a more effective strategy, because in the end, those who want to hate stick to anything in front of them.

Generally, about success, I think I’m living a fairly quiet relationship with it, actually. I see it as a means, I have the privilege to access a wide audience, to share the messages I want to transmit, especially about Palestine and the genocide we’re still suffering. So why not do it? Indeed, in certain places like on mainstream TV there seem to be certain rules about not talking about certain topics, but I am approaching them, as much as possible, with my naturalness and my identity, without hiding anything. 

SN: On the power to use popularity to take a stance, recently in Italy there were some controversies about the words of Francesco De Gregori, a very popular singer, who said that he “feels embarrassed when an artist takes a political position”. What do you think of that?

T: I have honestly not read what he said, and I don’t want to decontextualize his words, but my opinion is a totally different one: I want my art to give a voice to the voiceless and to minorities. 

As an artist, I believe I have the power and responsibility to educate younger generations and empower those who might otherwise feel silenced. I don’t want to live in a world where somebody grows up fearing that exposing themself is something that leads them to something negative. I don’t want that, I want something different.

The post Giving Italy a Sound It Has No Category For: An Interview with Palestinian-Italian Singer TÄRA appeared first on Untold.

The air grew particularly suffocating between September and October 2025, when local authorities reported 122 cases of intoxication and asphyxiation caused by toxic fumes. Gas leaks from GCT’s facilities are widely blamed. 

On 15 October, the civil movement Stop Pollution mobilized 40,000 residents for a mass demonstration, followed by a general strike called by the national trade union UGTT, which drew more than 130,000 participants. The city of Gabès has around 150,000 citizens. 

The last protest took place on 17 December 2025, the anniversary of the 2011 Tunisian Revolution.

The Little Tunisian Chernobyl

Phosphate, one of Tunisia’s key natural resources, is largely destined for export. In 2023, Tunisia ranked as the world’s tenth-largest exporter of phosphate fertilizers, earning 61.7 million US dollars. The main destinations were Bangladesh, Brazil, France, Italy and the United Kingdom.

Phosphate fertilizers are widely used in intensive agriculture to boost crop yields. The practice can lead to the accumulation of toxic heavy metals such as cadmium in both soil and crops. And if these are the risks downstream, the dangers upstream are far greater. The combination of extractivism and export-oriented production has compromised Gabès as a whole, to the point that it is now dubbed the “Little Tunisian Chernobyl.” 

Today, the gulf the city overlooks is polluted by phosphogypsum, an industrial by-product of phosphoric acid production. It is generated by treating phosphate rock—extracted from the Gafsa mines, 150 kilometers from Gabès—with sulfuric acid. Studies have shown that phosphogypsum contains high levels of uranium and radium, both radioactive elements.

Dying Meadows of the Sea

According to a 2021 study by Oréade-Brèche on biodiversity loss in Tunisia, every ton of phosphoric acid produced generates between four and five tons of phosphogypsum. Over the past 25 years, an estimated 70 million tons of phosphogypsum have been discharged into the Gulf of Gabès, contaminating sediments across roughly 60 square kilometers. 

Marine flora and fauna have borne the brunt of this pollution. Combined with rising sea temperatures driven by climate change, the contamination is causing the progressive disappearance of Posidonia oceanica, a Mediterranean seagrass that serves as a vital refuge for fish species, crustaceans, and mollusks. 

Posidonia also plays a crucial ecological role: it helps prevent coastal erosion and oxygenates seawater by absorbing CO₂. These seagrass meadows account for 10% of the ocean’s carbon storage capacity—twice as much per square kilometer as terrestrial forests. 

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Gulf of Gabès hosted the largest Posidonia meadows in the Mediterranean; today, phosphogypsum discharges are estimated to have destroyed around 90% of them. In their place, the invasive alien algae Caulerpa has taken hold.

The disappearance of Posidonia has dealt a severe economic blow to small-scale fisheries, causing losses that exceed the added value of Gabès’ phosphate-processing industry.

Once known for its rich fisheries, the sea off Gabès is now grappling with a drastic decline in fish stocks. Pollution has coincided with industrial trawling by large fishing vessels, progressively stripping artisanal fishers of their livelihoods. 

Suffocating Protests

Moreover, as a 2018 European Commission study on the economic impact of industrial pollution in the region illustrates, there is a correlation between rising cases of chronic bronchitis and asthma in the neighborhoods of Ghannouch, Chott Essalem, and Gabès city, and the pollution generated by GCT’s activities.

Air pollution from sulfur dioxide, ammonia, fine particulate matter, and fluorides lies at the root of the region’s cases of intoxication and asphyxiation. According to the European Commission, concentrations of these substances near the GCT plant far exceed both Tunisian and international standards. 

Confronted with this reality, the people of Gabès began to raise their voices. Already in 2012, a group of residents founded Stop Pollution, a social movement demanding the dismantling of GCT’s polluting facilities. Since then, the group has organized protests, raised awareness, and informed the public on issues related to energy transition.

In 2017, the movement achieved its first major breakthrough: then–prime minister Youssef Chahed approved a plan to dismantle the six phosphate-processing units in Gabès and rehabilitate the sites in line with international standards. Yet the decision was never implemented. Instead, the government reversed course entirely.

Last March, the restricted Ministerial Council decided to raise phosphate production from under 3 million tons a year to 14 million by 2030, including expanded transport and processing capacity. The move comes amid a surge in global fertilizer prices. The plan also sets the stage for a pilot unit to produce green ammonia in Ghannouch. 

In 2024, Tunisia signed six memoranda of understanding (MoUs) with several European multinationals for the production of green hydrogen. The national green hydrogen strategy sets an annual production target of 8.3 million tons by 2050, with 6.3 million tons intended for export to Europe. This strategy has been supported since 2022 by the German Agency for International Cooperation (GiZ) through the project “Green Hydrogen for Sustainable Growth and a Low-Carbon Economy in Tunisia (H2Vert.TUN).” 

The exported hydrogen would be transported via the SoutH2 Corridor, which will connect Tunisia and Algeria to Italy, Austria, and Germany.

Environmental obstacles were swiftly sidestepped: phosphogypsum was removed from the list of substances classified as hazardous to human health.

Meanwhile, Gabès continues to suffer. On 17 October last year, Gabès’ citizens filed a petition before the Gabès First Instance Tribunal requesting the immediate closure of GCT’s polluting units. The preliminary hearing was scheduled for 23 October; however, the examination of the case has been postponed several times. 

The next hearing is expected to take place on 12 February. Assisted by the regional section of the Bar Association and the Regional Council of the Medical Association — which will present health data collected in Gabès — Stop Pollution and the people of Gabès have launched an unprecedented legal action. As Amir Ammar, a PhD student in Law, states in Village de la Justice, this is the first class action that “directly targets a major industrial actor (and a public one at that) in order to stop environmental harm in Tunisia.”

To understand what the people of Gabès endure each day—and how upcoming industrial projects could worsen the environmental crisis—we spoke with Aziz Chebbi, researcher in international law and political science, and activist with Stop Pollution.

Nadia Addezio: How have residents’ health and the state of the environment in Gabès changed over the years? 

Aziz Chebbi: Since 1972, since the Groupe Chimique Tunisien began operating in the Gabès region, the area has suffered environmental damage across three fronts: air, land and sea. First, marine pollution: phosphogypsum waste is discharged daily into the waters of Chott Essalem in Gabès. These discharges have had a direct impact on the livelihoods of local fishers, many of whom have lost their jobs and been forced to abandon a profession passed down through generations.

Then there is soil pollution: heavy metals in the land around Gabès have severely compromised local agriculture. The region’s emblematic oases have been deteriorating steadily, and farming activities have been deeply affected for more than 50 years. Finally, air pollution has taken a dramatic toll on residents’ health. The area records very high cancer rates, as well as frequent fainting episodes among students, especially in September and October.

Pollution across these three fronts devastates daily life in Gabès, undermining people’s health, their economy, and their dignity. Every day, residents simply aspire to breathe clean air and live in an environment that respects human dignity, as guaranteed by the principles of the Tunisian Constitution.

Between 2012 and 2017, numerous grassroots mobilizations helped secure a government decree—issued on 29 June 2017—ordering the dismantling of the polluting plants in the Gabès region. However, the decree was never published in the Official Gazette by the then-President of the Republic Béji Caïd Essebsi. As a result, the authorities failed to acknowledge the scale of the harm caused by the GCT and neither acted on nor upheld that decision.

Unfortunately, from 2017 to today, no government has shown real political will to enact or advance this measure. No significant progress has been made, leaving residents in a constant state of waiting for a sincere political commitment to environmental justice in Gabès.

NA: How did you respond to the government’s decision to revive phosphate production and remove phosphogypsum from the list of hazardous substances? Do you have any direct dialogue with the government or with the GCT?

AC: For years, the government has failed to consult civil society organizations or citizens when drafting its decisions and administrative decrees. In March 2025, it adopted a measure stating that phosphogypsum would no longer be classified as a hazardous substance, paving the way for its “valorization” and for the creation of a pilot plant to produce green ammonia. Faced with this decision—which we consider extremely worrying—we organized several demonstrations.

Because the announcement came during Ramadan, we held a protest in Tunis in April 2025, followed by a large march in the Gabès region in May. At the same time, we published statements and held several press conferences to spark public debate about these government decisions. We also carried out awareness campaigns among Gabès residents to explain the environmental and health risks associated with these policies. 

These efforts culminated in September 2025, a period marked by numerous fainting incidents among students and by heightened toxic emissions from the GCT’s facilities. More and more citizens are adopting our narrative and mobilizing with growing determination toward our shared goal: the complete dismantling of these polluting plants.

NA: The paradox is that the GCT provides jobs. What do GCT workers think? 

AC: In reality, GCT workers are themselves residents of the Gabès region, with children who attend local schools. During recent demonstrations, we noticed a significant development: a growing number of workers—through their unions or individually—support our actions and take part in mobilizations on the ground. Recently, there have even been fainting incidents among workers inside the GCT itself.

NA: As you mentioned, there is now talk of a possible green transition for the industrial hub. Among the proposed projects is the production of green ammonia, part of Tunisia’s national energy strategy and its plans for green hydrogen. How is this project perceived in Gabès? 

AC: There are two essential points on this issue. The first concerns our refusal, as a social movement, of any new installation within the Groupe Chimique Tunisien complex. Establishing a new entity on that site would mean completely disregarding the citizens’ core demand: the environmental rehabilitation of the Gabès region.

The second point concerns the national green hydrogen strategy, which includes the production of green ammonia. We view this strategy as a neo-colonial dynamic, imposed by GIZ, and designed exclusively to meet German energy needs. 

Berlin is seeking to externalize its energy production to countries in the Global South—Namibia, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt—turning them into suppliers of green energy. Producing green ammonia requires green hydrogen, which demands vast amounts of water and renewable energy. It is an extremely energy-intensive process. Tunisia does possess abundant natural resources such as sun and wind, but these resources should meet our own energy needs, not feed German power grids.

Moreover, Tunisia currently has no real domestic demand for green hydrogen within its industrial sector. If, in the future, industries arise that require it, the decision should be made collectively, through a participatory process involving citizens, experts, and civil society, based on a transparent assessment of benefits and risks. It should not be dictated by a strategy conceived in ministerial offices in partnership with a German cooperation agency that has no stake in Tunisia’s needs or priorities.

This project is therefore not an opportunity but a real threat: it risks worsening the environmental crisis in Gabès, particularly through the seawater desalination projects required for green hydrogen production. The discharge of brine into the sea will have severe consequences for marine biodiversity and for numerous local species already weakened by decades of industrial pollution.

NA: What will be the collective’s next steps?

AC: So far, the public authorities have shown no reaction. In the face of this governmental silence, we will continue our mobilizations and maintain our demand for the dismantling of the polluting facilities in the Gabès region. Residents fully support our actions and share our demands. Every time we call for mobilization, the population responds. We will go all the way to obtain a clear political decision and a concrete response from the authorities, one that meets the legitimate expectations of the region’s inhabitants.

Gabès could be a paradise on earth: the oasis system that surrounds the sea, the mountains and the desert is an exceptional national heritage that must be preserved and valued. Alternatives do exist. Agricultural development, ecological and community-based tourism, and activities linked to the sea can offer new, sustainable job opportunities.

The GCT, by contrast, brings nothing but harm and threats to the environment and health of the Gabès region. The current jobs tied to this industry can be replaced by local, sustainable and non-colonial economic alternatives.

The post Gabès Is Suffocating: Breathing Under Phosphate, Protest, and Green Colonialism appeared first on Untold.

On the technological side, search engines are being replaced by Artificial Intelligence, the World Wide Web by social media apps, while cryptocurrencies keep rising.

The title of the book was inspired by Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe’s work investigating the extractivist, destructive and world-threatening character of contemporary global capitalism. In this context, Lovink maintains that digital platforms and their owners (X, Meta, Google, Airbnb, Uber, just to mention a few) have reached a (predictable) point at which their logic of treating the world as “an immense reservoir” is ultimately translated directly into political violence. 

We can see this in different forms: when data collection is used to control borders or target civilians, the trivialisation of violence to normalise it and disturb dissent, and deletion to destroy voices and entire communities.

Enrico De Angelis: The book starts with a consideration: we have already lost the battle to change the techno-social aspects that you described in such detail in your previous work. You say there are no imaginative follow-ups on the horizon, no paradigm shift in sight: “The Universe ignores us”. And yet, while Franco Berardi (who is also included in this dossier) calls for a radical withdrawal to enable the emergence of a new horizon, you propose another approach. Also radical, but you say it is the moment to fight back. What should we do? Wait for the moment to leave the platforms ‘en masse’? Or, as you propose at the end of the book, are there other, smaller steps that can be implemented immediately, even by non-tech-savvy people?

