The building does not just display history; it selects which histories can remain visible, and which must be softened, abstracted, or forgotten.

This is where the stakes emerge. The museum’s beauty carries political work: it naturalizes a version of the country in which conflict, inequality, and rupture are treated as noise rather than memory. By monumentalizing continuity, the institution implies consensus. By designing awe, it designs obedience. The danger is not that the museum tells a story—every museum does—but that it presents its story as the only one with the right to fill space.

The Grand Egyptian Museum is both architecture and argument. Its material language, spatial choreography, and territorial placement operate like a voice: articulating what the state wants to be believed about the past, and what it hopes the public will no longer remember about the present.

Architecture and the Performance of Sovereignty

The Grand Egyptian Museum acknowledges that architecture is a performance of authority, a stage on which the state rehearses its preferred version of Egypt. Its size, symmetry, and alignment with the desert plateau are not only aesthetic performances; they are choices that speak in the state’s voice. Through these gestures, the structure suggests that the nation is continuous, cohesive, and immune to rupture. What appears to be a museum of the past is, in practice, a projection of the present—a carefully built argument about who owns history and who is permitted to stand inside it.

Official discourse reinforces this message. The museum is presented as a “national gift to the world” and a testament to an eternal civilizational identity, as though a single architectural form could gather every fragment of Egypt into one unbroken narrative. The effect is deliberate: to make political discontinuity feel like historical continuity; to transform instability into destiny. In this framework, the museum does not claim legitimacy; it manufactures it. The visitor is invited to marvel not only at antiquity, but at the modern state’s ability to summon antiquity as proof of its right to rule.

Inside, form becomes instruction. The procession from forecourt to atrium to monumental staircase guides visitors through a spatial lesson in belonging. Awe is not incidental—it is engineered. By directing the gaze upward, outward, and forward, the museum implies that the state is both heir to the ancient past and guarantor of the national future. The body learns by moving. The eye learns by being guided. Authority is absorbed not as argument but as atmosphere.

This is where the strings attached become visible. The question is not whether the museum is beautiful; it is what this beauty is doing. Architecture performs sovereignty not by describing power, but by making it feel natural, inevitable—like the only possible order. In the Grand Egyptian Museum, design becomes a form of speech. The building does not say the state is permanent; it teaches permanence. And in that lesson, certain histories—revolutionary, contested, or inconvenient—must be quiet enough to fade beneath the alabaster light.

Site, Form, and Design

The Grand Egyptian Museum does not sit neutrally on the edge of Cairo; it occupies the city like a statement. Its site, drawn between the density of the urban plain and the rising desert plateau, stages a threshold where the state can curate what Egypt looks like before one even enters the building. The approach—highways, forecourts, controlled access points—prepares the visitor to see the museum not as a public institution but as a destination that has already decided how it should be seen.

The building’s triangulated geometry, derived from the visual lines to the Giza pyramids, is more than an architectural concept; it is a strategy of affiliation. By joining itself to the horizon of antiquity, the museum anchors the present regime to the authority of the ancient past. Material choices reinforce the logic: alabaster, historically used in temples and tombs, glows at dawn and dusk in a way that suggests reverence, authenticity, and inevitability. It is a calculated softness—an aesthetic of welcome that conceals the precision of control behind it.

Inside, the museum’s interior volumes are organized as if they were a landscape of ascent. Wide halls, controlled perspectives, and the long pull of the monumental staircase train the body to read space as progress. The building is not merely walked; it is climbed, ascended, and internalized. Architecture becomes choreography, and choreography becomes instruction. Even the generous sightlines toward the pyramids are not simply vistas; they are confirmations: this is where the story comes from, and this is where the state claims the right to continue it.

At this scale, design produces a political effect. The museum does not demand belief; it designs the conditions under which belief becomes the easiest response. It organizes the city’s edge into a controlled frontier, turning territory into narrative and access into agreement. The message embedded in the site is clear: Egypt can be seen from here—but only in the way the state prefers it to be seen.

Materiality, Light, and the Aesthetic of the Sublime State

Light does a particular kind of political work in the Grand Egyptian Museum. The alabaster façade, glowing at dawn and radiant from within at night, softens the building’s edges just enough to make authority feel gentle. It produces an atmosphere of invitation, but one in which the terms of entry are already decided. Transparency is suggested, not granted; openness is performed, not lived. What looks like light is also a kind of veil.

Inside, illumination becomes a form of direction. Daylight enters through triangulated skylights and alabaster fins that scatter brightness across statues and vitrines, creating a visual field where artifacts appear suspended in reverence. The visitor is not simply observing objects; they are being positioned in relation to them. Light gathers the eye, concentrates it, tutors it. The museum does not tell the visitor what to think—its spatial glow teaches them how to see.

This aesthetic is not accidental. By producing awe, the museum produces agreement. The softness of the alabaster, the slow bloom of light across stone surfaces, the calibrated passage from shadow to radiance—they are emotional cues that smooth over rupture. The technique is subtle: instead of commanding, it persuades; instead of asserting power, it normalizes it. Authority arrives not as an order, but as ambience.

What emerges is a choreography of perception. Light does not simply reveal the architecture; it completes its argument. It ensures that the emotional register of the museum—wonder, pride, belonging—leans toward acceptance rather than interruption. And in that emotional current, alternative narratives lose volume. Under the alabaster glow, disagreement dims, critique quiets, and the idea of a single, unbroken national story becomes easier to believe.

Spatial Choreography and State Pedagogy

The Grand Egyptian Museum is not only a sequence of rooms; it is a sequence of lessons. The spatial journey—from the forecourt to the atrium, to the monumental staircase, to the galleries, and finally to the terrace facing the pyramids—produces a controlled progression in which movement becomes meaning. Each transition feels natural, but it is choreographed with intent. The visitor is ushered from anticipation to reverence to confirmation, as if the architecture were guiding thought through the body rather than through language.

The forecourt acts like a threshold of discipline. It separates the turbulence of Cairo from the curated calm of the museum, signaling that one is crossing from the city’s contested present into a state-managed version of the past. The atrium, dominated by monumental figures, shifts the scale of the body: the visitor becomes smaller, and the state—architecturally speaking—becomes larger. The monumental staircase then performs the emotional climax. Ascending it feels like rising into the national narrative itself, as if the visitor were being placed inside the timeline the state prefers.

Pedagogy happens through design. The galleries are arranged to unfold history as an inevitability: a straight line from antiquity to modern authority, uninterrupted, unbroken, unquestioned. Rooms do not simply display objects; they display a worldview. The architecture directs pacing, determines sightlines, and maintains focus, allowing little room for hesitation or doubt. Even when the visitor pauses, the building continues narrating around them, as if the story could not be stopped.

This choreography carries a political charge. The museum does not instruct through argument or didactic panels; it teaches by shaping how the visitor moves, sees, and remembers. It performs the state’s preferred logic: that belonging is simple, that continuity is self-evident, that the nation has always been whole. The effect is persuasive not because it demands consent, but because it makes consent feel like the most intuitive response. In this sense, the museum behaves less like a cultural institution and more like a training ground for a particular way of imagining Egypt—one where disagreement has no spatial equivalent and where dissent finds no place to stand.

Urbanism, Mobility, and Territorial Control

The Grand Egyptian Museum does not stand alone; it is the anchor of a redesigned territory. The highways, landscaped approaches, security perimeters, and dedicated access routes are not supporting infrastructure—they are part of the project’s architecture. Before the visitor reaches the building, the city has already been edited. Mobility is directed, visibility is managed, and arrival is staged as proof that the museum exists at the center of an orderly national landscape. The edge of Cairo becomes a frontier where the state can choreograph what the capital looks like, and who gets to approach it.

This territorial framing reimagines the western periphery of the city as a controlled zone of presentation. The new roads bypass neighborhoods that once surrounded the plateau, replacing the improvisation of informal life with a curated route that leads directly to the museum’s entrance. What appears as efficiency is also isolation; what appears as access is also filtration. The surrounding communities, markets, and everyday noise of the area are quieted by distance. The museum reads as if it rises out of empty land, even though it does not. The silence is engineered.

Tourism infrastructure intensifies this effect. Airports, arterials, and hotel corridors link into the museum like arteries feeding an image. The state gains not only visitors but vantage points. The approach offers views that feel cinematic—framed horizons, measured distances, controlled skylines that hide the city’s contradictions. This is not about hiding Cairo; it is about selecting which Cairo will be seen. The result is a geography where the museum becomes both destination and filter: a place that promises access to the nation while deciding what the nation looks like on the way in.

In this configuration, territory becomes narrative. Space is made to speak. The controlled approach routes tell the visitor that the city is coherent, the nation is continuous, and the state is the author of both. And because this coherence is experienced physically—driven, walked, entered—it becomes easier to believe. The choreography of arrival, movement, and containment performs a political claim long before architecture comes into view: that modern Egypt can be understood from here, and that the legitimacy of the present depends on the disappearance of what surrounds it.

Authoritarian Monumentality in Historical Perspective

The Grand Egyptian Museum joins a longer tradition in which states build at scales that exceed function in order to exceed doubt. Monumentality here is not an architectural genre, but a political method: a way for governments to materialize certainty where consensus is fragile, and to project continuity where history has been fractured. Across different contexts and eras, monumental projects have served the same purpose—to turn authority into something that looks like geology, something too large to argue with.

Seen in this light, the museum inherits more than its alignment with the pyramids; it inherits the logic of monuments that stabilize regimes by stabilizing narrative. Just as earlier authoritarian and developmentalist states built to outlast the criticism of the present, the museum builds to outlast the memory of rupture. The gesture is familiar: when politics is unsettled, architecture is asked to appear immovable; when identity is contested, stone is asked to speak more loudly than people. The building functions as reassurance, not evidence.

But unlike older monumental projects, the Grand Egyptian Museum operates under conditions shaped by global capital and transnational cultural networks. Loans, consultants, partnerships, and international museological standards do not weaken the national message; they amplify it. They allow the state to present its narrative as globally verified, technically endorsed, and culturally neutral—when it is, in fact, a deeply situated political argument. The museum becomes not just a monument to heritage, but a monument to the credibility of the state itself.

This continuity with past monumentalism is less about imitation than adaptation. Ancient complexes sacralized divine rule; twentieth-century megaprojects dramatized ideological futures; the museum sacralizes heritage as proof of modern authority. In each case, scale stands in for consensus, and spectacle stands in for negotiation. The architectural language changes, but the political instinct does not. The building does not ask the public to believe; it asks them to stand in front of something that makes belief feel unnecessary.