Geert Lovink:  The exodus of social media platforms will have to happen together, as Team Human, for a reason, in an urgent setting. Sadly, this will only be done during a period of shock. Addiction and attachment are real. So far there are no effective strategies for the literally billions of users to voluntarily abandon Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or Google. Ever since 2011, when we started our Unlike Us campaign, where we emphasised the unity of social media critique and alternatives, we have known that the individual guilt trip is going nowhere. Nudging is nonsense. We came to the conclusion that platform/app dependency can be overcome with the ‘tools’ approach. Tools that we use and then put aside. There will be an end to the techno-misery: “We want to see the sunshine after the rain.”

Attempts to reduce excessive smartphone time through awareness campaigns, offline weekends, and blocker apps that help you focus did not make a noticeable difference. The consumer behaviour approach is simply the wrong one. The addiction aspect cannot be ignored, but the medical ‘detox’ angle simply doesn’t work in this context. The desire for social connection in a time of loneliness, the growing travel time within urban sprawls, and the coordination issues of meeting others should not be ignored. Do we need Meta and Google for that? We don’t. Getting your phone out in the elevator is a habit. Uncooling the phone will be a task of the generation after Gen Z.

All the above has been known for years—that’s the sad part of this topic. Regression and stagnation are real. As we are still stuck on the platform, we need to be brave to question the exit strategies on offer so far. 

I am confident that Gen Z will be able to revolt—not just to demand a return to access to social media, as was the case in Tibet and other places where authoritarian regimes, in a desperate attempt to remain in power, limited access to certain apps or even cut off the internet as a whole. But their demand was to get the apps back. They could not live without them. We need to leave our sorrow and open radical vibe labs and experiment. Just try stuff. Besides Signal, DuckDuckGo, cryptpad.fr, and more, get inspired by the Facebook Museum of the Utrecht media arts organisation SETUP, a temporary booth installed in the hall of Utrecht Central Station. Or think of Francesca Bria’s Eurostack initiative that showcases the complexity of interrelated levels of tech, from apps to datacentres, when we demand ‘tech sovereignty’. Let’s add more to this list.

EDA: You write that platform brutality is worse than any other media representation of violence because it is remote, invisible, and indirect.

GL: So far, average users do not notice data extraction. We need to learn from the violence debate over the past decades and apply it to the internet field. The start here is the realisation that the ‘free’ and innocent phase, in which we signed a social contract with Silicon Valley, exchanging free access to apps and online services in exchange for our data, is over. A violent turn has happened over the past five years. 

The question is to what extent we will ‘feel’ the abstract and structural violence that is unleashed. This goes beyond the complaints over annoying ads. Many users, primarily young people, are suffering from mental health issues related to 24/7 use of social media. At what point will this damage have a real and physical impact? 

We witness loneliness, depression, apathy and indifference and the rise of right-wing politics, especially among young people, but often this is still perceived as happening elsewhere, to others. Economic uncertainty, mental breakdown and cognitive poverty are such that it is perceived as cool to be conservative (as a virtual mask or psychic armour). 

Platform brutality is the case when all this is no longer happening to others, and real consequences are no longer information that you swipe away.

What happens when structural violence excludes you, but you cannot find out, or do not even notice? You’re out. No carrier. What’s wrong with this app store? Information is made invisible, just for you. You have no access, but have no idea why, or for how long. You do not get a home loan, visa, job, fellowship or discount. It can be discrimination or just an inconvenience. Or getting worse tomorrow, with an impact only much later. 

Randomness is often part of the tech exclusion logic. Search and you will not find; prompt and you will be offered the wrong information—all presented with the best of customer service intentions and impeccable UX design. I have pointed at the sliding scale of violence, from the creation of a profile, the categorisation of one’s identity, nationality, race, face, fingerprints and iris, genes, to the creation of confined groups, the selection and isolation of them, ultimately to the point of expulsion, removal, extradition or even extermination. 

The inflation of the term ‘genocide’ doesn’t help here, as it is solely focused on that very last part, not on the sliding scale we’re all already part of. Social media databases are the most incredible self-created data repositories of one’s preferences, opinions, and social network ever created—and are immediately at the disposal of authoritarian forces, assisted by the Californian Big Brother. 

Take this example that passed by recently: As 404 Media reports, Google has chosen a side in Trump’s mass deportation effort. “Google is hosting an app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, and tell local cops whether to contact ICE about the person, while simultaneously removing apps designed to warn local communities about the presence of ICE officials.”

EDA: From the perspective of social and political movements from the global south, the issue with the platforms can be even more problematic. Let’s take the example of Gaza. On the one hand, as you also remind us, platforms have become directly entangled with the exercise of violence, including their role in deleting content and spreading fake news and bias. At the same time, since mainstream media coverage was also extremely biased, dissent was mainly circulated on those platforms (“TikTok is the problem”). Or, to quote you: “Can event-driven social movements afford to leave behind Big Tech, knowing they own the heads and minds of millennials and Gen Z?” How to respond to this urgency, to the paradox we are all facing? 

GL: Let’s not be moralistic and judge others from a distance. I have and will advocate for decentralised alternatives, but shy away from any suggestion on how people in hardship should communicate. You mention ‘content moderation,’ the infamous US ‘freedom of speech,’ and the censorship by Meta and Google, but the underlying problem there is the tech’s linking of content to IDs. There cannot be dissident content without an encrypted, anonymous delivery mechanism. We need to communicate more and leave less online. A tech renaissance of store-forward? The sky is the limit.

Throughout history, people have given their lives to deliver messages. Please read Georges Didi-Huberman’s Images despite All about four photographs from Auschwitz. As a teenager, my mother smuggled resistance newspapers on her bike in Nazi-occupied Breda. That defined my upbringing. The lesson taught was to fight registration, ID cards and centralised databases (see the chapter on this in Sad by Design). 

The question I have to ask myself is how my generation of what some call ‘internet pioneers’ was allowed to move from pseudonyms and anonymous users to Web 2.0 profiles and rigid ‘real names’ policies (with Google as ‘identity provider’). This is a collective sin, or defeat, if you like. It compromised the word ‘privacy’ for good, which is a travesty on the internet. All this is bad, but it affects people in crisis and war zones the most. What’s evident is the power of the message, regardless of all the petabytes that are collected to be used against us. There’s never an indifference against the signs of life that matter.

EDA: You dedicate the longest chapter to dreams. You say we cannot dream anymore because of social media overstimulation, which crowds our brains and deprives us of the time to ‘digest’ dreams. But dreaming, as you remind us, is crucial when it comes to creating new imaginaries and, therefore, to planning for political change. You launched the “dreamful computing” project, which explicitly tackles this issue. Can you explain what you mean by this expression and how it can be translated into specific practices?

GL: ‘Access to dreams’ is going to be vital for any substantive change. This will be a new era for the interpretation of dreams, that is, no doubt, post-Freudian. However, there is a dark, technological side to this renaissance: the capture and manipulation possibilities that future digital neuroscience will provide. 

To me, the corporate move to enter dreams is summarised in this awful, boring image: their ability to advertise in our dreams. The more material my Sydney friend Ned Rossiter and I collect, the clearer it becomes to us that the dream space will be one of the next Big Tech battlefields. It will be interesting to push the current psychedelic research further – and democratise that field, as it has to be taken back from the pharmaceutical establishment, time and again. 

I follow Erik Davis here, in this context. It is also important to stress the potential of (collective) dreaming that goes beyond the necessary reproduction of the imaginary labour force, and all we have to process during our busy, noisy days. How do you see we can Reclaim the Dream? This is a sincere, open question, as we’re into this not that long. The psychedelic winter was a long one, with generations destroyed by destructive neo-liberal investments into the (online) Self. As Yasha Levine puts it on his Substack in media terms: “The parasocial technology took over from where television left off and pushed society even more radically into an atomised configuration”.

We need to move away from the narcissistic preoccupation, embodied by King Trump. The psycho-political situation even worsens as we enter the phase of techno-fascism, aka techno-feudalism, if you look at it from a political economy perspective. The mental health situation deteriorates so fast that many start to act together. Common tools with real-life gatherings are the answer to this planned isolation. Our dream computing project is part of that movement. “I am dreamin’ man, yes, that’s my problem. I’ll always be a dreaming man, and I don’t have to understand, I know it’s alright.” Neil Young sings while I write this. The helpless state of this dreamin’ man will soon be a thing of the past—that’s for sure.

EDA: At the Institute for Network Cultures you dedicate a lot of attention to tactical media, which for many can appear as almost an obsolete term. How can tactical media be relevant today, in the face of all the techno-social aspects and the invasiveness of the platforms that you describe?

GL: I am not emotionally attached to any term. I believe in the speculative potential of the concepts we design to make a difference, to become machines, to cause long-lasting techno-social effects. When we use the term tactical media today, we do so to strengthen collaborations among hackers, designers, artists, and researchers in social movements. The tactical media approach reminds us to be open to migrating ‘Killroy was here’ aesthetics that wander from one medium to the next, from one locality to the next. This is so powerful today because, most of all, we are stuck on platforms that narrow our visual language, close down dialogue and discussion, and are utterly impossible as mobilisation tools. 

I admit that the guerrilla mode of tactical media makes it hard for resistance to scale up. The tactical media approach believes in the power of sparks, memes, stickers on traffic light poles: subversive signs that give strength to make it through the day. They are known today as copium, which is the opening essay of Platform Brutality. The more depressed a situation, the more powerful humour and irony can become. The more we experiment with the reversal of signs and concepts, the better. Come together and set up spaces. The emphasis should be less on aesthetics and more on tactical forms of organisation outside of platforms. This could be irritating about fluid, non-committing tactics in a time when sustainable self-organisation is needed most.

The post Capitalism, War, and the Violence of Digital Platforms: A Conversation with Geert Lovink appeared first on Untold.

In this conversation, Ozoma discusses her work, the current political situation in the US, how to bring change in the tech industry, and her sources of inspiration. 

Enrico De Angelis: You mentioned in your conversation with Tammarian Rogers that today it would be even more difficult to speak out loud for people who want to denounce cases of discrimination, harassment, or problematic behaviours in the tech industry in the US. Can you elaborate on that, and tell us about the general atmosphere today in your country? 

Ifeoma Ozoma: The reason why I said that is because of what we’ve seen already in the US with our federal government, the State Department, and the White House, taking very targeted retaliatory measures against even green card holders, threatening citizens with the revocation of their passports. So none of the retaliation from the government is hypothetical anymore. We’re seeing it happen all the time. And we’re only hearing about the cases with people who have access to media. 

There are so many more cases that I’m sure we haven’t heard about and we may never hear about because they’re people who are less resourced, which is exactly what authoritarian regimes do: They go after the people who have the least ability to fight back or have their stories told. 

And then, on the tech company side, both anecdotally and in the data, we’re seeing tens of thousands and cumulatively hundreds of thousands of people laid off. I have no doubt that many of those folks who are being laid off are people who have spoken up at some point, and they’re just added to the numbers of folks who are let go as part of a reduction in force. 

And so, especially in a society with zero social safety net, when your job is tied to your health insurance, tied to your ability to live, your ability to pay your rent or your mortgage and to provide for your family, what we’re seeing are not theoretical risks for people speaking up. They’re real immediate and long term risks for people. And so I think just overall, it’s so much harder for people to speak up. 

EDA: The situation is getting worse despite some substantial legal improvements you also advocated for (in 2022, in California the “Silenced no More Act”, a law that places restrictions to confidentiality provisions in work agreements, was approved). How do you explain these developments? Is it the general political atmosphere, or rather other factors more related to the tech industry? 

IO: It’s all of it. The law that I worked on was at the state level. We still don’t have federal protections that actually cover people to the same extent that the law in California and in Washington and a number of other states do. So, in the event that you’re working for a company, and you happen to be in one of those states, you have some legal protections. But of course, they hire people all over the country and all over the world. So unless you are in a jurisdiction where you are covered, you are totally left on your own. 

Moreover, the few measures that we used to have in the United States, like the “Equal Employment Opportunity Act” (EEOC), the Commission and other federal agencies that are supposed to deal with labor issues are now much weaker, as many of their lawyers have been fired by this administration. 

The people in charge are not folks who are aligned with workers anymore. And so you have a much worse case even if your situation is heard or taken up. If you file at the federal level now, you’re just as likely to have them make a ruling in favor of your employer. 

And I think from our perspective as advocates, we have to be understanding of that and careful not to ask people to martyr themselves. 

EDA: During the last two years, the role of tech companies in wars, as we have seen particularly in Gaza, has come to the surface as never before. Is there a direct connection between your work in terms of protection of workers’ rights in tech companies and this aspect in particular? In other words, does protecting the rights of tech workers in the US have an impact on tech companies’ complicity with human rights violations abroad? 

IO: It’s absolutely connected because those who are working in the kinds of positions that I used to work in, in these tech companies, are the most privileged folks in the tech worker ecosystem. And so if companies are successful in silencing their ‘white collar’ workers in the United States who have the most means, the most money, and the most access to lawyers,  then what of the folks who are doing labeling in East Africa and in Southern Europe and in Southeast Asia? 

And what of the folks even further down the chain who are in mines and basically in slave labor conditions in Congo and in other areas? So it’s all very, very connected to me. If you’re able to silence people in your offices on issues that are already settled in law, then you’re making sure that no one is able to speak up about what they’re seeing when they’re being told to program things for drones that will end up killing people in Ukraine, in Gaza, in Sudan, and wherever else, because all of it is connected. 

EDA: You mentioned the importance of adopting pragmatic approaches in order to bring change and avoid what you call the typical analysis/paralysis many activists suffer from. In the context of the US, you say you were inspired by the strategies of the environmental movement, like exerting pressures on shareholders in order to force companies to change their behaviours. You stressed also that we should accept that we live in a capitalist society and recognise its power balances, and act accordingly. Do you think this type of approach is effective also when it comes  to addressing the relationships between tech giants and weapons industries? I ask this especially since you said that in your case the leverage was money (as shareholders have to pay  lawsuits for example) and not racism or gender discrimination. In other words: what if that economic leverage doesn’t exist? Or, as you mentioned, when the wider political atmosphere is particularly hostile, as it is today? 