The result is a paradox: a project that appears inclusive by virtue of cultural pride, yet exclusive by virtue of the narrative it enforces. It remembers too much of one history and too little of another. It claims to gather the nation, but it gathers only the version of the nation that can fit inside its myth. What is absent is not forgotten by accident; it is forgotten by design.

The Authoritarian Sublime and the State Machine

The Grand Egyptian Museum presents itself as a place of preservation, yet its power lies in what it constructs rather than what it protects. It uses alignment, scale, and the softness of light to turn architecture into a statement of endurance. The building does not argue for the state’s permanence; it rehearses it. It makes authority feel architectural—quiet, inevitable, already decided.

This is what gives the project its force. By organizing sightlines, controlling approach routes, and scripting movement, the museum draws a boundary around which futures are imaginable and which histories are permitted to matter. The narrative it offers is coherent and compelling, but it is a coherence built on selection. What exceeds the story is allowed to fall away. What disrupts continuity remains outside the frame of alabaster and glass.

None of this negates the museum’s achievements as a work of design. It is visually extraordinary, technically sophisticated, and unmistakably ambitious. But ambition is not neutral, and beauty is not without consequence. If the museum succeeds, it is because it persuades—not because it proves. It gathers visitors into a vision of Egypt that feels seamless enough to stand, and silent enough to hold.

The question that remains is not whether the museum will endure, but what it will ask the public to forget in order to endure. In this sense, the building’s most powerful exhibition is not its collection, but the story it makes possible—and the stories it leaves in the dark.

The post Building Belief: The Grand Egyptian Museum and the Architecture of State Power appeared first on Untold.

Through free-form writing and illustration, the contributors reflect on what divestment can mean for academics of color within knowledge-producing institutions across the Global North. Grounded in the urgency of documenting the present moment and its reverberations in academia, the series reveals how the dehumanization of the “other” has always been structural and systemic.

This story is by Watfa Najdi, with illustrations by Pascale Ghazaly. 

What does it mean to think beyond extractivism in times of war?

I was invited to speak at an event. At the time, I was feeling vulnerable and constantly worried about the situation in Lebanon, and I rarely felt like leaving the house. 

However, it was an important event, so I said yes.

That night, as I was sitting on the stage speaking, a strike hit al-Nuweiri neighborhood in Beirut. Among the martyrs, there was a family with the same last name as mine: Najdi. I didn’t know, and I kept talking about the importance of moving beyond the North/South paradigm that casts certain populations as perpetual beneficiaries or aid recipients in need of Western expertise… I remember saying something about care, holding space, and listening to voices from the majority world. I didn’t look at my phone until the panel ended.

When I finally did, I saw several messages about the strike, the victims, the names.

“Israeli air strikes on central Beirut have killed 22 people and wounded at least 117, Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health said… The strikes appear to have hit densely populated residential areas as flames and smoke rose from two residential blocks.” (Al Jazeera, October 2024)

For a few minutes, everything inside me froze until my dad finally answered his phone and said they were okay. I then texted a friend who lived close to the targeted area. She replied briefly that they were still trying to process what happened, but they were okay.

After that, I put on a smile and said I needed to leave early. So, while everyone went upstairs to continue the conversation, I slipped out and rushed back home. That day I realized that academic conversations feel impossibly small during war, and the world you come from suddenly becomes too heavy to carry into these spaces but also too real to just put on hold.

Excerpt from Megaphone’s X account posted the following day (October 11, 2024):

“Hussein (51) and Lara (40), along with their twins Bassam and Zakaria (15) and Fatima Najdi (4), were laid to rest on Friday in their hometown Srifa, as well as their grandmother Inaam Saqlawi, her brother, and his wife. The death toll from the Noueiri massacre has now reached 22 martyrs, with over 117 others injured.”

How are you doing? How’s your family?

A professor asked me how I was doing. Over the past months, I’ve learned not to answer those questions fully. Most people ask because (I assume) it would be impolite not to, and what they expect is a short confirmation that your family back home is “doing okay,” even while surviving a war. So, I usually say exactly that: “they’re okay” then I smile and nod.

But this time there was something in his tone that made me believe he actually wanted to know more about what’s happening. So, I let myself say a little more. “It’s terrible,” I said. “Last night I couldn’t sleep. I stayed up following the news… watching which buildings were being bombed…”

I was tired and angry, so the words kept coming. “They hit a building close to my neighborhood in Beirut. It’s just…”

I don’t remember what I said after that, only the moment he gently cut in: “Can you walk with me? I need to grab my coffee from inside.”

I froze for a second but then nodded and walked beside him towards the class. It took me a minute to put a smile back on… I stood there as he grabbed his cup and checked something on his desk.

He then turned back to me and said, “…you were telling me about the situation in Beirut?”

I felt ridiculous sharing, even if for a few seconds, something very personal to me with someone who preferred to listen to a conversation about war while sipping coffee. I smiled again and said, “oh, that was it. The situation is difficult. Hopefully it will end soon.”

He smiled back, warmly. I don’t think he was pretending. But this is probably as far as he could go. Not because of lack of empathy, but because news about war, suffering and pain from the other side of the world can only be acknowledged briefly, never long enough to interrupt the rhythm of (academic) life.

The post Diaries of an Academic of Color: On the Limits of Academic Spaces, and Life in Two Places appeared first on Untold.

This story was produced under the Feminist Journalist Fellowship, it is part of a series highlighting the work of our fellows, developed in collaboration with UntoldMag and Noor.

LGBTQ+ individuals in Egypt face daily incidents of online violence, including threats, harassment, defamation, and blackmail. Much of this abuse comes from conservative and religious segments of society and often spills over into offline risks—or begins offline and later escalates online. 

The boundaries between digital and physical harm are increasingly blurred.

A few years ago, Noha Abeer, a pansexual Egyptian in her late twenties, became a target of online violence because of her identity and sexuality. The digital attacks soon translated into offline threats that put her life at risk.

“Yes, I was subjected to harassment, defamation, and online threats,” Noha recalls. “Between December 2021 and January 2022, people used photos and personal information from my account after I filed a harassment case against a driver,” she adds.

Targeting Nonconformist Persons in Egypt

When Noha filed the complaint, she refused to disclose her personal address and information to the prosecutor in front of the accused. The prosecutor insisted. Shortly afterward, anti-LGBTQI+ groups launched a defamation campaign against her, denying her right to exist in both digital and public spaces.

Those who are nonconformist or who simply do not obey the traditional gender divisions and social attitudes always face restrictions on their freedom, as they threaten the conservative social ethics, this applies especially to members of the LGBTQI+ community. For many like Noha, harassment flows seamlessly between online and offline spheres.

“I went to the cybercrime unit,” Noha recalls, “and the treatment was terrible. After a lot of persistence, a report was filed, but nothing happened. I couldn’t follow up because I couldn’t leave the house due to the defamation campaign in my neighborhood.”

She adds, “I was subjected to hundreds of instances of online harassment in the form of text messages and hateful, threatening comments. Sometimes I shared these messages and other times I just ignored them.” 

Noha had rejected advice about staying safe online, such as restricting messaging and commenting to friends only, not posting personal photos, and blocking abusers. She explains that she considers that all these steps are equivalent to asking, “What was the girl doing to be harassed?” or “Why did she go to that place?”, comments that blame the victim and do not solve or address the real problem.

Days before writing this article, Noha was subjected to a new smear campaign because of her opinion on a recent harassment incident that sparked public outrage in Egypt. A young woman was harassed on a public bus, and according to MadaMasr, “She said in a video she published on her social media accounts she faced three incidents of verbal harassment and assault on the road she takes to work, all by the same stranger.” 

Noha’s views were met with a hate campaign against her, with attackers sharing what they considered inappropriate photos of her taken from her personal account, including photos of her supporting LGBTQI+ people.

Noha is currently living outside Egypt, and it’s difficult for her to pursue or file reports against the ongoing abusive comments and threats she receives.

“The process of reporting harassment and online blackmail against women could be made easier and the state could allow for electronic reporting,” she explains.

LGBTQI+ Rights Rejected

In a report published in January 2025, a group of women’s rights organizations and initiatives submitted a joint submission on the status of women’s and girls’ rights in Egypt for the period 2019-2024.

The report revealed the situation of the LGBTQI+ community, from trapping and harassment to digital targeting and targeting in the public sphere, to the poor quality of medical services provided to them. According to the report, “transgender women are 50% more likely to receive harsher sentences than gay men.” Judges in ‘debauchery’ cases usually issue defendants with a single sentence for all charges.”

In January 2025, 137 countries submitted more than 370 recommendations to Egypt to improve its human rights situation. According to its response, the government decided to support 264 of the recommendations in full (77%), partially supported 16 (5%), and “noted” 62 (18%).

Some of the recommendations made to Egypt regarding improving the conditions of the LGBTQ community included Chile, Spain, Canada, and Iceland raising the issue of prosecuting and criminalizing individuals based on their sexual orientation or actual or perceived gender identity and the need for Egypt to commit to stopping forced anal examinations and amending the debauchery article used to criminalize consensual sexual conduct between adults.

The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) released a report in July 2025 a day before the final report of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of Egypt’s human rights record, criticizing the Egyptian government’s response and commenting on the recommendations received during the review held last January.

According to EIPR: 

“This time, the Egyptian government decided not to respond to any recommendations with an overt rejection, as it had done in the three previous reviews, instead using the term ‘noted’ to refer to all the recommendations it did not accept and is therefore not committed to implementing. The government rejected any allegations of restrictions on civil society activities, any form of arbitrary detention, or requirements that limit the right to peaceful assembly or demonstration or freedom of traditional or digital media or that Egyptian laws are used to punish individuals for their sexual orientation.”

Why All These Waves of Hatred?

Mohamed Zarea, a researcher at the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), believes that the recent wave of anger is not new to the LGBTQI+ community; “they suffer from hatred and discrimination from society and through media outlets indirectly controlled by security agencies.” 

“I would say that this wave of hatred has been escalating since 2014, when the community faced unprecedented arrest campaigns,” Zarea adds, “my explanation for this is related to the closure of freedom spaces that opened up after the 2011 revolution, including spaces specifically for the LGBTQI+ community and within the framework of the state’s control over the concept of morality.”

Zarea doesn’t believe that Islamist movements are solely responsible for this: “I don’t deny their hatred of the LGBTQI+ community, but they are not the only ones responsible; the state also has a very conservative regime.”

Zarea explains that Egypt has signed numerous human rights agreements, but it has not adhered to any of them. It consistently places a reservation, namely, “the stipulation of non-conflict with Islamic law”, in all the agreements it has signed (such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, CEDAW, and others). 

However, according to him, when it comes to LGBTQI+ rights, Egypt does not merely place reservations; it actively undermines any recognition of their rights. This is evident in its role within the Human Rights Council when opposing any resolution related to LGBTQI+ rights. “For example, in 2016, Egypt expressed its concern regarding the adoption of the deeply flawed draft law L.2. Rev.1, which aims to establish new rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people”, Zarea explains. 

“Egypt emphasised that the Council does not have the legislative authority to create new rights. Egypt will not recognise or cooperate with the independent expert established pursuant to L.2. Rev.1,” he adds. 

Zarea explains that Egypt consistently forms alliances to support opposing resolutions aimed at protecting the family as the fundamental unit of society. This is clearly demonstrated in its recommendations to countries that grant freedom to LGBTQ+ individuals through the UPR mechanism. 

Zarea confirms that Egypt consistently submits recommendations with almost identical wording: “Strengthen policies to support the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society.” This recommendation was submitted by Egypt during the fourth (current) cycle of the UPR to countries such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, Finland, and France.

This official broader pattern reflects a deeper and structural cause for the hostility faced by LGBTQI+ people like Noha in Egypt. These are not only shaped by social attitudes but also by a wider political and legal environment that leaves little room for protection. In such a context, harassment does not remain confined to one space. Hate speech, smear campaigns, and threats often move easily between social media and everyday life and the judicial system. For many LGBTQI+ people in Egypt, the result is a continuous cycle in which online and offline violence reinforce each other rather than exist separately.

The post Online and Offline Violence are Two Sides of the Same Coin for LGBTQI+ in Egypt appeared first on Untold.

For the better part of the past two years, we have read study over study detailing the manifold forms of violence inflicted on the population of this tiny strip of land – maybe to compensate for the screaming silence on or relativization of these horrors by so many colleagues and institutions. 

Yet most of these readings only reiterate to what we already know. We know the casualty counts, the satellite images, the story of Hind Rajab. We all know them and what they are symptoms of. At least, those of us who want to know. 

There is an exhaustion that is not only emotional but epistemic: the sense that Gaza’s archive of horrors has become so heavy, so routinised, that it no longer clarifies anything. It merely accumulates. And in that accumulation, the place and its people risk dissolving into function – into a screen for moral and political performances and a symbol for the erosion of rights-based global order that, let’s be honest, never truly served those now paying its highest price.

Abdalhadi Alijla’s Fearful in Gaza does not accept this economy. It does not offer Gaza as piecemeal material for a political lesson. It refuses the familiar rhetorical contract in which the reader is permitted to feel only if the text supplies the requisite volume of shock, and in which the writer is expected to translate lived reality into the idiom of an international audience. 

I finished Fearful in Gaza with the distinct feeling one sometimes has after reading a work that is neither “extraordinary” nor “representative”, and yet more unsettling than either category. In fact, the book stays with me to date precisely because it does not contain something shocking in the way the world expects writing on Gaza to shock. Instead, it trusts in being taken seriously in its own, very quiet way. 

Alijla insists, with remarkable discipline, in the irreducible seriousness of the ordinary. He writes about growing up in Gaza with an honesty that is strikingly frank and unsparing. “Ungeschönt” (unvarnished?) we say in Germany, where we seem to have a precise word for everything but for the brutal Israel occupation and the genocidal violence deployed in Gaza. 

Contrasting with the semantic acrobatics of German officials or media in trying to avoid certain terminologies, Fearful in Gaza comes with a sobering clarity. In fact, its language is almost plain and precisely for that reason it is deeply affecting. Everyday routines, small pleasures, and moments of intimacy and care are described with the same clarity and in the same breath as moments of shame, humiliation, and the slow sedimentation of fear into the biographies of every protagonist of the book. 

But most importantly they are presented without moral staging for a specific audience. Unlike so many recent publications, Gaza appears here not as a metaphor or a case study, but as a real place of home, with all the contradictions that implies.

Two Voices, One Childhood, No Setting

Formally, the book is written in two voices: “The Son” and “The Mother.” While the son, Ayk, carries the main line, his mother interrupts, mirrors, adds weight, and often presses down on the same memory from another angle. What results from this structure is a family memoir that does not seek harmony but remains fragmentary dissonant. 

The son’s narrative registers the world through the eyes of a child and without full comprehension, the mother’s narrative registers the same world as a horizon of responsibility and vigilance. However, the mother’s interventions do not function as explanatory commentary. Alijla does a great job portraying the mother as an authority in her own right, with her exhaustion, anger, tenderness, and practical intelligence. Through her testimony, he makes visible the labor of keeping a child alive in Gaza, without ever romanticizing or lionizing this task.

Violence enters into this relationship of mother and son not as a spectacular event that can be easily morally consumed, but as a persistent atmospheric condition that reorganizes the child’s and the mother’s cognitive and emotional architectures. 

As a pressure that seeps into the logic of childhood and quietly deforms it. There is the children’s fascination with military jeeps, and their instinct to domesticate them by giving them animal names, as if naming could tame the terror. The gesture is, on the surface, playful, a small act of imagination. But it is also a way how a child makes fear manageable by giving it a known shape. 

Effectively it is also a technique of survival in a context of constant uncertainty: In one moment, school is school. In the next, it is no longer just school – when the teacher distributes pieces of onion because its smell helps against tear gas or when children are marched across the schoolyard at gunpoint and with their hands up. 

This scene that illustrates the carceral nature of a child’s life under occupation is described without theatrical punctuation, which is precisely why it becomes difficult to forget. One feels, reading it, the thinness of the wall that is supposed to separate childhood from coercion and harm, and how quickly that wall is pierced. In another passage, the mother describes waking her son at the first sound of military engines, because she is afraid his heart could stop during a nightly raid. 

There are passages that are even more difficult because they do not offer interpretive scaffolding. A scene of sexual violence against children is observed through the eyes of a six-year-old who cannot yet name what he sees but carries the fear from this incident for years, as if the body understood something that language could not yet organize. The description does not force emotion, though. Alijla refrains from converting the scene into a moral exhibit. He merely describes, and the description itself is what unsettles.

Home, Not Symbol

The comparison to other recent books produced under conditions of war and siege is unavoidable, not because they are the same, but because they share an ethic of focusing on the ordinary. That is what makes Fearful in Gaza feel closer, in spirit, to books like Tijan Sila’s Radio Sarajevo or Tony Doherty’s This Man’s Wee Boy than to much of what is marketed as “Middle East” conflict literature. 

This kinship that has less to do with geography than with scale. Sila’s Sarajevo is not presented as a grand theatre for questions of belonging amid ethnic conflict. It is a toilet where the family sleeps, crude jokes, and the brittle bonds of boyhood. Likewise, Doherty’s Derry at the onset of civil war in Northern Ireland is made intelligible by being rendered small and specific through the joys and tribulations of childhood and a son’s fragmentary recollections of his father, shot dead on Bloody Sunday. 

Alijla does something similar, but with his own temperature. Through his recollections of everyday kitchen situations, quarrels over schoolwork, neighbourhood routes, and the stubborn persistence of habits even when these habits become risky, he gives the domestic and the routine a dignity that public talk about Gaza rarely allows. That matters because so much writing and commentary in Europe and North America treats Gaza as a symbol first and as a lived world second. 

Since 7 October 2023, this symbolic reflex has only intensified. Gaza is increasingly made to carry debates that are, in practice, not about Gaza at all, and more about the moral self-positioning of distant audiences: about legitimacy, about the right vocabulary, about whose grief is permissible and what forms of violence are justifiable. 

In Germany, where public debate has largely concentrated on a self-referential struggle over the country’s historic responsibility, this dynamic has been particularly stark, with the effect that Palestinians appear, at best, as a footnote to someone else’s ethical drama. In this climate, Gaza functions like a floating signifier, a symbolic container filled with meaning ascriptions that harden moral frontiers, prevent empathy, and criminalise solidarity, policing what can be said and who is cast as decent or dangerous. 

Alijla’s refusal to write Gaza as allegory matters here. By returning again and again to the small things, to the mother’s vigilance, to the child’s strategies of coping, to routines disrupted and reassembled, Fearful in Gaza withdraws Gaza from the role of rhetorical object and gives it back its status as a place where people live, remember, disagree, and endure. 

Gaza is presented as home in the literal sense, that is, a place where your life happens, where you learn tenderness and cruelty in the same day, where you absorb contradictions because you have no choice. In the end, this is how the book becomes political: It trusts the reader to feel the humanness of its protagonists without being pushed to do so. 

This is, for me, the central reminder the book carries: Sometimes the most powerful political writing is precisely that which simply tells what it is like, without the implicit bargain that the reader will only pay attention if suffering is presented at maximum volume.

Exile as Aftersound

The frame of the book is also a story of later, of what comes after the spectacle. Towards the end of the book, Alijla describes his cumbersome relocation Sweden, where he lives and writes today. From this exile, he was forced to witness from afar Israel’s destruction of the very home he remembers so affectionately and the death of the people who populate his memories: Of the Shuja’iyya neighbourhood, located East of the so-called “Yellow Line” drawn by Israel straight across the Gaza Strip, where nothing but rubble remains. Abdalhadi’s mother, whose voice structures the book and anchors many of its most intimate passages, was killed in an Israeli drone strike in May 2025. 

Against this backdrop, Fearful in Gaza has become something it never meant to be: A record of places and voices that have been violently disappeared. The book’s closing movement thus performs a subtle shift. What started as memory becomes preservation. In this sense, the memoir holds a powerful truth. Namely that neither geographical nor temporal distance, neither occupation nor physical destruction can erase what we hold dear. They only alter the modalities. 

Sleeplessness, sensory echoes, the sea as an unexpected trigger may puncture the author’s everyday life in exile. But these punctuations are not just reverberations of trauma. They testify to the continued presence of a world that did not end simply because the narrator left it. In Fearful in Gaza, the mother’s voice offers the vocabulary of Ghourba, longing and estrangement, and with that the sense that “after” is not a clean temporal category but a different kind of living with the same thing.

When I closed the book, I did not feel better informed. Nor did I feel morally validated in my political position. Instead, there was a quieter recognition, bordering on embarrassment, of how often we mistake information for understanding. And so the introductory question returns, but changed slightly in tone: Why do I still read books like this?