IO: I think it depends on where you are, but certainly in the United States, in Germany, in the UK, you’re not going to be very successful when the government is also supportive of arming folks who are carrying out genocide. And so if you don’t even have leverage with your own government, then you’re not going to have the kind of leverage you need with shareholders. 

You certainly aren’t going to have leverage inside the companies with the individuals who are making money off by arming attackers in a genocide and arming those like the Israeli government, like the Russian government, like the UAE that is operating in Sudan. 

Yeah, it’s all really terrible and so I think part of why there has to be global engagement and global connections between activists is that even though we’re not able to do much in the US, our folks who are in Ireland and able to put pressure on a government that actually agrees that genocide is wrong is then able to leverage pressure. Because many of these companies have international headquarters in Dublin. All of it is connected and so we have to be working together to figure out where there’s the ability and where’s the political space to put pressure on the companies, even if it’s not directly from the US, directly from the UK, directly from Germany. 

EDA: You said that one of the lessons we should learn in Europe while observing the US is that things can indeed get worse from one day to another. But trends are quite clear. Things are already getting worse here too: far right parties are winning or at least gaining consensus; freedom of speech is being repressed, and welfare eroded. In this context, how would you think your practical approach should be adapted? 

IO: The answer is always the same: to diversify the approach. And I think it also means working with different types of activists. So I think in the advocacy space, we’re so good at siloing ourselves. Like: ‘oh, I’m the group that works on human rights’, ‘I’m the group that works on immigration issues’, ‘I’m the environmental advocate’, when all of these things are connected. 

And so folks need to be working together. If a labor action is able to get things moving in France, then that’s the type of action you need to do. If environmental issues are more salient in Germany, then you can use different parts of the activism ecosystem to target the same companies and to target the government in different ways. 

You know It’s so interesting that World War II was not that long ago. So in theory, it shouldn’t be curious to people that fascism can take over in Europe in general, country by country and very quickly. History is not that separated from us and yet two generations past people completely forget what happened in their own countries, even if some of the people who witnessed those events are still alive. 

And so for me it is really infuriating that we can be so close to it and people can still act like, oh, there’s no way that it could happen here. 

EDA: During the conversation with Tammarrian Rogers, I really liked when you said that change in tech companies doesn’t pass only through those who are strictly “tech workers” but also other worker figures, with smaller wages and rights. So here are two separated questions: where are we in terms of organising across different types of workers in the tech industry? And, second: across different countries?

IO: I think the companies understand exactly how important it is, and that’s the reason why they’ve worked so hard to silo groups. So that, even in one company, you may literally not be able to reach out to and communicate or engage with folks who are doing work for the same company because they’re using countless different contracting agencies. 

The primary mechanism that they’ve used was to ensure that their engineers aren’t able to be in communication with even the data labelers who are ensuring that they’re able to feed all of this information into a large language model. So it is incredibly important that folks working on the coding of these systems understand that their work would be impossible without the people making cents a day, cents an hour in Kenya and in Bangladesh and in other places to label the information. 

But the companies have ensured that there isn’t the ability to directly communicate. And that’s where I think journalists actually have a huge role to play because they’re the ones who help to tell these stories. Like Time Magazine did a huge series on the Kenyan data labelers who have been doing both content moderation for companies like Meta and then the ones who are now doing a lot of the labeling for Large Language Models (LLMs). 

And the same for folks in Venezuela and in South America who are doing a lot of the labeling for these systems and looking at really horrific content because the companies know that no one would be willing to do it in Western Europe or in the United States, and certainly not at the pay that they’re able to exploit people with in these other countries. 

EDA: Are there no more traditional initiatives from below, like labor unions? 

IO: Not organizing, unfortunately, but I do know that there are a number of organizations like Tech Equity in the United States and others who have been doing reports. And they actually worked with a large labor union in the United States to do a report on how people in this chain of work are being exploited. 

But it’s next to impossible to do old school organizing because they’re not even at the same company. So the way that the companies have set up this work is you may work for OpenAI, but the people doing the data labeling are at 10 different contracted agencies so that the company can state legally that they never actually hired these people. They were just hiring the work through a contract with X, Y, Z agency. 

EDA: I want to finish the interview asking you about sci-fi writer Octavia Butler. In 2020 you founded a consulting firm, Earthseed, whose name is inspired by a political-religious movement in the novel “Parable of the Sower”. What place does she have in your work? 

IO: When you read Octavia Butler, it looks like she knew it all. I mean, if I believed in time traveling, she is surely an example of someone who has time traveled because she knew exactly what would happen and how it would happen. And that’s why her work moved me so much. But the core tenant of Earthseed in the books is that God is ‘change’. If anything is true, it is that things will change and we have our own role to play in changing things. 

And so that really is what I have believed in, that like so many of us can feel overwhelmed by the fact that so many horrible things are happening all of the time and what power do we have as individuals to change it. And what I really took away from her writing and what I try to live with day to day is that I can’t change absolutely everything but I can change small things that I have the ability to touch. 

So in my case, I have a background in political science and public policy and I know how laws are made. That is one thing that I can do. Can I change Hollywood? No. I have no experience in that. Can I go and change who becomes the president? I don’t have billions of dollars, so I don’t have the ability to buy the next president, unlike someone else. 

But where I can, in my own small space with my own expertise and my own networks, make changes, that is what I’m committed to. 

We all need to step up because I feel a lot of the power of authoritarians is in making people feel powerless. That there’s absolutely nothing that individuals have the ability to do, so they might as well just go along with what is happening to them and around them. 

The post Breaking the Code of Silence: Workers Rights and Systemic Change in Tech – A Conversation with Ifeoma Ozoma appeared first on Untold.

Developed as part of the European Research Council–funded PalREAD project, the platform brings together archival material, podcasts, network visualizations, and thematic narratives to document a literature created under conditions of exile, occupation, and censorship. It offers a critical intervention against erasure—especially vital in a moment of genocidal violence against Palestinians and the systematic suppression of their voices.

In this interview, Refqa Abu‑Remaileh reflects on the origins and goals of the project, the challenges of building a literary history from fragments, and the urgency of documenting Palestinian cultural production in the face of historical and ongoing destruction. Through her work, she not only tells the story of Palestinian literature but also how we can learn from this rich creative history of defiance, resistance, and survival.

Walid El Houri: How would you describe this massive project? What made you decide to do it, and who do you believe it is for?

Refqa Abu‑Remaileh: One of the main reasons I started this project was to answer my own questions. I was struggling to understand how to read, write about, and make sense of Palestinian literature. There are many anomalies in this field—disconnections, gaps, scattered histories—and I kept hitting a ceiling. Even though the existing work was incredibly important, it felt like we couldn’t see the bigger picture: how everything connects, how the diaspora relates to the homeland, and how we make sense of a history shaped by fragmentation.

At some point, I became disillusioned with the limits of traditional literary analysis. It no longer felt sufficient to analyze texts in isolation. I felt the need for unconventional approaches to make sense of what is, in many ways, an unconventional literature.

I’m also a visual learner, so I wanted to create something that was visual and interactive. Simple facts, like whether Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani ever met were unclear. The canon of Palestinian literature has been reduced to a few major names, but even those figures lived in entirely different cities, cultural spheres, and political realities. We often treat them as though they belonged to a single, unified literary scene—which they didn’t. So, I wanted to build something that would allow us to explore these disconnections and interconnections more clearly.

This is how the idea of an atlas emerged—something that could show the motion of literature across geographies, a “literature in motion.” I realized that the best way to represent that was through a digital platform that allowed for textual, visual, and audio components. It had to be non-linear and participatory—something more democratic, that could reflect the fragmented and scattered nature of Palestinian literary history. I didn’t want to write a conventional, linear literary history.

The digital realm became essential not only for hosting the project but as a conceptual space—a virtual meeting ground for dispersed data and fragmented narratives. It helped me see Palestinian literature as a story of movement, elasticity, and rupture. I didn’t know all of this when I began, but the drive to answer these questions and see the bigger picture is what propelled the project forward.

WH: What defines Palestinian literature and what makes it special or particular? How is it different from other national literatures?

RA: This was one of the biggest challenges I faced—trying to define what is and isn’t part of Palestinian literature. Early on, I decided to adopt an inclusive approach inspired by the spirit of the Palestinian revolution, particularly the Beirut years. Many people I spoke to, including in our podcast interviews, emphasized that Palestinian identity—at least in the context of literature and culture—wasn’t strictly about nationality or ethnicity, but about belonging to a cause.

So, I made a conscious decision to include non-Palestinians in the project—writers, editors, thinkers—anyone who made a major contribution to Palestinian literature, regardless of their background. This wasn’t about gatekeeping based on origin but about contribution and connection. That inclusiveness felt essential to reflecting the spirit of the literature itself.

At the same time, I had to confront a recurring question: Is Palestinian literature really that different from other Arabic literatures? I remember meeting Salma Khadra Jayyusi, an incredibly important but underrecognized Palestinian poet and literary critic, who was already in her 90s when I interviewed her. She looked at me skeptically and said, “Why do you need a separate project for Palestinian literature? It’s no different from Arabic literature. It has the same genres, styles, movements.”

And she was right—on the level of the literary texts themselves, Palestinian literature is very much part of modern Arabic literature. It shares its genres—novels, short stories, poetry, plays—and it’s shaped by the same regional trends and intellectual currents. These writers were writing in, and part of, the broader Arab world.

But what makes Palestinian literature different is the context of its production and circulation. It’s a national literature without a nation-state—a literature that is unhoused, fragmented, scattered across geographies. Its writers, critics, readers, publishers, and archives are not located within a centralized, territorial state. This affects everything: how the literature is written, read, archived, and remembered.

Most national literatures emerge from relatively stable territorial entities. Palestinian literature doesn’t. Its very conditions of existence are shaped by displacement, exile, censorship, imprisonment, and erasure. These are not just background facts; they define the literature. There’s also a kind of latent transnationalism that has always been there, but we’ve tended to overlook it—perhaps because of a desire to normalize Palestinian literature within national literary frameworks.

So, we end up analyzing the canonical figures—Kanafani in Beirut, Emile Habibi in Haifa, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra in Baghdad—as though they were part of a unified literary tradition. But they were living in completely different political and cultural environments, and rarely, if ever, interacting directly. Ignoring that reality means ignoring what actually makes Palestinian literature distinct.

It’s also a literature that has been systematically targeted—through censorship, imprisonment, exile, and erasure—in ways that go beyond what’s typical in other Arab literatures. All of this contributes to its particularity: a decentralized, transnational, and constantly disrupted literary tradition that still manages to cohere around a sense of collective memory and struggle.

WH: Does Palestinian literature need to be in Arabic, or do you consider it a multilingual literature? Which other languages have you encountered and documented?

RA: Yes, Palestinian literature is multilingual. During the research, I encountered material in many languages—Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, German, English, French, among others. However, for the purposes of this project, I made the decision to focus primarily on Arabic-language sources. That wasn’t because the other languages aren’t important—they are—but because the vast majority of literary production, especially in the 20th century, has been in Arabic.

This sometimes frustrates people, but we can’t deny that Arabic is the dominant language of Palestinian literary expression. And the Arabic corpus is enormous—much of it still unexplored. I realized we’ve barely scratched the surface. When people think of literature, they often focus only on the major literary texts, but there’s so much more: criticism, editorials, letters, essays, manifestos, cultural commentary. All of this exists in Arabic, scattered across newspapers, magazines, private archives, and oral histories.

That said, the multilingual dimension is real, especially when we look at the diaspora—Latin America in particular. One of the surprises in my research was discovering just how much Arabic-language publishing was taking place there, starting in the early 20th century. Many of these publications eventually became bilingual—Arabic-Spanish or Arabic-Portuguese—and then fully Spanish or Portuguese. This history is often overshadowed by the emphasis on Arab migration to the United States, but in fact, Latin America has a rich and largely untapped archive of Palestinian and broader Arab cultural production.

I think we’ll see more work emerge around this in the coming years, and I hope others take up that research. My project doesn’t deny the multilingual nature of Palestinian literature—it simply focuses on Arabic because that’s where the core of the historical production is, and because it remains a massive field requiring further excavation.

WH: What is the importance of this type of documentation amid the genocidal destruction of all things Palestinian—communities, history, heritage, places, and more?

RA: This project was actually completed before the current genocide began—it just happened to be published a few days after October 7. At first, I couldn’t make sense of that timing. But slowly, everything started to click into place. The patterns I had traced over nearly a century of literary history—the erasures, the silences, the censorship, the imprisonments, the massacres—they all pointed toward what we’re witnessing now. This eruption of violence didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s a culmination.

Through the project, it became clear to me that there have been two forms of genocide at play: a slow, grinding genocide that has unfolded over decades, and a fast, spectacular one we are now witnessing. But both follow the same logic: erasure of Palestinian presence on the land, culture, memory, and people.

I didn’t expect to find what I found. When you write literary history, you don’t usually think you’ll be documenting prisons, massacres, and mass censorship. But these elements kept appearing in the sources—so often and so forcefully that I couldn’t ignore them. So I began highlighting them as themes in the project. These include imprisonment, censorship, and massacres—tools of suppression that have shaped the conditions of Palestinian literary production for over a century.

The sheer number of writers who were imprisoned, exiled, banned, or silenced is staggering—and unprecedented. These weren’t isolated incidents. They formed a pattern, and this pattern maps directly onto the political project of erasing Palestinian identity and culture.