Because every now and then a book refuses the roles assigned to it and, by doing so, leaves an even deeper mark.

The post Gaza, Not a Metaphor: Childhood, Memory, and the Refusal of Spectacle appeared first on Untold.

Through free-form writing and illustration, the contributors reflect on what divestment can mean for academics of color within knowledge-producing institutions across the Global North. Grounded in the urgency of documenting the present moment and its reverberations in academia, the series reveals how the dehumanization of the “other” has always been structural and systemic.

This story is by Myriam Dalal, with illustrations by Pascale Ghazaly. 

Having a conscience is making everything much harder.

As if we needed one more layer of complication to add to our “survival of the fittest” battle as Arab academics in the west.

Since the start of the genocide in Gaza, and the war on Palestine, Lebanon, bits of Syria and bits of Yemen in October of 2023-which coincided with my appointment as a research associate at a university in Europe- my work plan started incorporating multi-level scrutiny measures:

For the places I’m invited to speak at, the funding that I seek for my activities and projects, the people I collaborate with, the researchers I interact with, the university where I work, and our center’s preexisting/ongoing/future collaborations, as well as the research projects conducted here, the way the university communicates about its international collaborations, etc.

And when you’re already in a space where your very being is attacked every single day, from the moment you open your door in the morning till the moment you go back to bed at night, this means you’re adding to your already achy shoulders a new reason to shrug.

You say it’s the mattress that got you this back and shoulder pain, but you know deep inside that it’s Orientalism, you just don’t know how to explain it to the white physician.

Being an Arab woman of color comes with all its “shades of anger” as the amazing Rafeef Ziadeh would say. The orientalist machine starts from the very state administration to the individual level that seeks to discredit you, belittle you, and fetishize you or in its most positive manifestation, save you…

The post Diaries of an Academic of Color: All Shades of Anger – Notes from an Arab Woman in European Academia appeared first on Untold.

This story was produced under the Feminist Journalist Fellowship, it is part of a series highlighting the work of our fellows, developed in collaboration with UntoldMag and Noor.

Years before Jan (preferred pronoun he), a 33 year-old Egyptian non-binary, came out or even knew about the LGBTIQ+ community, he would search online for people like him. He often found himself deceived by strangers on social media – people pretending to be LGBTIQ+,  or men posing as women. 

Like many queer Egyptians, he was searching for connection in a digital landscape designed to expose him.

A few years ago Jan adopted a new name for safety, deleted all his old social media accounts and rebuilt his online presence from scratch. The fear of being tracked — by security forces, anti-LGBTIQ groups, or far-right actors — shaped every decision he made online. On an earlier account, he happened to encounter members of the community who guided him through basic digital protection practices. For the first time, he felt a degree of safety.

Homosexuality in Egypt: a dangerous secret

According to a report by Transat, , transgender and gender non-binary people in Egypt live under a repressive system that perpetuates violence, discrimination, and stigma in various areas of life. This includes the private sphere, where domestic violence and deprivation of family support are prevalent, as well as the public sphere, where discrimination in education and the labor market persists. It also includes systematic legal and societal harassment that exposes LGBTIQ+ individuals to direct targeting through the state’s repressive laws and practices.

Egypt criminalises same-sex relations, according to the Law on the Combating of Prostitution (No. 10 1961), and in recent years, also on cybercrime laws such as the Law on Anti-Cybercrimes and Information Technology Crimes in  Egypt’s economic courts.

According to the Transat report, there is an increase in cases where online morality laws are applied: 

“The Egyptian media is a key partner in adopting and disseminating hate speech and incitement against women, minorities, and the LGBTQ+ community in particular. It consistently participates in stigmatizing LGBTQ+ individuals by perpetuating the stereotypes that have been nurtured about them over decades in artistic productions and media programs”.

The telecommunication law has been under the Economic Courts since they were created in 2008, and the cybercrime law was added to the Economic Courts by decree in 2019. With this addition, the Economic Courts began exercising influence over public life by reinforcing digital surveillance and by policing digital morality.

For Jan, digital safety became urgent. Other LGBTIQ+ individuals stepped in early on, teaching him how to protect himself online. This was guidance he needed because, by his own admission, he was once too bold and dismissive of the dangers. Today, his greatest concern is keeping his identity from his family, as they respect him so much and though he’s religious.

“I was harassed online by both women and men, within and outside LGBTQ+ circles. This harassment was not always direct or explicit perhaps, meaning if the conversation escalated, I would stop it, but it still happens” Jan recalls.

In a disappointed tone, he recounts a time when he was shamed by his closest friend, who was also part of the LGBTIQ+ community. During an argument between them, she threatened to go to his house and out him with his mother.

These threats reflect the broader precarity facing LGBTIQ+ Egyptians: vulnerabilities compounded by policing, stigma, and the absence of legal protections.

How to protect LGBTQ+ persons online?

In 2022, an organized anti-LGBTIQ+ campaign known as Fetrah emerged across social media, especially on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Telegram. The name, which translates from Arabic as “human instinct,” was adopted by religious and far-right networks. Using the slogan “Fetrah is an idea,” the campaign launched coordinated posts and Twitter threads in Arabic urging users to promote its core message: that only two genders exist and that homosexuality is deviant and contrary to human nature. 

M.A, a researcher and gender activist who preferred to keep his real name hidden, believes that the Fetrah campaign promotes the outdated idea that homosexuality is an illness or a perversion. This is a great injustice to the LGBTIQ+ community, which is fighting for its rights. “The Fetrah campaign uses religion to fuel hatred and discrimination and legitimize violence against the queer community”, the researcher adds. 

For Jan, the violence and threats he experienced online led him to isolate. “I practically have no friends”, he says. “I stopped trying to make friends or form relationships online.” After closing his social media accounts he is even isolated from the LGBTIQ+ community which is increasingly under attack online — a choice many queer Egyptians feel increasingly forced to make. 

“The LGBTIQ+ community isn’t an isolated island from larger society; it’s a reflection of it to varying degrees”, M.A. explains. “I have seen somewhat similar experiences, some people withdrew, not always out of fear, but sometimes to protect their mental well-being. Others persevered and confronted the situation regardless of the consequences,” he adds.

“When people like Jan are threatened, they certainly won’t go to the police for protection”, M.A. explains. This is why the queer community must be a more compassionate place, or at least more aware of the dangers of male-dominated and patriarchal actions like harassment. 

“The presence of violations within the community necessitates that all entities, individuals, and activists re-evaluate themselves, not justify their actions”, M.A says. “They must work on building a genuine culture of accountability that protects people instead of silencing them or causing them to withdraw,” he adds. 

Though Jan cannot represent the experience of the entire LGBTIQ+ community in Egypt, he reflects a vital part of it, as he and many others have faced—and continue to face—digital challenges and risks that limit their access to safe online spaces. 

While social media offers visibility and connection, it also exposes the vulnerables to digital violence, blackmail, and state surveillance. These threats force many of LGBTIQ+ individuals to navigate the internet with fear and caution, restricting free expression and access to support. Understanding these struggles is essential to recognizing both the power and dangers of online spaces on queer groups in Egypt.

The post For LGBTQ+ People in Egypt, the Internet is Both a Lifeline and a Trap appeared first on Untold.

The gathering is small, perhaps no more than a dozen people, but they scream out loud, which in Japan is quite unusual. They chant mostly in Japanese, sometimes in English. The slogans are familiar: “stop the genocide”, free Palestine “from the river to the sea”, and “end the Israeli apartheid now”. 

In front of them, a line of candles and small lanterns laid down. Behind them, well illuminated, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, more commonly known as the Atomic bomb dome. 

The building was originally designed by Czech architect Jan Letzel and was realised in 1915, to host art exhibitions in what was at the time the city business district. 

On 6 August 1945, at 8:15 am, the atomic bomb dropped by the United States razed the entire city to the ground. No buildings remained standing close to the hypocenter. With the exception of the Dome, thanks to its structure of steel and stone, despite being almost right below where the bomb exploded. In the 1950s, the park was established around the building as a space to host different memorials. In 1966, the city council took the official decision to preserve the dome. The restoration was minimal, and the dome itself shows clear signs of the impact. Its purpose, and that of the entire park and the institution running it, is one: to convince humanity never to use that weapon again. 

Aoe Tanami sensei (the Japanese term for “teacher”), as the others used to call her, was among the first ones to organise the vigils. She is an associate professor at the Faculty of International Studies at Hiroshima University and specialised in Palestinian culture. On 26 October, she was there, playing a tambourine and leading the chants. After the event, she invites all the participants to have dinner at her office. The group is quite diverse: most are Japanese, including some involved directly with local anti-nuclear movements, but also some foreigners. 

Two Palestinians are also there. Lara lives in Hiroshima, where she moved in October 2024, and she works as a counselor at the Hiroshima International School. Her mother came to visit from Canada. For the occasion, at the specific request of her daughter,  she cooked ful (fava beans), while others brought Japanese dishes. 

In the conversation, an aspect emerged that many people around the world during the last two years can relate to: Palestine is not only a cause to fight for, but rather an entry point to better understand the society they live in, create a community, find a sense of humanity in a world where violence and human rights violations are often met with silence and avoidance. 

The Palestine-Hiroshima Vigil Community

The first gathering, around 30 people, took place spontaneously on October 13, 2023, to mourn the Palestinian and Jewish lives lost, and protest the ongoing massacres in Gaza. Some of the participants insisted on continuing. The vigil took place every day, for 500 consecutive days. At least one person was always there, with a banner and candle. Later, the group became known as the “Hiroshima-Palestine vigil community”. Before summer 2025, it was decided to limit the gatherings to weekends only.

In early 2024, the community delivered letters to mayor Katsumi Matsui and the city council questioning their silence over the Gaza massacres. For them, Hiroshima has a specific responsibility. The city built up its post-war identity as an example of turning its status of victim into resilience, recovery, and promotion of nuclear disarmament through advocacy, education, and documentation of survivors’ experiences. In fact, the city evolved into a relevant actor on the international diplomatic scene when it comes to peace and disarmament. 

The term hibakusha, to design the victims of the bomb, including those suffering from the effects of radiation, acquired a global dimension. In 1957, the Japanese government recognised the issue and provided the victims with specific forms of support. 