And yet, even in times of catastrophe, people wrote. One example I highlight is a magazine published in East Jerusalem after 1948, where the editor, Amin Shunnar, proposed a new literary genre: “Adab al-Nakba”—the literature of catastrophe, or the literature of the Nakba. He believed Palestinians could contribute something unique to the Arab literary tradition by reflecting on how to write from the ruins—not just about destruction, but also about survival, hope, and the future.

This kind of resilience is threaded through the entire history of Palestinian literature. Despite the attempts to destroy and silence, people kept writing, thinking, and imagining. There are precedents to draw on. There is a legacy of resistance—creative, intellectual, cultural—that didn’t emerge out of nowhere in the present moment. It’s been built over generations. This project is one attempt to document and preserve that legacy—not only for memory, but also as a resource for the present and future.

WH: At a time when there is violent erasure and suppression of Palestinian voices, what can the history of Palestinian literature and literary figures teach us about the present moment?

RA: One of the central themes I traced in this project is censorship—not just of Palestinians, but of anyone speaking about Palestine. What surprised me was how early this began. For example, I found Arabic newspapers published in Santiago, Chile, as early as 1920 reporting on events in Palestine, like the Nabi Musa uprising. These papers received Palestinian newspapers from the homeland, but they arrived heavily censored—entire sections blacked out. And the editors in Chile understood this as a systematic attempt to silence Palestinian voices and to decimate their political and cultural leadership.

That was under British colonial rule. What’s striking is how seamlessly the Israeli state inherited these tools—prison, censorship, bans—and expanded them. Palestinians themselves understood this continuity. The poet Tawfiq Zayyad, for example, explicitly said that his struggle inside Israel after 1948 was a direct continuation of the struggle of poets like Ibrahim Touqan under British colonialism. The colonial conditions hadn’t changed—only the rulers had.

This suppression wasn’t limited to literary production. The writers I researched weren’t just writers—they were also teachers, journalists, organizers, activists. Their work spanned cultural and political spheres, and because of that, they were seen as threats. One powerful example is the Al-Ard movement, an anti-Zionist political group inside Israel after 1948. It was quickly banned, and when its members tried to publish a bulletin, they had to use a legal loophole from the British Mandate period that allowed for one-off publications without a license. They issued a series of underground bulletins, each under a different name, editor, and location—but always with “Al-Ard” in the title. It was a brilliant act of resistance using colonial legal mechanisms against the colonial state.

That example reminds me of what we see today with social media. Palestinian journalists and activists create multiple Instagram or Twitter accounts because once one gets taken down, they open another. This pattern of silencing and persistence goes all the way back to the early 20th century. Palestinians have had to fight media blackouts, censorship, and suppression for generations.

What this history teaches us is that Palestinians have always resisted erasure—and they’ve done so with incredible creativity and resilience. The erasure isn’t new, but neither is the resistance. What’s crucial now is to recover those histories—not just to honor them, but to learn from them. They remind us that we’re not starting from scratch. There is a long archive of creative defiance that can guide us through this moment.

WH: In your project to document this rich literature, what were the biggest challenges? And what were the biggest discoveries?

RA: The challenges were many—legal, logistical, emotional, conceptual. First, I had to accept that this project would never be comprehensive. Palestinian literary history is full of ruptures, silences, and missing pieces. I wasn’t dealing with a cohesive, well-preserved archive; I was working with fragments. That required a shift in mindset. I had to be okay with documenting what I could, knowing it would remain partial, interrupted, and unfinished.

There were also major logistical obstacles—accessing sources across geographies, finding rare materials, dealing with COVID travel restrictions. Much of the archive doesn’t exist in national libraries or formal institutions. It’s in people’s homes—private libraries, boxes in garages, basements, old community centers. You have to look in unexpected places.

As a literary scholar, I wasn’t trained in archival research or oral history. But I had to embrace those methods, because often there were no written records. Oral interviews became essential for filling the gaps—especially for capturing lived experiences and connecting dots that the written archive couldn’t provide.

Then there was the digital side. This was a team-based project, and it couldn’t have been done alone. We worked with researchers across the region—in Gaza, the West Bank, inside Israel, in Cairo, Beirut, Kuwait—and coordinated a small team in Berlin. Creating the project’s database  was hugely labor-intensive. There are no pre-existing datasets for Palestinian literature. Everything had to be manually collected, coded, and entered—biographical data, periodical metadata, geographic information, thematic connections.

And because the digital infrastructure is geared toward Latin-script, left-to-right languages, we faced constant hurdles with Arabic—OCR (optical character recognition) is still inaccurate, right-to-left formatting is often buggy, and nothing could be automatically generated. Every node and connection you see in the platform had to be mapped manually in Word docs and Excel sheets.

Conceptually, one of the most difficult questions was: how do I represent a fragmented, non-linear story in visual and textual form? Edward Said’s idea of “counterpoint” was key here—multiple narratives happening simultaneously, often in tension with each other. That’s why I created a timeline with overlapping geographies—showing events in the homeland and in the diaspora at the same time. Palestinian literature has never existed outside occupation. Whether in the homeland or abroad, it’s always responding to colonial pressure. Representing that contrapuntal history was a major challenge, but also one of the most meaningful parts of the work.

WH: What journey do you want the reader to take when navigating the site?

RA: This isn’t a conventional book. You don’t have to read it from beginning to end. The idea was to create multiple entry points so that readers—depending on their interests and background—could navigate the project in a non-linear, intuitive way.

The heart of the project is the timeline, which is also the landing page. It doesn’t follow a single narrative but offers seven overlapping historical periods, each with its own geographic and political context. As you scroll through the timeline, you can literally see the geographies shift—dots move across the map to reflect changing centers of literary production. The idea is to make the fragmentation and movement of Palestinian literature visible.

If you click into any period, you’ll find a narrative that includes highlighted elements. These highlights are color-coded: blue for literary figures, green for periodicals, and red for themes like censorship or exile. There are 94 highlighted figures, 35 periodicals, and 12 themes, all cross-referenced and pre-mapped to show how they connect.

From there, readers can jump to the network view—a meta-perspective that shows the relationships between periods, people, periodicals, and themes across different periods. This was especially helpful for me while writing. I’m a visual thinker, and I often needed to draw connections by hand just to make sense of the data. The network view automates that, allowing readers to hover over nodes, follow links, and see unexpected connections emerge.

There’s also a visualization gallery, which serves as a standalone knowledge source. These graphs and charts are embedded in each chapter but are also available on their own because they contain far more data than I could write about in the text. For instance, someone might discover that a writer based in Tunis was publishing in a periodical in Paris—things I couldn’t always explore in depth, but the data is there for others to pursue.

Finally, we have the audio interviews, which became a podcast. These are also standalone, and they add personal and historical depth to the project. Many of the voices you hear there reflect on periods, people, and publications that are documented in the text or visualizations, but from lived experience.

So, the journey is really up to the reader. You can enter through the timeline, the network, the visualizations, or the audio. You can follow a theme, a writer, a periodical—whatever interests you. The goal was to create an experience that is interactive, non-linear, and generative, where readers can follow their curiosity and find their own path through the story.

WH: What’s next for the project? How do you see it—or wish it—to live on?

RA: The current version of the project is static. That was one of the conditions of publishing with the digital arm of Stanford University Press. I can’t add to or update it, but the upside is that they’ve committed to maintaining the infrastructure over time—keeping the site online, updating it as needed, and ensuring its longevity. That was really important to me. I didn’t want to build something this labor-intensive only for it to disappear once the funding ran out.

That said, I see this project as a foundation for future work—my own and hopefully others’. It was also a way for me to document everything I wished I had time to explore in more depth. I plan to return to many of these threads, starting with the Mahjar period, which is incredibly rich but still under-researched. There are several figures, texts, and publications I want to dive into further. The data I gathered points to so many pathways—Palestine and the Maghreb, Palestine and Latin America, Palestine and Europe—each deserving much more detailed study.

This atlas is also a map for my future research—articles, books, maybe even new collaborations. And I hope it will be the same for others. I wrote the texts in accessible language, without academic jargon, and it’s all open access. That was intentional. I wanted to break through the academic paywalls and make this resource usable for people outside the university—students, educators, cultural workers, or anyone interested in Palestinian literary history.

I’m also developing teaching tools based on the platform. During the project, I didn’t have time to build them, but I’ve started working with collaborators to create digital teaching modules—courses that can be used in schools, universities, or workshops. I’d like to expand that work further, especially with cultural centers and museums, so people can engage with this material outside of academic settings.

Some colleagues are already using the platform in their teaching, which is great to hear. I want to do the same with my students. The idea is for this to be more than a static archive—it’s meant to be a living, generative space where people can learn, research, and pursue their own questions. I hope others will take it in directions I haven’t imagined yet.

The post A Country of Words: Mapping Memory, Resistance, and Exile in Palestinian Literary History appeared first on Untold.

Giulia Crisci together with Emmanuelle Bouhours have interviewed the Algerian feminist filmmaker on her cinematography for the Sicilia Queer filmfest in Palermo (Italy), which dedicated the Eterotopia section to Algerian cinema in 2023.

Giulia Crisci: The context from which we speak is always significant. Can you tell us where you are speaking, observing, and writing from??

Habiba Djahnine: I came to cinema as a young girl through film clubs, out of cinephilia, let’s say. With a very strong desire to discover not only Algerian cinema, but also world cinema, which I did thanks to the Algerian Cinémathèque. We were fortunate to have this Cinémathèque that strongly supported Algerian and world cinema; while other cinemas in Algeria were distributing blockbusters and films for the general public, the Cinémathèque held its line to bring art-house cinema to life. 

At the same time, poetry and literature occupied our lives. I started writing poetry and collaborating with a few magazines and poetry events at the Béjaïa theatre. Up until my thirties, I had never thought about making a film, I was more focused on publishing my texts. However, I still had a very cinephile attitude, I was thinking of distributing films and organising festivals. A cultural activist’s spirit, in short. 

In 1994, together with my sister Nabila Djahnine we organized a festival called Images and Imaginaries of Women in Algerian Cinema, organised by the association Thighri n‘’mettouth (Cry of Woman), of which Nabila was president, in Tizi-Ouzou (a city in Kabylia 100 km from Algiers). 

These events allowed us not only to discover cinema but also to cultivate an encounter with the audience. In fact, I think an audience is built, it does not exist per se. I put a lot of energy into creating film clubs, even in completely isolated places, in the mountains of Kabylia, for example, or in some villages in southern Algeria, even in difficult situations, with very few means. 

The aim has always been to engage an audience and to learn to debate, to discuss, to confront different ways of thinking. We started with women’s film clubs because women did not have access to cinema and cultural spaces in our hometown of Béjaïa. Later, we opened them up to everyone so that we could also discuss political and social issues, in addition to discovering films. This is where I come from. 

GC: How did you decide to go behind the camera?

HD: I don’t like to constrain myself  into categories or labels.  However, I can say that poetry has always accompanied me since I was a little girl: it provides a strong way of looking at the world and of taking care of very complex things. Poetry allows us to create a distance with things while allowing us to speak honestly about our own depths, about what touches us deep inside. 

It was the desert that helped me find my way back to poetry. When I was 25, I took my backpack and went to live in the Algerian desert. I encountered other ways of thinking and began my work of deconstruction. 

The only station I have never left is that of feminism. Since then, I have spent my life deconstructing the chains, the cages, the ones they put us in, but also the ones we are responsible for.. From there I began to reflect on the medium I wanted to use to speak, and then cinema and more specifically the creative documentary came to the fore. What really interests me is to draw from reality to turn it into something  and thus offer a personal and subjective view, a bit like it was for poetry.

I also started writing my first film: Lettre à ma sœur (2006) at the beginning of my training while attending important documentary film festivals). 

At the time, I was working in France,  in exile. I devoted  myself to the creative documentary, I began to learn and find a true form, an experience that transformed and shook me, because I was in a real confrontation with the others. It was together with these other protagonists that I wrote my first film. 

Of course there was, as always, preliminary writing work and intentions, but in fact the film is made in the field, with people. That is, with all the components of reality, with its difficulties, misunderstandings, subtleties. From the experience of Lettre à ma sœur, I met so many people who were reflecting on the importance of the image, on how it can transform our gaze and thus construct it. Expressing things in duality, in dialectics, in complexity… It is about reappropriating the self-image as a strategy of disalienation. That’s how I got the idea to start giving workshops in Algeria.  

GC: So this is where your educational work starts?

HD: Starting with my first film and all the meetings I had, I decided to work in broadcasting and educating people who wanted to try their hand at documentary filmmaking. It was interesting because we were in a daze, we had just come out of the 1990s civil war without really being out of it. 

It’s always like that when you think you’re coming out of a war and you’re never really out of it. There are always things that remain, that are there and you don’t really know what to do with them. We found each other in the cinema, in the analysis of the films, able to reflect on what had happened, and it was of great help. I created a space of freedom where we could experiment in our own way, while at the same time leaving room for discovery, a real workshop. 

Very interesting things came out of it, as these film objects were totally imbued with freedom. I started with these workshops in 2007, even though I had already been working on image education since 2003 and, immediately afterwards, we organised an annual workshop on the creation of documentary films. 

The methodological axes that I follow are always linked to the idea of freedom, of not belonging to any institution, always questioning the constraints imposed, deconstructing the way of creating images by proposing some others, although often clumsily and taking a long time. Sometimes also with a lot of suffering, because traumas and buried histories are faced. Despite everything, they remain intense and very strong experiences, every time.

Emmanuelle Bouhours: To stay with the topic of workshops, you felt the need to think about how to represent the world and, as you said, ‘take off your straitjackets’. But wasn’t it also about the need to rethink ways of producing cinema? Collectives in cinema have always existed, what you propose in the workshops is also a collaborative and horizontal approach.

HD: We couldn’t organise the workshops without resorting to a new production model. Participatory workshops have always existed. There are very famous ones, the Medvedkine group, the Varan ateliers, the feminist groups in France in the 1970s, many experiences in Latin America, in Iran, and in Arab countries. I was inspired by all these methods. 

I did a lot of reading, even attending workshops. Of course, then we created our own recipe. The Algerian context is complicated and we still had to adapt production models. We experiment with a participative model where everyone provides their own means, even if it is the Cinéma Mémoire collective that provides most of the resources, materials, work spaces and invites people to intervene, etc. 

Materials are managed collectively, they circulate freely, without a central unit that collects them and where people come to find them. On the contrary, this material circulates because films are made in several cities. In the workshops, some people come from Oran, some from Kabylia, some from Constantine, some from Sétif.. So we had to find a system that would allow not only the circulation of means, but also mutual help. 

How can we support each other in making films? Each time and over all these years, the outgoing group helps the incoming one. Even today, many people work together. This creates an interesting group and production dynamic.

I also wanted to show that films can be made even with very small means. When we film misery, the most complicated and violent situations, it is unseemly to have large resources, as is the asymmetry between what we have and what we are filming. We have to create a balance between who we are and what we are filming. It is what I call the depth of the gaze, your positioning, where you stand.

EB: You have talked about feminist perspectives in your workshops and in relation to current struggles. What is your relationship with feminism?

HD: Feminism has always been part of my life. Since I was 14 or 15 years old, I have considered myself a feminist. I discovered feminism as a form of thinking and with my sisters we developed our knowledge and practices primarily among ourselves. 

We talked a lot about feminist ideas and literature. We were very committed. Over time, with the murder of my sister and my exile, feminism somehow became part of my DNA, something completely natural. I often forget to say that in all my work there is a strong feminist dimension. It is a contradiction and I realised it later. It is so integrated that I don’t feel the need to say it. 

Later, when I met young feminists, I realised that no, it is not obvious. Things have to be reaffirmed. Everything I do is imbued with feminism. It is not just a way of thinking, in fact I cannot imagine the world otherwise. It constitutes who I am. 

People and the media often presented me first and foremost as a feminist-filmmaker. It was their gaze that made me aware of it. For 20 years I didn’t say it, not verbally, even when I made Lettre à ma Sœur, even though it was a deeply feminist film. And in all my films there is a feminist dimension that takes precedence over everything else. The issue is much broader than just a woman’s gaze.

GC: The entry of women into Algerian cinema is often linked to films such as Leila et les autres by Sid Ali Mazif (1978), about women workers in Algeria, or La Nouba des femmes du mont Chenoua (1977) by Assia Djebar. Your cinema is also strongly linked to feminist commitment. It began with Lettre à ma Sœur and continues by giving space to the feminisms of other generations, which is the case of the authors you welcome in your workshops. Do you recognise yourself in this genealogy?

HD: As I said before, in 1994 with my sister we created the festival Images et Imaginaires de femmes dans le cinéma algérien. We could only do one edition, because the following year my sister was assassinated. 

Only after a while do I realise that it was no accident that this first festival was focused on feminist thought. We were already questioning the discriminatory representations of women in our societies. The only film that I found really powerfully feminist was the one by Assia Djebar. La Nouba des femmes du mont Chenoua was the first film directed by a woman director in Algeria, in 1977. 

It is impressive that this film poses not only the question of women’s place but also their experience during the war of liberation. The character of the journalist and teacher who can ask questions immediately positions herself as a leader, a woman in the vanguard. 

The limit is pushed even further, because this woman’s partner has a motor disability. To a certain extent, she is thinking of the world of men as a world with a disability. Assia not only makes the first film by a woman in Algeria, but the first feminist film and, even more, she creates something totally new in terms of form. A formal freedom. 

This provoked the anger of filmmakers who attacked the film for not corresponding to the usual format of the time. To answer your question, yes I do recognise myself in this genealogy, but not only in this one, as I do not like categories I feel that my influences also come from elsewhere. Algeria is not the only reference in my journey.

We asked Habiba Djahnine for a filmography that tracks her most significant works:

Tahia ya Didou (1971), Mohamed Zinet

La Nouba des femmes du Mont de Chenoua (1977), Assia Djebar

La Zerda ou le chant de l’oubli (1979), Assia Djebar

Une boite dans le désert (1978), Brahim Tsaki

La moitié du ciel d’Allah (1995), Djamila Sahraoui

Combien je vous aime (1985), Azzedine Meddour

Roma Wala N’touma (2006), Tariq Teguia

Je suis mort (2015), Yassine Benalhadj

Bîr d’eau a Walkmovie (2011), Djamil Beloucif

El Atlal (2016), Djamel Kerkar

Dans ma tête un rond point (2015), Hassen Ferhani

Abou Leila (2019), Amine Sidi-Boumédiène

Films she has collaborated on or produced include:

Harguine Harguine (2008), Meriem Achour Bouakkaz

EL Berrani (l’étranger) (2011), Bouba

La grande Prison (2014), Razik Oumeziane 

Nnuba (2019), Sonia Kessi

Hey Djamila, si je meurs comment feras-tu ? (2019), Leila Saadna

Kouchet el Djir (Four à Chaux) (2014), Boukraa Moussa

Retour vers un point d’équilibre (2009), Nadia Chouieb

Bnet el Djeblia (Les filles de la montagnarde) (2019), Wiame Awres

El Sitar (Le rideau) (2019), Kahina Zina

J’ai habité l’absence deux fois (2011), Drifa Mezenner

Fi Rayha (Selon elle) (2019), Kamila Ould Larbi

The post The Depth of the Gaze: A Conversation with Habiba Djahnine on Algerian Feminist Cinema appeared first on Untold.

The first image etched into eleven-year-old Aya’s mind was a dark, powerless room and women screaming over her uncle’s burned body—an airstrike by the U.S. left only a burnt limb the size of a palm. From that moment, she adapted her mind to the image of a shattered, grieving woman in Baghdad. Just like Fida from Palestine, Maya and Diana from Lebanon, Oula from Syria, and Mazda and Zoya from Afghanistan—these women are activists and journalists who spoke about the experiences of women in wartime. Although foreign forces claimed to be ‘liberating’ them, what these women received instead was devastation, occupation, and deep social divisions.

Now, one of the world’s most violent military leaders, Benjamin Netanyahu, is citing Jina Mahsa Amini and the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” to justify his attack on Iran with a cloak of justice, turning “women’s rights” into a weapon to legitimize war and occupation—the same leader responsible for killing thousands of women in Gaza over the past two years. An all-too-familiar pattern of imperialist exploitation repeated across the region.

For Aya and other Iraqi women, the US occupation was never a source of liberation. Women were arrested alongside their children, and husbands were killed in front of their families—often by soldiers who spoke of peace while carrying weapons. What occurred was not a rescue, but another form of devastation. Iraqi women were not freed; they were caught between tyranny and the foreign fire that arrived with empty promises. Today, each of these women activists who have emerged from war and destruction represents not only her personal experience but also a collective voice—the voice of women who have lived through resistance and have refused to be ‘liberated’ by bombs.

From Iraq: Fake liberation, real chains

Aya, an Iraqi journalist and women’s rights activist, once tried counting how many women she had lost over the years—but gave up quickly, fearing her heart might collapse from grief. Her childhood began with the memory of her uncle’s burned limb and the women’s cries in that powerless room. From then on, the image of the broken woman was etched in her mind: a woman forced to bear the burdens of war, execution, disappearances, and discrimination in an oppressive system.

Under Saddam Hussein, young boys might be executed in front of their mothers for having a religious or communist book. After 2003, the scene didn’t change—only the methods did. Men were executed or disappeared; many never returned, not even as bodies. What mothers received was their absence.

Aya says that after the US invasion in 2003, that violent system against women did not collapse—it grew stronger: “Saddam needed to go, but the way he left only deepened the destruction. The US decided how Iraq would ‘change,’ chose new rulers, and imposed priorities with no link to the wishes of the people. Iraq was neither liberated nor secure; it was another form of prison—and remains so.”

Aya believes that the US not only failed to free Iraqi women but handed power to men who hate women: “The laws allow child brides, men kill women in the name of ‘manhood’ and escape punishment. What we have is legalized violence against women, not reform.”

She says the rhetoric of ‘education for women’ and ‘civil society’ during occupation was simply a facade for failure: “On the surface, workshops and seminars happened, but in practice, women remained vulnerable in a patriarchal society. Women activists, translators, and journalists were all labeled as traitors or collaborators. We received neither support nor voice.”

Aya says this pattern of deception is a familiar US tactic: “The slogans remain the same: freedom, human rights, saving women. Yet behind these words always lies a political agenda. Deprived of hope, we sometimes fall into believing them.” She is certain that occupation never leads to liberation: “The only real resistance is refusing to let our suffering be exploited as a weapon. When foreign powers invoke feminist slogans, they strip them of meaning and turn them into war propaganda; this is not rescue—it’s a takeover.”

When Netanyahu speaks of “Woman, Life, Freedom,” Aya says it serves only as a façade for atrocity—the same recurring pattern, the same slogan, the same lie: “They present us as symbols rather than human beings. They showcase us at strategic moments to legitimise  a policy, only to abandon us when we cease to be of use.”

She expresses her unwavering solidarity with women in Iran, Syria, and Afghanistan: “My solidarity is unconditional. I urge the women of Iran: do not let anyone dictate your story. These narratives are our invaluable assets. But today they’re being taken from us; we are being used, without any concern for our lives.” She warns: “When we ask the international community to acknowledge our plight, the response is often ‘it’s an internal matter.’ But if it suits their interests, all of a sudden, our lives matter to them. This selective approach to our suffering is the worst form of exploitation.”

From Gaza: “We know how to resist ourselves”

Fida is a woman forged by war—a gender studies researcher born and raised in Gaza. She has lived through the horrors of war for as long as she can remember, constantly overshadowed by bombs and occupation. However, the devastation of the past two years marks a profound escalation: complete destruction, profound loss of friends and loved ones, and even erasure of her hometown. For her, women suffer the most amidst the rubble. 

When Fida heard Netanyahu invoke “Woman, Life, Freedom” to justify attacks on Iran, she was not surprised—“this is what the Israeli regime has always done: instrumentalize the suffering of others to legitimize its own violence. This reflects a colonial, racist mindset that dehumanizes others,” she says.

Fida places Netanyahu alongside politicians like Donald Trump—figures who only acknowledge movements they can co-opt: “Whenever a movement can feed their war machine, economy, or geopolitical interests, they seize it. Saying ‘we bomb to free women’ is nothing new—Afghanistan, Iraq—and now Iran. This discourse is acceptable in the West because Islamophobia, white supremacy, and racism are entrenched.”

In response, she emphasizes a simple but vital truth: “Yes, women in our region are oppressed, but this is our struggle. We know how to resist, organize, and fight. No state responsible for war, occupation, or resource plunder has the moral standing to speak of freedom.”

She warns many progressive movements risk being hijacked by imperial projects, shifting focus from justice and transgression to mere token representation in corrupt institutions: “That is dangerous—because countries like the US, Israel, and Germany use moral slogans to conceal their expansionist agendas.”

Fida argues that a common tactic employed by Western powers is to depict West Asian women solely as passive victims—figures presumed to be awaiting rescue by the so-called “civilized” white man. “This portrayal is not only demeaning,” she explains, “but also strategically useful, as it allows these actors to obscure their own roles in constructing systems of occupation and domination, while shifting responsibility onto ‘culture’ or ‘religion.’”

Fida has never looked to foreign governments for support in achieving liberation, and she contends that such expectations are misplaced. “When these states invoke ‘women’s rights,’ it is often not out of genuine concern or solidarity, but rather to legitimize military interventions.”

Importantly, her critique extends beyond the context of Palestine or Gaza. Fida warns that feminist movements in Iran must likewise be vigilant against the risk of co-optation. In her words, a movement rooted in popular struggle can only retain its authenticity and strength if it is led from within, not by the intervention of foreign powers. “We must have full autonomy over our movements. No state with a legacy of colonialism, violence, and war possesses the ethical authority to dictate the terms of our emancipation.”

From Lebanon: The same old tactic

For years, Lebanese women have borne the burden of violence, crisis, and poverty—women like Maya, who are not just storytellers of war but have lived it. A journalist and feminist who lived the crisis from within, she now speaks with experience and resilience of women who became the pillars of families amid destruction.

Maya describes her home in southern Lebanon—recently bombed again by Israel—where thousands of families lost homes and land. Many cannot return: “In crisis moments, these women cared for those around them. In crowded shelters, with bare hands they built kitchens, made play and learning spaces for children. They prevented families from falling apart.”

By late 2024, more than 50% of Lebanon’s 1.2 million internally displaced were women and children, including some 12,000 pregnant women without access to basic medical services. Economic and financial collapse since 2019, the COVID pandemic, and the Beirut port blast intensified pressure—especially on women in informal, small-scale work.

Lebanon, she notes, is a “country of consecutive crises.” Since the outbreak of the civil war in 1975, five successive generations have endured at least one major security or economic crisis. “Each generation held onto the hope that the next would live in peace,” she reflects, “but we have learned to remain in a constant state of readiness—always anticipating the next blow.” These protracted crises unfold within deeply patriarchal structures and legal frameworks that systematically marginalize women.

She describes a form of latent violence—one that does not destroy the body, but gradually erodes the spirit: “If the bullets don’t kill you, war finds a way to break you from within. Many older women continue to live with psychological trauma and a persistent sense of entrapment in the city. They are unable to return to their homes, lands, and gardens in the South; their sense of belonging has been violently severed. It is as if Israel seeks to erase women’s connection to the land through hostility.”

Maya recounts that until the early 2000s when the Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon was liberated, she was not even permitted to visit her birthplace. Against this backdrop, Netanyahu’s invocation of the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” to justify aggression toward Iran strikes her as yet another iteration of a familiar strategy: “It’s the same old tactic powerful states have used for years—washing women’s rights. They claim to champion freedom, but in reality, they instrumentalize such slogans to legitimize war, intervention, and the expansion of their [geopolitical] influence.”