However, this role, according to members of the community, soon became frozen into memorialised rituals, limited only to nuclear weapons, and often disconnected from other contexts. In front of the genocide unfolding in Gaza, despite its previous generous contributions to humanitarian aid in the region, Japan took a very timid stance, very close to US policies. It didn’t put any diplomatic pressure on Israel, didn’t impose any sanctions, and rather continued business as usual. 

When UNRWA was defunded by the US and their allies, Japan followed. The country has consolidated trade relations with Israel. Not only through weapon companies, but also large investments in the Tech sector. The Japanese pension fund, the largest in the world, invests billions in Israeli companies, including those directly involved in the genocide. 

Holding gatherings in front of the dome has a strong symbolic value. It gives the “never again” slogan a wider breath, to embrace weapons of mass destruction and the endless cycles of violence that characterize our world. Shouting in this place also assumes a specific meaning, as it disrupts the silence of the memorial and the calm of the city. If Japan in general tends to be quiet and avoid social nuisances, in Hiroshima the act appears even more dissonant. When demonstrators approach people passing by to hand over leaflets to them, most of them turn and walk away. 

Japanese people passing by the vigils tend to ignore them. Very few decide to stop by, and even less decide to join the community. This is why the group decided to keep doing it in front of the dome, instead of more crowded places like the Hondori street, one of the city’s most important shopping hubs. Not only because of the symbolic value, but also because in that place they are more visible to tourists. 

“Hiroshima is a conservative city. It is not chaotic and loud like Tokyo, and people here tend to respect the rules. For this reason, with small numbers, the vigils have to create some noise in order to attract attention: drums, music, shouting. It has to be disruptive and inappropriate”, says Lara. 

Takuya Kirihara, a painter/musician originally from Saitama, agrees. In Hiroshima people tend to follow the rules, he says, and judge harshly those who don’t, even more than in other places in Japan. Despite its prominent anti-nuclear stance, in the last elections many voted for the far right party Sanseito, which promotes the idea of returning to atomic weapons.

Born in a communist family, Takuya was pushed by his parents to make his own experience abroad. He left Tokyo for Berlin, where he remained for 16 years. He came back in 2023, this time to Hiroshima. He says:

What I can do is to bring a perspective from Europe to the country. A friend of mine introduced me to the people of the vigil, and they invited me to join the gatherings. The noise music scene in Japan is very small, almost absent in Hiroshima. So the music serves the purpose of instilling curiosity. It tells people that something different is happening. But in general most of the Japanese are not interested in these issues. And we are a country where concepts like ‘human rights’ or ‘nation state’ have been imported and have a quite recent history.  

Sailor Kannako is another member of the community.  She is a DJ and singer who started her career in Tokyo. Her name recalls the manga character Sailor Moon. She is very involved in activities of solidarity with Palestine, including performances in which she mixes noise music and political slogans. About the vigils, she says: “When we stand at the Atomic Bomb Dome, many passersby avoid photographing us. They take a photo of the Dome, then quickly move on. This scene, which plays out almost every day, feels like a symbol of Hiroshima today”. 

Most of the members, says Tanami sensei, didn’t have any activism experience before the vigil. 

At the same time, today the community is visited by different groups: representatives of the postal workers’ union, women’s groups, and many of the old guard anti-war and anti-nuclear activist groups, members of Kakuwaka, and at a certain point even the Nihon Hidankyou, the hibakusha movement that won the Nobel Peace Prize last year. 

Connecting Gaza genocide and the bombing of Hiroshima is important but also problematic, Tanami sensei explains. Of course there are similarities: the level of destruction, the civilian victims. But the people in Gaza are without a homeland, they are refugees. The bombing of Hiroshima was a war crime, but it happened in the context of a war, against a state. Moreover “Japan committed crimes against people in Korea, or before in Okinawa. In many ways we can say it was the Israel of Asia. So I am generally against drawing a comparison between Hiroshima and Gaza beyond a certain line”. 

But being in Hiroshima has also advantages, she adds: “Here at the university they stop me and they congratulate me for my ‘peace activism’. Even if this is not what I do, framing it like this facilitates my acceptance. When I go to Tokyo, I am perceived only as a radical”. 

For Lara, political activism in Japan as a Palestinian was quite a transformative experience:  

Before coming here, I searched on google Palestine related things in Japan, and the vigil community came out first. The first weekend I went to the Dome, just to observe, and I started getting to know the group, and soon they invited me to speak at the events. It was a very interesting experience for me, as a Palestinian, because in Japan they focus a lot on education and awareness. Despite their limited numbers they have a very balanced and diversified approach: they can be disruptive, but also set up events for raising awareness, boycott campaigns, and academic work. 

Since 7th October, it has been devastating. I was in Jordan at the time, which enabled me to grieve collectively with Palestinians there. I could watch the news, mourn, and share with others as a Palestinian, without the need of explaining or teaching anything. So when I came to Japan I was very worried. I was extremely glad when I discovered the vigil community. I am really proud of the work they do to inform and educate. In a context where they are quite isolated, they realise they have a greater responsibility, and they do a lot of effort in order to achieve the same outcomes as in other contexts. 

In this sense, Japan has taught me the value of community. Living here was a transformative experience: here you really learn that you, as a single individual, are not important. Elsewhere, people are always struggling to get their place. Here is different, they value the collective more than individuals. 

A Decolonial Café in Tokyo

Sawa Sawa is a community café established in July 2025 in the calm Arakawa neighborhood, in Tokyo. The name is composed of two words with the same sound but different meanings. In Japanese ‘sawa’ (さわ) means ‘a chat over tea’, and in Arabic (سوا) it means ‘together’. 

It was founded by a group of Japanese and Palestinians who felt the need to have a safe space in which they could meet and discuss issues that, they realised, are interconnected. Many of them met before, as they were engaged in educational events, running different campaigns, including BDS, over the last two years. But they lacked a physical place to talk comfortably and meet people sharing similar values and interests. While there are other venues engaged with political issues, like the Friends of Palestine in Kobe, or the anarchist queer Namnam community in Kanagawa, or small punk communities scattered here and there, Sawa Sawa is the first one focusing on a comprehensive decolonial approach. 

Since its birth, the place has hosted film screenings about Palestine and the Ryukyu Islands (the modern day Okinawa), but also fundraising events, workshops, and discussions. 

Hanin is one of the founders. Born in Gaza, she moved to Japan when she was eight, and she returned in 2023, after 10 years in the Gulf. After the 7th of October, the political atmosphere in countries like the United Arab Emirates was suffocating, and she decided to move back to Tokyo. In Japan, Palestinian residents are only a few dozen (in 2023 they were 95). As the country doesn’t grant refugee status, almost all of them are there to work, or to study. And yet, she says, here you can speak freely, and she found a community of engaged and like-minded people. 

Sawa Sawa is the evolution of that community. “It is a place to decolonize minds”, she says, “where you can have conversations about different oppressions all over the world. Not only Palestine but also Sudan, Congo, and, of course, Japan”. 

Because of the context, the approach is quite different from the vigil community in Hiroshima, says Hanin: 

We want to attract people in a calm, subtle way. That’s also why we didn’t choose a name that was too clearly political. Sawa Sawa wants to be a space where you can slow down in order to unlearn and relearn while taking a pause from a hyper capitalistic metropolis like Tokyo, where everyone is always on the go. 

As someone coming from Gaza, it is not always easy for me. I feel so much rage, I want to be disruptive. But there is a thin line between being disruptive and damaging the cause. In other places in the world it would be completely fine, but in Japan you can become alienated very quickly. Or we would be banned. Here it is like this: when you make a mistake, they immediately take strong measures. There is a big debate among us, and sometimes we go in smaller groups to protest at events. Other times we need to change strategy in order to attract people and raise awareness.  

Some of the campaigns they launched were quite successful. Itochu, a massive trading company that signed an MoU with Israeli Elbit systems, canceled it after a boycott call that started in Japan, and then became global and particularly effective in countries such as Malaysia and Canada, where the company has also a strong presence. 

Palestine Solidarity as a Mirror and a Community 

For Hanin, Palestine is not only a topic, but rather a way to start a discussion. 

For a lot of Japanese people, Palestine is like a mirror. It is a way to look into their own country’s history. In a way, people woke up because of Palestine. It is an entry point, and they look at different parts of the world and realise there is oppression and exploited people everywhere. 

Imperial Japan is not much discussed in Japanese society, especially if we consider the education system. After the Second World War, there was a lot of ‘peace washing’. Peace education is great, but it cannot remain in theory. So Palestine often becomes part of a larger conversation that involves the anti-nuclear and anti-war movement. But it should be louder and bigger than it is at the moment. More difficult is to connect this to Japan’s colonial past. Not only what they did in southeast Asia, but also to the Ainu people in the north, and in the Ryukyu islands.

In this context, Palestine becomes an entry point to also reflect about the Japanese imperial and colonial past. Not only the occupation of Korea and China and the war crimes committed there, but also the older issues, such as those concerning the Ainu, an indigenous people located in Hokkaido, in the North, and gradually forced into assimilation, or the more recent annexation of the Ryukyu islands (Okinawa) during the Meiji period, at the end of the XIX century. 

The case of Okinawa is the easiest one to bring into the debate: after the Second World War, the island was forced to host more than 70% of the US military bases in Japan, and it was for a long period administered directly by the US. The decision to impose this burden disproportionately on Okinawa has been read by many of its inhabitants as another proof of the colonialist and racist attitude of the mainland towards them (the island has its own specific  identity, language, and ethnicity). The continuous US military presence is also often perceived as a humiliating subordination to US imperialism and its political agenda in the region.  

“When I was a University student, I was an anti-imperialist activist”, says Aoe Tanami, “I think the topic is very important of course. But it is not always connected with Palestine. Bringing up the issue of Japanese colonialism when we speak about Gaza could be counter-productive. And when it comes to talk about imperialism, it is even more delicate, as it is related to the figure of the emperor, and even some of our members in the vigil community don’t want to talk about it”. 

In Japan, some aspects of the past have been washed through the pacifist stance the country adopted after the Second World War, which rejected armed conflict, as stated by article 9 of the constitution adopted in 1947. And yet, revisionist narratives are becoming stronger, and the rightwing populist Sanseito party, which glorifies the imperial period and aims at removing article 9 from the constitution, is on the rise. 

In this context, Palestinian solidarity movements in the country, as in many others, acquire a larger meaning and scope. As Hanin concludes: “It’s not so much how much we can do for Palestine sometimes, but how much Palestine is doing for us, right?”