She cites examples: Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, now Iran: “Whenever real decisions need to be made, these governments sideline women- unless they conform to official narratives. This selective use of women shows their real intent: they use women not to liberate them, but to advance military-political goals.”

For Maya, Netanyahu is the epitome of this hypocrisy—a politician directly responsible for killing women and children in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria: “For someone like him, responsible for so many crimes, to invoke the name of Mahsa (Jina) Amini—it’s a moral affront. If anyone still believes that Israel will liberate Iranian women, they need only look at Gaza or post-occupation Afghanistan.”

Her message to Iranian women is clear: “As long as war machines are active and driven by militarized men, women’s suffering will be instrumentalized. We must remain vigilant—liberation cannot begin with bombs.”

Diana, a Lebanese journalist, emphasizes how the layered realities of war have fundamentally reshaped women’s lives in Lebanon. Under what she refers to as “patriarchal peace,” survival has become a multi-generational struggle:: “Grandmothers managing homes amid bombardment, mothers rebuilding after displacement, daughters facing economic collapse and mass migration. Despite everything, women have held society together, yet structural transformation in laws and political representation remains elusive.”

She notes that women’s roles shifted significantly during the civil war and subsequent occupation—taking on responsibilities as caretakers, fighters, smugglers, and negotiators—often under duress. “In the occupied South, women played key roles in sustaining social life and participated in resistance networks, especially secular ones. But war left them vulnerable to violence from ‘the enemy’ and their own communities. As [Lebanese anthropologist] Souad Joseph puts it, war not only creates widows and mothers of martyrs, but deepens patriarchal norms that restrict women even after the weapons fall silent.”

Diana believes Netanyahu’s rhetoric about women in Iran mirrors Lebanon’s experience: powerful actors borrowing feminist language to conceal violence. “As some foreign institutions or politicians have used women’s rights to justify unrelated agendas. When feminism becomes propaganda, it becomes part of the war machine—not a means to peace.”

She argues that such appropriations deplete feminism, reducing struggles for justice to hollow marketing slogans and silencing the voices of real feminists on the frontlines whose language has been co-opted. Her message to women in other crisis zones, such as Iran, is clear: “You are not alone, and you are not merely victims. Your struggle is part of a broader, global movement—but its direction and meaning must be defined by you. Do not allow others to instrumentalize your suffering to justify further violence.”

From Syria: Patriarchy fights on there too

Oula, a Syrian feminist researcher, offers a one-word answer to why foreign armed forces invoke women’s rights during wartime: “Patriarchy.” 

“Whether it’s a regime, militia, or state, they all reproduce the same logic: that they know better than we do what is good for women, what rights we should have, what problems we face, and what our future ought to be.”

As the author of the study Paths of the Feminist Movement after 2011, Oula argues that speaking about women is easy—but truly listening would require relinquishing power, something patriarchy is rarely willing to do. “When Syrians rose up in 2011, they demanded dignity, freedom, and human rights. That was a revolution for dignity—and dignity without full women’s rights is meaningless.”

Despite war, displacement, and repression, feminist organizing in Syria not only persisted but flourished. Women led local initiatives, supported survivors, and created feminist spaces both within Syria and in exile—spaces rooted not in traditional institutions, but in solidarity, care, and everyday resistance.

Yet at the critical turning points, these same women were once again pushed to the margins. Oula, with a critical view of the political process in Syria after the beginning of the transitional period, says: “Despite years of activism and feminist leadership, out of 23 ministries in the transitional government, only one was assigned to a woman. These achievements are real, but fragile. These victories were not the result of the war, but were achieved in spite of it.” According to her, 14 years of war and displacement, while painful for all Syrians, brought specific forms of violence upon women: “From rape and sexual violence in detention centers to forced disappearances, public punishments by extremist groups, and the use of women’s bodies as weapons on the battlefield.” 

Despite this harsh reality, Oula’s account of Syrian women is one of resistance in the heart of the fire. In ISIS-controlled areas, women resisted forced disappearances, taught secretly, built support networks, stood against brainwashing. In areas under foreign or local militia control, documenting abuses, coordinating humanitarian aid, and creating safe spaces—even under bombardment—became everyday acts. To Oula, survival was also rebuilding, envisioning alternatives: “Resistance wasn’t always grand demonstrations—it was keeping society together and asserting women’s presence in shaping the country’s future.”

Asked whether she sees parallels between how women are used in Syria and the global portrayal of Iranian women’s struggles, Oula responds firmly: “Absolutely. War criminals and occupiers have long used our fights for their own goals. From the French in Algeria to the US Americans in Afghanistan, colonialism always posed as ‘saving women’ to legitimize violence. Today the pattern repeats—when Netanyahu uses Iranian women’s protests to justify aggression, it’s a continuation of that violent history.”

Afghanistan: Only the color of chains changed

In 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan, promising to “free Afghan women”—a slogan that became the banner of the campaign, casting Afghan women as symbols of “salvation” from Taliban darkness. But the lived experience of women during 20 years of “the republic” tells a bleaker story.

Mazda, an Afghan women’s rights activist, speaks from that experience—from shiny storefronts whose veneer couldn’t mask the stench of obsolescence and violence. She says that freedom in Afghanistan was inflated and hollow, a balloon that popped. Over those 20 years, only a limited group of urban women accessed universities and jobs, but the societal reception remained sexist: “Appearances changed; women were no longer whipped in the street for not wearing the hijab, but abuse continued—verbal harassment, groping, unwanted touching—from street to presidential palace. Laws seemingly protecting women weren’t enforced, and the underpinning structure remained misogynistic.”

As she puts it, the US removed the Taliban’s beard from the streets, but left misogynistic structures intact: “The real voices of Afghan women were never the occupiers’ priority—not in politics, not in reconstruction plans.” Mazda says that the voices of the people—whether women or men—meant nothing to the occupying powers; they only listened to themselves and silenced everyone else with bombs, bullets, and violence: “We protested, we demonstrated, but the response was always the same: violence.”

What distinguishes indigenous feminism from imported versions is agency, Mazda says: “In local feminism, women are subjects, decision-makers—not objects for international institutions and armies to decide for.” The US‑NATO package of “democracy” implemented at Bonn conferences included a definition of women’s rights—but this was symbolic window dressing to legitimize occupation.” she says, with derision: “There was no real liberation—only the color of our chains was changed.”

She speaks about personal and collective experiences of the Afghan woman’s body as a battlefield and symbol of power, where women are blamed even when assaulted: “Society blamed her for her clothing, the law didn’t protect her; the police became perpetrators. In an environment without legal mechanisms to address femicide or sexual assault, any man in the street could act as an enforcer. The republic might have removed official hijab patrols—but patriarchy permeated society, controlling women’s bodies.”

There, Mazda says, women’s bodies became banners for regimes—republicans branded them as democratic symbols, the Taliban used them for “political Islam.” In both cases, women remain symbolic objects for legitimizing regimes. She asks: “Why do states speak so much about women in wars but never listen to them? Because women are seen as ‘honor,’ not humans. Political power always seeks means to reinforce dominance, not autonomous agents who can disrupt the status quo.”

When Netanyahu wields “Woman, Life, Freedom” to justify attacking Iran, Mazda sees a continuation of the same scenario that used Afghan women to justify occupation: “It’s laughable to think bombs bring freedom—amid bodies left in our hands. It’s absurd to consider child-killers as saviors.”

She has lived the experience of “imported freedom”: “Today millions of Afghan women have gained nothing but depression, isolation, and bans from that exported democracy. The danger of exploiting women’s suffering is more than disrespect—it gives excuses to warmongers and normalizes violence against women.”

Mazda’s message to Iranian women and others whose voices may be hijacked: “Be careful not to be used as tools. Peace is born from awareness, not bombs. No country has been liberated by bombing. All that changes is just the color of our chains.”

Zoya, a member of the AfgactivistCollective—a group of first- and second-generation Afghans aligned with the Global South movement—opposes both the US occupation and the Taliban. The collective works to link Afghan struggles with broader regional movements.

Calm yet confident, Zoya speaks of the West’s invasion under the banner of “saving Afghan women,” wryly remarking: “Twenty years of war just to replace Taliban with Taliban.”

For Zoya, the rhetoric of salvation served as a cover for economic and geopolitical interests—not women’s rights, but access to natural resources and Afghanistan’s strategic position. As she puts it, the hypocrisy was plain to see: “Everything happened in front of our eyes.” The Doha Agreement, she says, confirmed that behind the veil of liberation lay nothing but self-interest.

She states: “Our land is full of resources needed for capitalist war machines. Women’s bodies were just propaganda tools.” In her narrative, Afghan women’s resistance arose from within—from houses turned into secret classrooms, hands building progress uncontested by funding or support: “With all the money that flowed into Afghanistan, what was visible was our own effort—not international NGOs.”

She describes corrupt development models that dispossessed farmers, bought homes, forced dependence on processed food—food that created health and pharmaceutical markets for international profit. “Today’s Afghan crisis is the result of this profit logic,” Zoya says.

With the Taliban’s return, new forms of suppression emerged—religiously justified but without real basis: “From closing girls’ schools after sixth grade, banning women’s baths, to even requiring covered kitchen windows—these are all pretexts to distract us from resource extraction.”

She clenches anger at the question: “Who arms the Taliban? How did they gain power during 20 years of ‘struggle’? The same forces preaching freedom also profit from Afghan suffering—through pharmaceuticals, military, electronics industries.”

She doesn’t spare “white feminism,” openly criticizing Germany’s so-called feminist foreign policy: “Afghan women are ignored, Palestinian women are nonexistent, and Iranian women must be saved.” To her, this brand of feminism is colonialism dressed in progressive language: “They offer a false feminism—one that neither dismantles patriarchy nor challenges oppressive structures.” 

Her answer? Amplify grounded, authentic voices. “Only true narratives can withstand purple-washing—the use of feminist slogans to camouflage war and domination.” Her message to Iranian women—and to any women whose movements risk being co-opted—is clear: “We in Afghanistan, Palestine, Iran, Kurdistan, Congo, Somalia, Balochistan—we all share one struggle: against patriarchy, imperialism, and capitalism.”

The narratives of war-affected women across the region may differ in detail, but they speak in unison: liberation does not arrive through occupation or bombs, and slogans like “Woman, Life, Freedom” must not be turned into tools by powers that are themselves among the main violators of all three.

In a world where structural violence and imperialism continue to target societies of the Global South under the mask of “rescue” or “freedom,” it is more urgent than ever to listen to the voices of real women from within these communities.

They do not need saviors.

The post The Women Not Liberated by Bombs appeared first on Untold.

Davide Oberto: Kamal, can you tell us how you encountered cinema and how you started to make films?

Kamal Aljafari: When I was a Palestinian student in Jerusalem, I wasn’t really interested in art and cinema – in the sense that it wasn’t something that I aspired to pursue. 

At that time, I was mostly an activist at the university, a member of a left-wing student group.

Within that context, I began working with the (editorial) team of a magazine, where I learned how to investigate the different issues I wanted to write about.

At that point, almost by chance, I started going to the cinemathéque in Jerusalem – mainly  because everybody seemed to be going there. You could get a membership and then watch films. And I really enjoyed watching films!

But the idea of studying and making films only came later, when I started thinking about creating something to express things that I couldn’t articulate in other ways.

This desire coincided with my growing urge to leave the country. I was involved in a kind of Marxist group – it was almost like a sect – and it was really difficult to break away. So for me, making art and wanting to express myself differently and artistically became a way to escape that situation and eventually to leave the country.

I ended up going to Germany because someone told me about the school in Cologne and offered to let me stay at their place.

I was 26 when I left. That was already many years ago – my God!

I think things often happen by coincidence. In the end, I could have ended up doing something completely different, not necessarily filmmaking. 

D.: What about your first films?

K.: Well, the first film I made was at film school – the one I did in Geneva- Visit Iraq (2003, 25’). I’m not sure if I’ve already told you this: recently I wanted to digitize some old miniDV tapes of my earlier films like The Roof (2006, 61’) and others. While going through the tapes, I found three labeled “Gaza”. I had no idea what they were, I didn’t even remember ever filming in Gaza. Really, I had no recollection.

I watched the tapes, and they turned out to be footage from a visit that I made to Gaza when I was 28. At that time, I was already living in Germany. I had taken a camera from my school, returned to Palestine, and filmed for three days. And incredibly, I never watched the material.  I never digitized those tapes, so I never saw them until now. I am even in the footage myself because I had asked someone to film me while I was talking to people.

This might be  the first thing I ever filmed. You know, it just happened after my first year at film school. I had learned a bit how to use the camera, and then I went to film that. My idea back then was to make a film about my experience in prison. I was looking for someone in Gaza who was imprisoned with me. I didn’t find him, but I filmed that search, and then never watched the material. I’ve carried it with me for almost 25 years. Now that I’ve discovered it, I’m making a film from it called With Hasan in Gaza.

D.: When were you in prison?

K.: When I was 17. I talked a bit about that experience in The Roof.

D.: Have you already finished With Hasan in Gaza?

K.: (laughing) Not yet, not that fast! 

What is interesting is that there’s a lot of great material in the footage, especially the people. I filmed many people, their faces…But what is also fascinating is that I had completely forgotten all of it.

D.: In fact I’m wondering how you will work with this material, with this footage… Since you forgot you even shot it, it could function for you almost like an archive.

K.: Exactly-like an archive!!

I could only remember because I watched the footage. Otherwise, the fact that I had gone there, that I had slept at that person’s place, was completely erased from my memory. It was around the year 2000. There were bombings around the house. And Hasan, the person who hosted me, said “Yeah…don’t worry, let’s watch TV. There is a basketball game”. So he turned on the TV and he started watching the basketball game, and I filmed that. Sometimes I would look and film out of the window, checking what was happening outside. But he kept saying: “Don’t worry, don’t worry. Just come and sit next to me”.

This time I want to approach the filmmaking process differently, because this footage brought back so many memories – about Gaza, about my time in prison. I’ve written the narration, and I’ll start working on it when I’m in Paris (Kamal received a one-year fellowship at The Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Columbia University in Paris).

With Hasan in Gaza is actually the first thing I ever shot, and it’s become a kind of archival footage. It’s crazy, because it has only now come to light. I carried it with me all these years, never watched it – and it’s really strange how things happen. That’s why I say: it’s not always about what we decide to do. It’s about what life brings us, how life carries us to places.

I could have ended up being a writer, instead of making films. I don’t want to say that I was born to make films. Sometimes, we start something, we enjoy it, we stay with it. We live, and life leads us.

 D: Maybe cinema turned out to be the perfect language for expressing a necessity…

 K.: In a way, yes.

I started by writing for the political magazine, doing reportages, but not only. I also expressed more poetic feelings, and I started taking photos for the magazine, too.

I think that filmmaking, in a way, was an accident – a good accident, but still an accident.

It could have completely failed. I went to study in Cologne, and it could have happened that I didn’t enjoy it. But in the end, I stayed, and I’m still making films. It might sound really crazy, but most of the people I studied with don’t make films anymore. No one! At some point, you start a family…I don’t know…You have to work…It becomes too hard to be a filmmaker…

It’s strange, because I didn’t plan it this way. I didn’t intend to make films with archival footage, and now even though there is a fiction film I want to make I find myself working in an archive again.

This time, it’s my own archive, but it really is an archive. I can watch myself at 28 years old. I still had a lot of hair, and I was very attentive and curious.

D: I think cinema, in your case – especially considering your early films like The Roof, Balconies (2007, 7’), Port of Memory (2009, 62’) – is a remarkable opportunity , or perhaps a serendipitous accident, to combine space and time. You went to this film school in Cologne, then returned to Ramleh (Kamal Aljafari’s hometown, Editor’s note) where you began  intertwining  the space around you with the personal (hi)story and the time of your family…

K.: For me, it was something natural and instinctive – to fill the environment I came from with meaning.

 I grew up in a house where the second floor was left unfinished. So, for me, the sense of belonging to a certain sense of history was always there.

When I returned,  I made my first feature-length film, The Roof, in 2004.

I was immediately attracted by this landscape, which was part of my story, part of what I wanted to express. I couldn’t do what I wanted to do without relating to that.

D.: Maybe you can tell us where your family lives.

K.: On my mother’s side, the family came from Jaffa; on my father’s side, from Ramleh. Both families were internally displaced, meaning they lost their homes, and were resettled to houses that belonged to other Palestinians. They couldn’t return to their original houses, because their neighborhoods were destroyed. After 1948, the Israeli army created ghettos for the Palestinians who remained in Israel. 

In Jaffa, out of 120,000, only a tiny minority, about 2000, stayed. The same happened in Ramleh, only 100 remained out of around 30,000. The house where I was born had previously belonged to another Palestinian family. It was “given” to my family because this area had been designated as the area where all the Palestinians who stayed after 1948 were gathered. The house was unfinished – the second floor was never completed – and they lived there. It has remained the same ever since, because the municipality doesn’t give permission to build further. It’s been frozen in time for 76 years.

So, naturally, this space became part of my films. And this space is, of course, also intertwined with time. Generation after generation, you inherit a special sense of time. I think I tried to explain this spacetime idea in The Roof, where I said that my parents live on the ground floor, and the past lives above them, on the second floor.

D.: And then you move on to using archival material or, rather, creating your own archive.

K.: I wanted to tell the story of where my mother came from and of the neighborhood where  her family came from. It was a fisherman’s neighborhood, now part of Tel Aviv. By chance, I discovered that some Israeli films from the 60s had captured this place before it was completely destroyed. And that’s how I came up with the idea of making a film. Initially, I just wanted to collect images of the backgrounds from those Israeli films. But then, I found that there are many films shot in Jaffa in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. I began a photographic project, taking snapshots of these backgrounds. I would project the films and focus on the details appearing in the background: houses, people and fragments of everyday life. At first, I didn’t intend to make a film, it was just mostly about collecting images. I was so thrilled to see and discover these places in the background of Israeli films.

That led to my decision to make Recollection (2015, 70’), a film about memory and the act of recollecting or remembering. I made it precisely because those places no longer exist physically: they survive only virtually, in images. And, as I mentioned earlier, one project leads to another.

D.: in Recollection and in An Unusual Summer (2020, 80’) you are no longer working with the footage you shot yourself. Especially in Recollection, you did something incredibly powerful politically too. You used these Israeli films shot in Jaffa and you deliberately erased  the actors…

K.: I’ve always reworked the images to make them my own. I didn’t just take the archival footage as it is. I reworked these images and, by doing so, I created a different ownership. Altering these images is both an artistic and political act. In a way, by changing them, you liberate them and they become your own images.

D.: This might be the difference between a document and a documentary.

K.: I never think in terms of  style or genre, like “Now I’m making a documentary…” . I just try to find the right way to express myself. I don’t set boundaries. I use whatever tools I think are necessary.

For example, in A Fidai film (2024, 78’) I also used some Israeli fiction films scenes, because they helped me express myself and show something. What I’m doing is, in a way, free-form art.

D.: In fact we can say that in A Fidai Film, your most recent work, you express your freedom to the fullest. Can you tell us about the genesis of the film? How did you discover the material?

K.: I’ve been collecting images for a long time, from many different places. During the  COVID pandemic, the Israeli Cinema Archives began uploading a large amount of material online, and I’ve been watching these videos from the very beginning. I was particularly interested in what they had  on Jaffa and Ramleh, and I started recording images that I found interesting. 

Then, by chance, a friend sent me an article about what happened in 1982 during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when the Israeli army looted and destroyed the Palestinian Research Center in Beirut. That  article sparked the idea of making a film – one where I would sabotage the material coming from Israeli archives. I came up with the title, A Fidai Film, because “Fidayin” refers to the Palestinian fighters who, in the early years, crossed the border and made actions not to harm people but to sabotage the Zionist project, such as planting a bomb in a factory. 

In Hebrew, they were called “saboteurs”, a term still used today to describe Palestinian fighters. There is actually a very funny interview with Edward Said where he talks about this word. He recounts an incident from 1982, when the Israeli Army had captured a Palestinian fighter in Beirut. During the interrogation, they asked if he was a saboteur. Thinking to save his own life, he answered: “Yes, I’m a saboteur”. Then the interview took a surreal and absurd turn. They asked him what exactly he did as a saboteur and he answered: “I wake up in the morning and I think about sabotaging things”. 

In some way, when I came up with this title, everything fell into place. I began downloading and capturing video materials online with the intention of ‘sabotaging’ the images.

In many of the Israeli films that I captured, both documentary and fiction, Palestinian places and landscapes are used as visual backdrops during the opening and end credits. That was always deeply disturbing to me, and I felt the need to sabotage it, to literally scratch over the names of the titles. That’s how I started. Then I discovered footage taken by the Israeli army from the Palestinian Research Center, and I did the same to what they had written over the images at the beginning of each clip. So, sabotage by sabotage, the film came to life. The process itself became the film and that’s what makes the Fidai project so unusual and interesting.

The starting point is what happened in 1982, but the material comes from many different sources. I sabotage, I intervene, I disrupt, I remove people, I erase texts, I create a new meaning.

D.: I love the fiction scene with the two lovers on the beach. It feels like a French film from the ‘60s. You can almost imagine a Serge Gainsbourg song playing in the background. You can recognize the style, the period, and yet the effect you create feels so uncomfortable, so unheimlich, so unpleasant.

 K.: That film actually screened in Cannes, as a short, sometime around 1965.

When I watched it, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The dialog, in all its banality, reflects  exactly what they are doing to Palestine.

The man says: “I’m gonna go on and on like this. I can’t stop it”, and the woman replies: “It’s terrible, but we can’t stop it”. The scene, to me, captures the essence of the Zionist project: the recognition of the harm and yet an unwillingness or refusal to stop.

By covering their faces and sabotaging the image, you create this new meaning. Otherwise, it’s just a couple on the beach. Once you put on this mask, they become someone else. The scene becomes something else. It’s no longer about them. It becomes a metaphor for  something much larger.

D.: How did you decide to include the text (Letter from Gaza, 1956) by Ghassan Kanafani? (Ghassan Kanafani was a Palestinian journalist, politician, and author. He developed the notion of “resistance literature”. Born in 1936 in Acre, he was assassinated by the Mossad along with his niece on 8th July 1972. A/N)

K.: I felt it was necessary to find references that convey  a sense of history through personal stories. Kanafani always wrote about the stories of individuals.

When I was a teenager, my history teacher asked us to record some oral history. I interviewed an elderly neighbour who told me a story that, years later, I found  again in Letter from Gaza. He spoke about the possibility of going to California and about a boy who had lost his leg.

It’s very likely that  Kanafani had heard a similar story from someone in a refugee camp in Lebanon or in Jordan. I don’t know exactly where. In Letter from Gaza, he recounts a story from 1956, during the first major Israeli military attack on Gaza. He writes about the 13-year-old Nadia who has lost her leg during the attack.

Reading that text today,  it becomes clear just how long this suffering has been going on. Including Letter from Gaza in the film could be seen as a response to what’s happening today, but it isn’t. I’m talking about 1956. And yet, it is about today,  just on a different scale.

People watching the film now often think it’s a reaction to what happened in October. In reality, the film was finished between July and August 2023 – the final edit even earlier. 

But it’s true that the film reveals the background of what is happening today.

D.: That’s probably why those in  power always try to destroy archives.

The footage of the destruction of the Palestinian Research Center in 1983 is incredibly powerful and scary.

K.: Yes, those in  power always try to erase evidence.

The story of the Center is both symbolic and, frankly, quite surreal. First, they tried to assassinate Anis Sayigh, the director of the Center. They sent him an envelope bomb, which exploded in his face. He nearly died, and lived the rest of his life with severe hearing damage and a constant, painful noise in his ears. 

But he survived, and continued his work directing the Center. Later, the Israeli army looted the place. After the army withdrew from Beirut to South Lebanon, some of the Center’s staff came back to rebuild the library. But the army had planted a powerful bomb. Many people were killed, the street was completely destroyed, cars were incinerated. 

The goal was clear: to put an end, once and for all, to the efforts of documenting Palestine. To permanently erase the archive. To destroy any attempt at building a historical record, a collective memory.   

D.: What are your projects after With Hasan in Gaza? You mentioned working on a fiction film…

K.: Yes. I’ve written the script, but I don’t think I will shoot it in Palestine as I originally planned. I want to find a different way of doing it, to continue this tradition of working with something more virtual.

I’m still figuring it out. There are so many possibilities today with 3D technology: you can create anything. Of course, filming remains important to me, but I think I want to use the material differently. I want to create something that isn’t realistic, even in terms of place or setting. That’s the direction I want to pursue, but first, I want to finish the Gaza film.

D.: What you are saying about the impossibility of shooting in Palestine and the necessity to imagine and to build a virtual reality reminds me of a scene from Film Socialisme by Jean-Luc Godard. When the cruise ship arrives in front of Palestine, we don’t see the land itself. 

Instead, we just see a Palestinian postcard with the words “défense d’entrer” (forbidden entry) written across it.

K.: Working with archives is directly tied to this feeling of inaccessibility. In theory, I could go there, but the place is inaccessible because it was destroyed. So I turned to archival films- images captured by others – because these destroyed places continue to exist only through these images.

But the inaccessibility is also deeply psychological. Today, I find it very difficult to imagine myself going back. I can’t picture myself landing there. It’s become such a psychological barrier, and that in itself forces me to rethink how I can make films.

I can’t just make a normal film now. The idea of simply going there and shooting, I can’t imagine myself doing that.

Avoiding that direct return has become a way to protect myself. I know it would be emotionally challenging. So I try to work differently, with distance and with layers. For this fiction film, I’ll probably return to archives again. Over the years, I have collected so much material, thousands of hours, stored in many hard-drives. Some of it I shot myself. I want to find a way to use all this material.

I have to work with limitations. Limitations force you to create something unexpected, which sometimes results in a much more powerful film.

Imagine this: I want to make a fiction film, but I can’t shoot it in the place where the story is set. Maybe, I’ll shoot it in a similar location, not pretending that it is Palestine. Perhaps in Palermo or in Lisbon.  There is something of Jaffa in Palermo for sure. I might insert some shots from there and it will be clear that it is Palermo and not Jaffa, but it doesn’t matter to me. Palermo is also part of my history. 

Ultimately, I’m speaking about a country that we have lost, a homeland that we have lost and I’m not trying to escape from that loss. Every film I’ve made -and every film I will make-, starts  from that condition, from trying to find a way to relate to it.

D.: One last question about the beginning of A Fidai Film. The film opens with a giant red sun: a striking image. It reminds me of the postnuclear films from the 80s…Why did you choose to start the film with such a symbolic image?

K.: This idea came from the feeling that colonialism and the Zionist project want to block out  the sun, and of course this image gives the sensation that a disaster is looming. But you can’t cover the sun forever, you can try, as I did in the film, but it won’t work. The sun always  comes back, even after a disaster. 

The post Accidents, Archives, and Acts of Sabotage: A Conversation with Palestinian Film Director Kamal Aljafari appeared first on Untold.

Over the course of her service, Ling was stationed at key military sites, including the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) headquarters at Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia, an Air National Guard unit in Kansas, and several overseas deployments. 

She ended her active-duty career at Beale and later traveled to Afghanistan to witness firsthand the impact of the systems she once participated in.