The post Between Hiroshima and Tokyo: Palestine is a Mirror appeared first on Untold.

“We have fasted from joy for ages,

and now we break our fast upon the plate of dignity.

Record, O time of victory, record,

Damascus is ours until the Day of Resurrection.”

He quickly added a clarification, as if aware of the exclusion already implied:

“When we say ours, we mean everyone of every race, faith, and from every origin to every horizon.”

Yet the contradiction is already inscribed in the moment itself. Even in its gesture toward inclusivity, the speech evoked a purified, exalted Damascus, a vision of triumph rooted in a timeless Arab-Sunni imaginary rather than in the fractured present.

Capital of the Umayyads

Within hours, the clip circulated widely across social media. The verses became a digital anthem for the “new Syria”, often paired with a single, gleaming phrase that seemed to hold the promise of rebirth: “Damascus, capital of the Umayyads.”

The Umayyad Caliphate or Umayyad Empire (661–750 CE) was the second caliphate in Islamic history and, at its height, one of the largest states of the medieval world. Its territories stretched from the western frontiers of China to southern France, encompassing North Africa, the Maghreb, al-Andalus, the Sind, and Transoxiana. 

Centered in Damascus and marked by the Arabization of state administration under ʿAbd al-Malik, the Umayyads left a lasting political and cultural legacy that continues to be invoked and romanticized in contemporary Syrian and Arab imaginaries.

The expression itself was not new. Bashar al-Assad had used the same words years earlier to court the nostalgic imagination, portraying the city as “the beacon of the Umayyads and the cradle of Arab civilization.” Yet in the post-Assad imaginary, the phrase acquired a different resonance. It became both nostalgic and redemptive, a dream of authenticity after decades of humiliation and dictatorship.

In this evolving rhetoric, “Damascus, capital of the Umayyads” is more than a slogan. It is an affective myth: a promise of purity and resurrection projected by an Arab-Sunni imaginary trying to restore coherence amid collapse.

The Umayyad dream no longer belongs to power or opposition alone; it is deeply embedded in the moral and spiritual imagination through which many Syrians – particularly from the Arab-Sunni community – envision their place in history. Far from being a passing rhetoric tied to the fall of Assad or argumentatively the ascent of ”the majority” again’, it has become a framework for self-recognition, a way of reconstituting “the nation” as a moral community destined for restoration.

Orientalism from within

In this imagination, victory and virtue are inseparable. The nation’s rebirth is conceived not only as a political project but as an act of moral purification, a return to an untainted origin where faith, masculinity, and honour align. 

This is the same grammar that once structured cultural myths like Bab al-Hara  (the gate of the neighbourhood), a hugely popular Syrian TV drama series, first aired in 2006, that nostalgically imagines a 1930s Damascus neighbourhood as a tightly knit, patriarchal community of “honourable” men defending “tradition” and the homeland, and has been broadcast across the Arabic speaking region for 13 seasons. The yearning for an immaculate past, the masculine guardianship of a virtuous community, and the exclusion of difference as the condition of purity.

Here, Orientalism no longer arrives from the West. It emerges from within, through the desire to idealize the self by imagining it as both sacred and victimized, timeless and threatened. The Umayyad dream, in this sense, is a form of self-Orientalism: an internalized gaze that seeks redemption not through transformation, but through resemblance to an imagined essence of the Orient itself.

If the Umayyad dream shaped the ideological vocabulary of the new political order, it also found powerful expression in the media and digital public sphere. Figures in pro-government media and among online influencers began invoking “Banu Umayya” (Umayyad people) not merely as a historical dynasty but as a moral lineage, a metaphor for honor, continuity, and faith.

One striking example came from Qutaiba Yaseen, a widely followed influencer aligned with regime narratives, who shared a video titled “Men of Dignity from Sweida stand alongside the sons of Banu Umayya in Damascus.” The clip showed a group of Druze men celebrating what he called “the liberation of the land of the Umayyads.” While his caption emphasized unity and brotherhood, the very choice of imagery – where belonging is validated through the Umayyad idiom – reveals how deeply this moral geography structures the imagination of “the new Syria.”

Visual grammar

Across social media, dozens of Facebook groups and pages now carry names such as “Syria al-Umayyah” or “Banu Umayya.” Their posts blend patriotic iconography with religious overtones, producing a digital landscape where history is both sanctified and aestheticized.

Even episodes of misunderstanding highlight how emotionally charged this symbolism has become. During the July 2025 sectarian violence in Sweida, a predominantly Druze city, in which hundreds of people were killed and members of Syria’s defence and interior ministries were later detained on suspicion of abuses against civilians, a banner reading “Sweida without ummiyyah” (illiteracy) was mistaken for “Sweida without Umayyads,” triggering outrage among armed groups and their supporters. 

The intensity of the reaction spoke not to confusion alone, but to the extent to which Umayyah now functions as a sacred signifier, an emblem that fuses history, faith, and national legitimacy.

The romanticization of the Umayyad dream unfolds through gendered imagery that fuses purity, heroism, and faith into a single visual grammar. Viral videos set to the song “Banu Umayya, their origins are gold” portray men as guardians of a sacred lineage. 

One shows Ahmed al-Sharaa, the head of the transitional government, riding a horse in a slow, cinematic sequence, a tableau of masculine virtue and divine favor. Another, filmed in Damascus’ Umayyad Square, features a masked horseman carrying the tawheed flag, a black flag bearing the Islamic declaration of faith (the shahada) in white, echoing the same melody of glory and moral renewal.

While variants of such flags have existed historically as religious symbols, in contemporary Syria and the wider region this specific black shahada flag has become strongly associated with jihadist and Salafi-jihadi groups, and therefore carries militant and sectarian connotations rather than being a neutral religious emblem.

These scenes are not merely political symbols; they reveal how moral imagination is gendered, sanctified, and aestheticized. The horse, the flag, the disciplined body, all perform a yearning for order through the image of the righteous man. This visual culture does not imitate anyone’s gaze; rather, it springs from within, from a longing to see the self as pure, elevated, and whole.

Such imagery invites a question rather than an accusation:

What does it mean when a society envisions its rebirth through these codes of purity and virility?

Perhaps the “Umayyad dream” is less about reclaiming power than about reimagining the self, a collective effort to restore coherence through an idealized reflection of what it believes it once was.

The fiction of the moral past

In this expanding media ecosystem, the Umayyad dream operates less as nostalgia for empire than as a mode of moral self-fashioning. It provides an affective grammar through which the Arab-Sunni imaginary reclaims virtue and coherence amid collapse, a language of sanctified belonging that transforms loss into purity.

But the Umayyad dream is not the only vessel of nostalgia or self-Orientalism.

Years before the revolution – and still today – the TV series Bab al-Hara built another dream: one that turned “Old Damascus” into a mythical homeland for an entire Arab imaginary. 

As noted once in The Guardian, the series “has been an extraordinary phenomenon from the moment it was launched,” watched “from Morocco to Kuwait” and becoming a shared ritual of Ramadan evenings. Beyond entertainment, it crystallized a collective fantasy of what “authentic Arab life” once looked like, a Damascus of honour, piety, and masculine solidarity.

What distinguishes Bab al-Hara from other television dramas is not only its popularity but its power to shape collective memory. It became a reference point for how millions imagined Syrian – and by extension, Arab- identity. Danny Makki observed once that the series “misconstrues the history of what Syria was during the mandate era,” yet paradoxically defines how that history feels. 

For viewers across the Arab world, the Hara (the neighbourhood) became shorthand for virtue, resistance, and rootedness, an imagined moral homeland that transcended geography and class.

In this sense, Bab al-Hara did not just represent nostalgia; it manufactured it. It offered Arabs from Rabat to Riyadh a mirror in which to see a purified version of themselves, turning Damascus – remote, complex, and plural – into a moral epicenter of the Arab world.

In Bab al-Hara, purity is not only spiritual but domestic. The home becomes a miniature nation, ruled by paternal wisdom and feminine modesty. The neighborhood is a moral microcosm where every deviation – a woman’s defiance, a man’s betrayal – threatens the order of the whole. Through its melodrama of virtue and shame, the series transforms social hierarchy into moral truth.

A ritual of belonging

This is not merely nostalgia for a simpler past; it is an aesthetic theology of purity.

The men of Bab al-Hara embody the same disciplined masculinity seen later in the post-2011 Umayyad revival, vigilant, protective, and righteous. The show taught generations to feel authenticity as something lost and endangered, and to imagine moral restoration through obedience and gendered order.

Bab al-Hara does not simply reproduce Orientalist clichés of the “Arab patriarchal society.” It performs them from within, as a cultural desire. The Damascus it imagines – pure, communal, and morally intact – is a mirror of how the self wishes to see itself: uncorrupted by modernity, yet triumphant in its own virtue.

The Umayyad dream and Bab al-Hara reveal two distinct yet converging temporal imaginations through which the Arab-Sunni self performs its own “purity.” Both rely on what Ghassan Moussawi calls fractal Orientalism, a process through which societies reproduce the same binaries of progress and backwardness, purity and corruption, not between East and West but within themselves. 

Rather than a Western gaze imposed from outside, this is a local hierarchy of virtue: a self-sustaining taxonomy that distinguishes the “authentic” from the “deviant,” the “moral” from the “fallen.” It is constantly rehearsed through media, memory, and ritual performance, allowing communities to define themselves by continually reasserting who belongs and who does not.

In the Umayyad imaginary, history is compressed into a single, sanctified century. The Umayyad Caliphate – just one among many civilizations that flourished in the region – becomes reimagined as the timeless essence of Syria’s identity. What came before and after – Aramaic, Byzantine, Abbasid, Ottoman, and modern plural histories – fades from collective memory. 

The brevity of the Umayyad period paradoxically strengthens its symbolic power: its scarcity becomes proof of purity. This moralized temporality underpins contemporary political and religious discourse, where the call to restore “the Damascus of the Umayyads” becomes not an historical project but a ritual of belonging.

Historical fabrication

Bab al-Hara performs a similar manipulation of time, but within the domestic and social sphere. The series constructs a Damascus that never existed, erasing the city’s real modernity during the early 20th century. The show’s central motif of “gated neighborhoods” is a historical fabrication: “It was never the case that Damascus neighborhoods had gates. 

Damascus has seven main gates, known to this day. The character of the Aqid – the paternal leader who rules the neighborhood – is likewise an invented tradition, unknown to actual Damascene social structures. Historian Sami Moubayed noted that Bab al-Hara’s Damascus erases the city’s modernity: its tramways, newspapers, intellectual clubs, theaters, and publishing houses vanish, replaced by the simplified archetypes of the “Shamian setting” established in earlier dramas: barber, baker, vegetable seller, policeman.