In the years since, Ling has become a whistleblower and researcher, critically examining the convergence of AI, surveillance, and automated warfare. Together with fellow whistleblower Cian Westmoreland, she coined the term Kill Cloud, a term first introduced in the anthology Whistleblowing for Change edited by Tatiana Bazzichelli (transcript Verlag, 2021)—to describe the sprawling, networked infrastructure enabling data-driven killing. 

This interview was conducted in partnership with the research programme Investigating the Kill Cloud: Information Warfare, Autonomous Weapons & AI (2023–2024), developed by Disruption Network Lab to bring together whistleblowers, researchers, and artists to interrogate the future of warfare and the growing entanglement of military systems with artificial intelligence.

Walid El Houri: Can you explain the “Kill Cloud” concept and how it encapsulates the evolution of networked warfare?

Lisa Ling: The term kill cloud mostly came from Cian Westmoreland as we tried to find a way to explain what’s really happening. The concept itself isn’t laid out in a way that connects all the moving parts—because there are so many.

To understand the kill cloud, think about everything we have connected to networks today: refrigerators, TVs, phones, computers. All of these devices communicate with each other to make life “simpler.”

Technology has been helpful in many ways. But when the same systems are used to target or kill, the connected devices are no longer just printers or mice. They become drones, weapons, robot dogs, and other tools that can be disconnected, loaded with data, and deployed to kill. The technology isn’t radically new, it’s just scaled up.

Corporations like Amazon, Microsoft, and telecom companies have built the infrastructure that moves data, and the military now uses that same infrastructure, not to send emails or order a ride, but to identify and target people. So when we order an Uber, that’s data coming from the cloud. And when the military uses the same cloud-based systems to kill, it makes sense to call it the kill cloud, because that’s what it is.

WH: How has the shift from geographically confined battlefields to global, interconnected military systems changed the ethics and accountability of war? How do you think the public’s understanding of drones especially in the West obscures the broader implications of network-centric warfare?

LL: When wars began, it was person against person. You sent battalions, large armies. It all took time. Now, take something like Elon Musk’s reusable rocket: you could load it with military equipment and, later, personnel, and send them anywhere on the planet within an hour. The barrier of distance is gone.

Another major barrier used to be public outcry. When people’s sons and daughters were sent to war, families protested. But now we’re not sending as many people, we’re sending machines. That shift reduces public resistance and feeds myths: that war is now safer, that strikes are precise, that conflicts will be shorter. In reality, what we’ve seen is endless war. 

Drone strikes have crossed borders into places not officially at war, and the laws of armed conflict, international humanitarian law,all once considered customary, are now eroding in favor of what I would call a techno-colonial ethic.

When we talk about smaller drones, often called the “weapon of choice of the poor,” we’re not looking at network-centric warfare. These are local, line-of-sight systems, often used to collect data in place of risking human life. In fact, when drones were first deployed, at least by the U.S., they didn’t carry weapons. They were used for overwatch. You could observe two opposing forces and maybe redirect one to avoid unnecessary death. But once weapons were added to drones, just like with any platform, their primary function shifted: from surveillance or defense to killing. That’s when defensive protective technology becomes offensive killing technology.

WH: What are the most concerning implications and pressing issues of integrating AI into military systems, such as autonomous targeting platforms? What has the Israeli war on Gaza shown in this regard for the future of warfare elsewhere? 

LL: There are a lot of implications here. War planners and war makers are saying many things about this technology, and even those who oppose it still talk about “putting a human in the loop.”

Let’s say the system scans over 700,000 records and narrows that down to a subset shown to the person tasked with pressing the button to fire a weapon. If that person, the so-called “human in the loop,” like the one reportedly involved in Israel’s operations, can’t meaningfully read or process that data, does their presence actually change anything? I don’t think it does. It’s like clicking “agree” on an end user license agreement—most of us don’t read it, we just press enter. There’s this built-in trust that the computer must be right, that what it produces is inherently just. But the evidence, especially in Gaza, doesn’t support that belief.

So who’s responsible when a missile is fired? The person in the loop? The commander? The programmer who built the AI? The corporation, Microsoft or Google, that provided the system? We don’t even have a framework for how that responsibility is assigned.

In a paper I wrote, I discussed the AEGIS weapons system. Compared to newer systems, it’s relatively simple: a plane either sends a signal—“I’m friendly” or “I’m a civilian”, or it doesn’t. Even then, during the investigation into the downing of Flight 655 over Iran, both sides disagreed, and it was messy. But at least there was an audit trail to verify the information.

Do these new drone and AI systems have an audit trail? I haven’t heard much discussion about oversight in that form. Most of what I hear is still about humans in the loop.

Meredith Whitaker talks about large language models (LLMs) being used by the military. These models ingest vast amounts of data scraped from the internet, data about you, me, anyone who’s used a credit card, signed onto a network, or interacted with any cloud-connected system like Uber. Anyone could potentially be flagged as a target.

Take something as simple as frequent movement. In some cultures, that’s normal and appropriate. In the U.S., young people move around a lot. That doesn’t mean they’re terrorists, but in these systems, such behavior can become a trigger for targeting. How does that make any sense?

And there’s a real difference between someone forced into a situation by circumstance and someone actively working to harm others. But I don’t see those distinctions built into the logic of these systems.

What I do suspect is that most of the incoming data in these devices is framed positively, “this is who to target.” But is there anything in the system that says, for example, “do not target a U.S. NGO,” like in the last drone strike in Afghanistan? Clearly not. I don’t have evidence that AI was involved in that strike, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was.

WH: How can oversight mechanisms keep up with the rapid evolution of technologies like the “Kill Cloud”? And is there really the ability to have real oversight let alone accountability within the present world system? 

LL: I think treaties and similar mechanisms could help, but we’re talking about intergenerational efforts. Look at how long it took to address nuclear weapons, landmines, or cluster munitions. How many people had to die before those agreements were even considered? And even then, will such treaties be honored?

Do I see any effective oversight today, with the systems we have? Honestly, I don’t. Will international humanitarian law hold? It doesn’t seem so now. Even if one doesn’t consider what’s happening in Palestine to be genocide, there are clearly war crimes being ignored. So can anything be done when powerful countries can veto action at the UN Security Council? I don’t know. But right now, I don’t see a viable path forward.

As for governing these technologies, you’d need to navigate patent law, corporate protections, military secrecy, state secrecy. I don’t know how any group or committee would gain access to what’s actually feeding these systems.

In scientific research, there are rigorous methods for collecting and validating data, whether through double-blind studies or other structured approaches. But the way these targeting systems collect data is nothing like that. From what I’ve seen, it’s about collecting everything: buying from data brokers, gathering it yourself, ingesting it from networked systems. There’s no disciplined or transparent method behind how data is used to target buildings, weapons, or people. I just don’t see it.

WH: What role do major tech companies play in the development of military systems, and how does that affect public accountability? How can we hold such massive companies accountable? 

LL: This brings up another aspect of networked warfare: propaganda. These systems have the capacity to spread information far beyond the boundaries of any one nation-state, and then there’s geo-censorship. You might think you’re seeing everything when researching online, but you’re not. For example, while I was in Berlin, I could access certain sites that became unavailable once I returned to the U.S. That really shifted my thinking.

As with many other issues, the old saying applies: Follow the money. You can see who profits from this system of war, figures like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen. They’re venture capitalists, and that’s a major conflict of interest in the current U.S. context.

I’m not a financial expert, but it’s clear that much of Silicon Valley has lobbied Congress for expanded powers and influence.

I now see companies like Microsoft and Google as weapons contractors, no different from Raytheon or other legacy defense firms. Think of all the employees who left Google over Project Maven, that was part of a much larger weapons system. And if negotiations to stop the war in Palestine were happening at the same time as defense contracts were being signed with Microsoft and others, then what we’re looking at is a stalemate.

WH: What do you foresee as the next major challenges in regulating AI and networked systems in warfare? Do you see hope that there can be ethical use or better governance of these technologies in the future?

LL: I’d like to think there’s hope. I really would. Human beings are a hopeful lot. But right now, what seems to be missing is the political will of nation-states to prioritize governance before technological advancement.

There’s an enormous dependence on artificial intelligence, and that dependence is overstated, both in terms of accuracy and the myth that AI can be unbiased. All of this data comes from a world with a long history of bias and racism, especially in the West. So how can we expect unbiased outcomes from systems built on biased data?

Where should governance happen? Do we regulate the large language models before they’re handed over to the military? Do we regulate the data brokers and miners, what they collect, what they sell? Do we regulate credit card companies and what they share with brokers?

There used to be strong intelligence oversight in the military, but even that has changed. Now, accountability is so diffused that in a single strike, multiple entities are involved. So where does accountability lie?

I don’t think any of these questions have been clearly answered, or even seriously addressed. I hear people talking about how today’s soldiers are learning to trust AI, about human-AI teaming with robotic dogs and other systems. But what I’m not hearing is talk about oversight, governance, or human rights.

Warfare no longer looks like it used to. Your enemy no longer wears a uniform. Anyone can buy a drone off the shelf, strap a Molotov cocktail to it, and send it flying. The accessibility of this tech has created a mess.

I’m still hopeful, because there are still people who care about justice, fairness, and humanity. I believe enough of those people exist that something can change. But the ubiquity of these systems makes it harder.

Everyone can see the drones, the hardware, but what’s hidden is how these aren’t truly “unmanned” systems. They’re hypermanned, just not onboard. And because these technologies are embedded in our everyday lives, through communication systems, smart devices, and cloud platforms. They’ve become invisible and normalized.

It used to be hard and expensive to make a long-distance call. Now, it’s hard not to be connected. And that makes this fight more complex.

But if people start talking about these difficult topics, war, surveillance, militarization, and start engaging as if their own children were being sent to war, it could make a real difference. In the past, those sent to war sometimes had parents in power. Now, wars can be executed from a hometown. That’s a major shift.

The character of war has changed, but war itself hasn’t. It’s still violent. It’s still one of the ugliest things we humans do. And if we can start speaking honestly about that, at the community level, we might begin to push for change.

The post Invisible Systems, Endless Wars, and Hypermanned Killing Machines: Lisa Ling on AI, Surveillance, and the Future of Conflict appeared first on Untold.

Walid El Houri: You’ve spent more than a decade researching drone warfare and surveillance. How did you begin working in this field?

Khalil Dewan: I’ve been researching the global war on terror and drone strikes for the better part of 15 years. I’ve covered the US, UK, France, and other drone programs, and one of the things that’s become clear is how these Western powers are using drone warfare for several strategic purposes. Most notably, they enable easier killing through what I call the individualisation of warfare, a new form of conflict where states no longer just target non-state armed groups or enemy states, but individuals themselves, based on conduct or perceived threat.

WH: Can you explain what you mean by “individualisation of warfare”?

KD: It’s about going after people rather than traditional military targets. Drones can fly and hover over remote parts of the world and strike individuals with very little legal accountability. This kind of targeting has dominated the past two decades of the global war on terror. And now, with AI-enabled targeting systems, things are becoming even more problematic.

WH: How is AI being used in targeted killings, especially in places like Gaza?

KD: In the case of Israel, for example, we’ve seen the use of AI-enabled targeting systems through drones. These systems are designed to process metadata and help identify targets who can be struck and where they may be located, especially in complex urban environments like Gaza. But that’s highly problematic, especially when used by states like Israel or the US, which already operate under an enabling posture, meaning they are already inclined to strike, with or without clear legal justification.

WH: What are the legal implications of this AI-driven kill chain?

KD: It complicates everything. We’re no longer just asking whether a killing was lawful. Now we’re dealing with algorithmic bias baked into AI systems. Biases that are designed and implemented by states. In an armed conflict, relying on such technology raises serious legal and ethical concerns. Who designed the system? What biases are embedded? Who’s accountable when the wrong person is killed?

WH: We saw the use of biometric scans during evacuations in Gaza. What are the implications of such surveillance in a humanitarian context?

KD: It’s deeply troubling. When Israel opened what it called an evacuation corridor in Gaza, Palestinians were held between two large structures and forced to have their faces scanned before being allowed to move. This was done amid ongoing shelling and airstrikes, and it shows how biometric data extraction is being used as a precondition for survival. Palestinians are already among the most heavily surveilled communities in the world, and now biometric submission is being weaponized during a humanitarian crisis.

WH: Does this practice align with international law?

KD: It certainly raises major concerns. International law is being manipulated, particularly by Western states, to justify targeted killings both inside and outside of armed conflict. They rely on legal arguments about imminent threats, self-defense, and the use of force, but in reality, they are pushing the boundaries of lawfare. Forcing biometric scans during a crisis, for example, fits within a broader strategy of control and dehumanization, not humanitarian protection.

WH: What role do private actors play in this new landscape of warfare?

KD: Private actors are increasingly involved, whether through data processing, AI development, or logistical support. This privatisation of warfare makes it even harder to assign accountability. You have a blurred line between state and corporate responsibility, and international law isn’t adequately equipped to handle that yet.

WH: How do you see the future of AI and autonomy shaping the battlefield?

KD: What we are witnessing in Gaza is the future of warfare, a convergence of AI, autonomy, targeted killings, and legal manipulation. States are racing to stay competitive in this space. The global South is developing its own drone and AI capabilities and looking at the last 20 years, particularly at Israel’s actions in Gaza, and asking, “If they can get away with it, what should our position be?”

WH: What advice do you have for states in the Global South navigating this environment?

KD: My message is clear: comply with international law as faithfully as possible. Uphold ethical standards, chivalry, if you will, but also recognize the geopolitical reality. States must remain competitive in the lawmaking process. They shouldn’t be colonized by international law that’s weaponized by powerful actors, but they also shouldn’t abandon it. It’s about balancing ethics with survival, because if Gaza has taught us anything, it’s that survival is now a legal, political, and existential question.

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