In both imaginaries, the past is not remembered but rebuilt; time is aestheticized and moralized. The Umayyad past is purified into faith and conquest, while the Bab al-Hara past is purified into patriarchal virtue and social order. Each constructs a closed moral chronology that excludes historical complexity: one through divine authority, the other through domestic hierarchy. 

Together, they illustrate how some Syrians and Arabs perform self-Orientalism not by imitating the West, but by staging its own ideal self, the pure, disciplined, and timeless Orient it longs to inhabit.

If temporality in both Bab al-Hara and the Umayyad dream collapses history into a purified origin, their social and political dimensions translate that origin into hierarchy. Both imaginaries depend on the repeated performativity of authority – patriarchal in one case, and theocratic in the other – as the guarantor of purity.

In Bab al-Hara, patriarchy is not only a narrative structure but the moral axis of the world itself. As mentioned earlier, the Aqid as well as the Abadayat (strong men), stand as embodiments of collective virtue: decisive, self-sacrificing, and untainted by doubt. The stability of the neighbourhood depends on their ability to preserve honor through control, to punish deviation through violence, and to restore moral equilibrium through obedience. 

Female characters, in turn, serve as moral signifiers, either preserving communal dignity through modesty or threatening it through disobedience. Violence, far from being chaotic, is ritualized; it performs justice as purification. The show’s moral universe thus reduces social complexity to a binary between discipline and decay, mirroring “a theater of virtue.”

The Umayyad imaginary scales this logic upward. The masculine ethos of the neighbourhood – the man who protects his neighborhood and restores its honor- becomes the figure of the righteous man of the nation. What Bab al-Hara staged as domestic virtue now returns as public theology: a call for moral guardianship at the scale of the state.

This transformation is not merely rhetorical; it is enacted. Across social media and public gatherings, performances of faith and virility merge into a shared script of revival. The “pure man” of the neighborhood becomes the “defender of the Ummah,” the guardian of a faith imagined as both wounded and sovereign. Within this discourse, reclaiming moral order also implies reclaiming political legitimacy for the idea that the nation’s rightful rule, historically associated with Arab Sunnis, was “lost” under ”the non-Sunni Assad authority” and must be restored.

These notions have taken performative and embodied forms. Ahead of the coastal clashes in March 2025, Damascus authority-aligned preachers and local figures called for al-nafir (mobilisation) – a term rooted in jihadist lexicon – framing mobilization as a sacred duty of protection and purification. Ending up with massacres against the Alawite community there. 

With the July assault on the Druze in Sweida, tribal networks in Syria invoked al-faz‘a – traditionally a communal call for mutual aid – but here transformed into a performative act of aggression. In both cases, the vocabulary of purity and defense migrated from the household to the battlefield; the moral economy of the Hara became the national grammar of mobilization.

Performing the past: From the Baath to the Ummah

It is important to note, however, that the Baathist regime itself was an early architect of this self-Orientalizing grammar. As researcher Husam Itani observes, “the Umayyad revival draws from the same well as Baathist ideology, which turned the past- too- into a dream meant to guide the future.” The continuity is not merely symbolic: both frameworks reimagined moral order through the disciplined masculine body and the myth of civilizational resurrection.

Rahaf Doghli also demonstrates in her book Romanticizing Masculinity in Baathist Syria, Baathist rhetoric recentered the figure of the man as soldier-citizen, the disciplined, sacrificial masculine body whose loyalty, obedience, and willingness to wield ‘legitimate violence’ constitute the very essence of belonging. 

This legacy of moralized masculinity survives today in both the rhetoric of Islamist governance and the popular culture that preceded it. The Umayyad imaginary does not replace the Baathist one; it inherits and re-performs it, translating the soldier-citizen into the believer-warrior, and loyalty to the leader into devotion to God.

In this sense, social and political self-Orientalism in Syria is not a passive inheritance but an active practice. It is sustained through gendered performance and emotional investment, through rituals of loyalty and moral speech. Authority here is not imposed from above, it is lived, rehearsed, and believed in.

Across this imagined spectrum – from the Hara to the “Umayyad capital” – the yearning for origin reveals itself not as a national sentiment shared by all Syrians, but as a project rooted in the Arab-Sunni imaginary of moral restoration. It envisions not a plural Syria but a purified ummah, a spiritual polity redeemed through discipline and faith. 

Today, this imaginary finds its most visible expression in the rhetoric and performance of Islamist factions such as Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, whose call to moral and territorial “liberation” extends the same logic that once governed the Hara: the defense of community purity through masculine virtue and divine order.

In this vision, the past is not recovered, it is rehearsed. The Umayyad century, brief and distant, becomes the horizon of eternity; the Damascus of Bab al-Hara, fictional and domesticated, becomes its emotional blueprint. Both transform history into a theater of redemption where belonging depends on the exclusion of difference.

Too often, Orientalism has become a convenient scapegoat, a totalizing explanation that attributes all the region’s distortions to Western power, leaving little room to interrogate the failures within. By locating domination exclusively outside the self, this reading absolves the internal hierarchies, mythologies, and desires that sustain oppression from within. 

Here, the notion of internal/self Orientalism becomes more revealing: it exposes how communities construct their own “Others,” reenacting the same logics of exclusion and moral superiority once ascribed to the West. In this sense, what is performed today is not merely resistance to Orientalism, but its domestication, the reproduction of its gaze in the mirror of the self.

The post From Bab al-Hara to the Umayyad Dream: How Nostalgia Shapes Syria’s New Moral Order appeared first on Untold.

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In November 2023, I was—among several other demonstrators—arrested by the Berlin police at an anti-colonial protest in front of the Federal Foreign Office for carrying the flag of Palestine. 

One officer stated, “Palestine has nothing to do with colonialism,” while another added, “It’s forbidden to show the Swastika too,” equating the flag of an oppressed people with a Nazi symbol. 

The consequence of my arrest was a fine; nothing in comparison to what M., a Syrian refugee arrested for the same charge, had to fear. For him the act of resistance could cost him his asylum status and even lead to deportation from Germany. 

As a Swiss-German citizen straddling a colonial family history in Palestine and a Nazi heritage, I was stunned by the blatant lies of the policemen. To say that Palestine has nothing to do with colonialism contradicts my own family history, and to equate the flag of Palestine with the Swastika portrays the victims of settler-colonialism as Nazi sympathizers. 

This is a false narrative perpetuated by German media who claimed that “Free Palestine is the new Heil Hitler.” This gaslighting and victim-perpetrator reversal serves a purpose: to deflect from Germany’s responsibility for both the Holocaust and its complicity in the genocide in Gaza. This historical revisionism also erases Christian evangelical support for the Zionist project, which claims to speak for all Jews, while its lobby targets anti-Zionist Jews and others who oppose the colonization of Palestine.

While Germany presents its Staatsräson (reason of state)—unconditional support for Israel—as a moral duty resulting from the Holocaust, German arms manufacturers like Rheinmetall and ThyssenKrupp increased their profits through their sales to Israel dramatically. Global investors, hedge funds and pension funds hold significant stakes in these companies. 

Germany is Israel’s second-largest supplier of weapons, following the U.S.; the taxes it collects from the booming arms industries surely don’t follow any ethics but a capitalistic logic. 

German Staatsräson: Not a Moral Question

In summer 2025 the German Secret Service Report labeled the internationally successful and growing BDS-movement an extremist force, in the same breath as Palestine Speaks and Jewish Voice for Just Peace—two political groups engaged in anti-Zionist grassroot activism. By comparing the boycott of Israeli products with the Nazi boycott of Jews in the Second World War, the German parliament projects its guilt onto Palestinians.

Currently, two legally non-binding resolutions operate here to silence dissent from people who stand for Palestinians’ rights. The anti-BDS resolution aims to criminalise the call for boycott, sanctions, and divestment of companies and institutions that are complicit. It targets Palestine solidarity and cancels decolonial voices. 

The second tool is the IHRA resolution that weaponizes antisemitism to conflate anti-zionism and critique of the Israeli state with Jew-hatred. Both frameworks breach several articles of Germany’s constitution such as the freedom of expression, arts, information, science, and assembly, negating basic democratic equality before the law.

The effect of both these resolutions on the official discourse in Germany is striking, as many curators, art spaces, and universities are implementing them.

Following such doctrines is more often a result of ignorance or the fear to be excluded from one’s peers, than an actual conviction. In all of the cancellations that I have experienced in the past two years as an artist, the reason was always the same: fear of backlash. Not one institution actually believed that I was wrong with my critical views. But they are inconvenient for the capital.

Evangelical Dogma: An Ideology of Belonging and Exclusion

The hypocritical attitude and moral superiority of German politicians reminds me of evangelicals who pretend to uphold ethical, universal values and speak of God’s “unconditional love for everyone” while excluding queer people and non-Christians. Only those who devote their life to Jesus are able to access that love; queer people must undergo conversion therapy or exorcism to prove their faith in a system that negates their sexuality or gender. These methods often lead queer teens to self-harm or suicide. 

According to evangelicals’ belief, other cultures with their own spiritual traditions cannot access God’s “unconditional love”, reserved for born-again Christians alone. For centuries, European missionaries spread their racist and anti-LGBTQ+ ideas to other continents, laying the ideological ground for domination, so that imperialists could extract resources from land and indigenous people, and funnel the profits back to Europe. 

The connection between missionary work and colonialism is not mentioned in their Bible courses, of course, but it lives on until today. 

I grew up in the 1990s in Switzerland in an evangelical congregation where my family history was kept from me. My father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were missionaries in historical Palestine. At the dinner table, I overheard conversations about Israel, terrorism, and Jesus. 

The message was always the same: “We are the good ones. We love Jews, but they need to be converted to Christianity. Muslims are barbaric. There will never be peace in this world—especially in the ‘Middle East’—unless the entirety of humanity accepts Jesus Christ as its saviour.” 

This rigid doctrine that divides the world in “us” and “them” was celebrated in rituals, prayers, songs, and festivities. But also it was built on the fear of ending up in hell, using guilt and shame as controlling tools. You are born as a sinner; everything unfolds from there. Passing on the gospel to save the world from evil is one of the major principles I was taught to uphold. Spiritual out-of-body experiences of collective practices like worship and prayer were used to substantiate hurtful interpretations of the Bible. 

Evangelicals turn the teachings of Jesus—that are all about love—into a battlefield of spiritual warfare and abuse.

Growing Up in Silence, Secrets and Erasure

It was difficult to see through these dynamics, as the beauty of having faith and a strong sense of belonging was a real experience for me too. But whatever I wanted to critically discuss, in the end the answer always had to come back to reinforce the already existing dogma. It was impossible to question the system in its entirety. 

Doubts were seen as sins, and even if I didn’t express them, God would always be watching and judging. The threat of public punishment such as humiliation and excommunication produced a detachment from my own intuition, self-censorship, and a climate of existential fear and confusion. 

From age 14 to 17 I joined prayer ceremonies to get rid of my queerness, even though I didn’t have any language for it. When I realized that my efforts to fit in would never succeed, I left the congregation and moved to Berlin. In my early 20s, I realized that the same as a queer vocabulary was missing in my upbringing, “Palestine” as a word, and as a reality, had been erased too. 

I was shocked to learn about the Nakba, the displacement of Palestinians, and that the Israeli state was established on the ruins of their villages just in 1948—and not in Biblical times. While I started to question my gender identity, I started to look deeper into my family history too.

Colonial Legacies in Palestine: Dispossession of Land and Water

My great-great-grandparents arrived in 1870 in Haifa, Palestine, from Württemberg, South Germany. They were part of the German Templers, a European Christian movement that wanted to “prepare the land” for the Second Coming of Christ. Following a strict and literal interpretation of the Bible, they saw themselves as role models for the indigenous people of Palestine. Described as “Proto-Zionists” by Palestinian historian Mahmoud Yazbak, the German Templers played an essential role in the early colonization of Palestine. 

Travel reports written by Christoph Hoffmann and Georg David Hardegg, the movement’s founders, following their first field trip in 1858 described Bedouin communities as a plague to be expelled from their land. 

When the first German Templers arrived in 1868 in Palestine, they quickly settled near al-Yazaq well in Haifa, restricting access to the previously communal well in order to devalue surrounding agricultural land and push out local farmers. 

The dispossession of land and water, as well as the segregation of the Germans from the local population was following a colonial model. After devaluing the land by cutting its access to water, the Germans bought more parcels for low prices from Palestinian Christian middlemen. 

When the U.S. American colony in Jaffa was abandoned that same year, its original settlers struggling with diseases such as malaria and to acclimate to the local climate, German settlers purchased the few infrastructures that the U.S. Americans left behind, and expanded their colonies from Haifa to Jaffa. 

Evangelical influences from South Germany and Basel manifested through the establishment of the Carmel Mission House in 1904. While some second and third generation settlers became more secular and focused on the material improvement of the German colonies, others joined the Protestant-millenarian “civilizing mission” typical of that time. 

They focused on converting German-speaking Jews, many of whom were fleeing persecution in Europe and carrying Zionist aspirations to build a Jewish state in Palestine. Later, the Carmel Mission hired Arabic-speaking missionaries to also reach out to the majority of local Muslims, imposing their supremacist, and islamophobic ideas on them.

Antisemitism Reframed as Political Weapon

From the 19th century onward, many non-Jewish advocates for Jewish settlements in Palestine were based in the U.S. and Britain, and believed in Christian Restorationism; an ideology tightly connected to colonial desires around Palestine and the theological root of Christian Zionism. 

It claimed that the end of times were near and that Palestine needed to be restored before the turn of the century, when they expected the Second Coming of Christ to occur. According to the Biblical prophecy, as many Jews as possible should be in the historical land of Palestine at the point of rapture. 

I remember the many Hebrew songs we sang in my childhood, celebrating Pessah, a Jewish holiday, together with Messianic Jews—Jews who converted to Christian faith. 

Evangelicals often display antisemitic elements in their beliefs, when instrumentalizing Jews for religious ends; same as on a political level the West uses Jews for its imperial expansion. 

I recall how in sermons, a religious and moral superiority towards Judaism was emphasized, while Jewish cultural practices were fetishized. Christian Zionists are known for their “love” for Jews, which in reality is philosemitism, an inverted form of antisemitism. Evangelicals are mostly based in the U.S. but also across Europe, with growing numbers in Latin America—now vastly outnumber the entire Jewish people. 

Germany’s support for Israel is deeply entangled with religiously rooted, colonial, and antisemitic fantasies, as well as contemporary geopolitical interests. It is certainly not motivated by genuine concern for the wellbeing of Jewish people. German media accused anti-zionist Jews multiple times of antisemitism, while simultaneously framing Palestinians as Nazis. 

In this colonial gaze, Palestinians are erased. Language has been weaponized in abusive manners, accusing innocents, while German right-wing politicians express their antisemitic and islamophobic hatred openly and with impunity.

Christian Zionism in Support of Settler-Colonial Imperialism

The first Jewish Zionist leaders looked at the German Templers’ settlements as a blueprint to be emulated. In 1898, one year after the First Zionist World Congress in Basel, Theodor Herzl met German Emperor Wilhelm II in Jerusalem. 

What many don’t know is that William Hechler, a Christian Zionist with roots in South Germany, played a critical role in advocating for the Zionist project and made this connection between Herzl and German leaders possible. Along with German Templer founders Hoffmann and Hardegg, Herzl sought Ottoman support for land acquisition and visited the German colonies to learn from their strategies.

As historian Rashid Khalidi argues, the situation in Palestine is not a conflict between two nations but as a settler-colonial project that started over a century ago backed by the U.S., Britain, and other Western powers. They supported the Zionist project to extend their markets, gain military footholds in the area, and control resources and trade routes. 

The alignment between Christian and Jewish Zionist groups with authoritarian or right-wing governments today reflects broader historical patterns shaped by colonial and imperial dynamics and overlapping interests. Religious narratives always serve to justify taking control over land and people.

German reparation does not account for non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, such as Sinti and Roma people, or for the descendants of the Herero and Nama genocide of 1904. The entire concept of reparation functioned primarily to support Zionism and its project to build a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine—an ideology with Christian theological roots that keeps the colonial violence going and promises more arms trades and profits to the ruling class. 

The dramaturgy and pathos of German politicians in which these reparations are portrayed as a moral reckoning with the past has an almost religious quality to it. 

In the case of my grandfather, who grew up in the German colony in Palestine, joined the Nazis in the Second World War, and later became an evangelical missionary, the storyline becomes quite personal to me. But I can see how this is not so much a story about private coincidences but rather a structural outcome. 

I’m only starting to reckon with my own story and family history, as I try to zoom out and see the bigger picture, raising urgent questions about the decolonization of Palestine. While pushing for accountability and the liberation from Zionism, larger structures of systemic violence become visible and raise awareness about Congo, Sudan, Haiti, and other oppressed people around the globe.

Religious Trauma and Pattern Recognition

As a person on the autism spectrum, my brain is constantly scanning for logic, therefore, cognitive dissonance is difficult for me to endure. I naturally take words very literally, but I have difficulties reading between the lines or recognizing negative intentions. As a result, I am very disturbed by injustice, such as discriminatory behaviours and the abuse of power. 

Meeting Palestinians and anti-zionist Jewish activists made me question the narratives I grew up with on a political level. Their voices have been there for decades speaking out against Zionism and colonial violence in all its forms, including Christian Zionism. The understanding of imperialism and colonialism as superstructures that intersect with the evangelical ideology has helped me in making sense of my experiences, research and observations. 

The reality that unfolded in Germany after October 2023, when I saw Berlin police arrest a 9-year-old Palestinian child, triggered not just disbelief but also clarity. The police violence I saw in Germany reminded me of the military Israeli occupation that I witnessed in the West Bank when I lived there from 2016 to 2017. These systems of oppression seem to be related.

Autism is self-referential and monotropic in the way that knowledge is built; collecting details, and recognizing patterns from a bottom-up rather than a top-down, birdsview perspective. By default, my way of thinking jumps between timelines and geographies in an associative way, looking into similarities and recurring patterns. However, my findings are comparisons; not equations.

Colonial Relationships between Germans and Palestinians

My grandfather, who was born 1915 in Haifa and grew up in the German colony, told me that all colonists were armed, since Palestinians were described as carrying out “raids.” In these stories, they were cast as dangerous outsiders, intruders in their own land. The second colony Waldheim was founded in 1907 on land that was originally called Umm al-Amad, not far from Haifa. 

The Templers bought it “legally” through a Beirut businessman, but such transactions bypassed the local peasants who had long cultivated and depended on the land. Once the deed was signed, the Germans hired a Bedouine guard, armed him with a rifle and used him to scare those same peasants away. 

The family narratives that I grew up with reinforced this colonial perspective: Palestinians appeared not as neighbors, but as a threat or as cheap labor. This perspective erased the reality: families who had cultivated the land for generations were pushed out and replaced. 

One of the leading German settlers put it bluntly: “I pay the Arab 5 piasters a day. And if I work as a European, I have to charge 50 piasters. So I prefer to hire 10 Arabs and have them do the work.” This relationship was fundamentally colonial and exploitative, though in my family’s memory it was often framed as well-meaning and collegial. 

My grandmother remembered that my great-grandfather was paid the same wage as the Palestinian workers because he lacked a formal theological education. His poverty, however, did not erase the fact that he was still embedded in and benefiting from a colonial system that extracted Palestinian labor for its benefit. 

“Every colonist had the right to build a flat for his Arab worker”, my grandfather recalled. “It was usually one big room. Some structures had no light, no water, and no bathroom. But they had an open air bathroom in the bushes.” The laughter that followed such recollections made it clear to me, even as a child, that Palestinians were not seen as full human beings. 

My great-grandfather built a school to missionize the children of Palestinian workers; the church paid for an Arabic-speaking teacher to “educate” and “civilize” them.

Nazism in the German Colonies in Palestine

The NSDAP established its branches in the 1930s in the German colonies across Palestine, turning them into a cohort for Nazi ideology and antisemitism. Heidemarie Wawrzyn highlights that while on average about 5% of Germans abroad joined the NSDAP, whereas in Palestine over 30% of German colonists were participating in activities of the Nazi party. My grandfather said that almost everyone at that time believed in the Nazi ideology, far more than the estimated number.

In the 1930s, unrest between the local population and European Jewish settlers increased. Palestinian workers organized a strike and revolt that was brutally beaten down by the British occupation. German settlers maintained practical relations with both groups; they employed Palestinians as cheap workers, while the goods were sold to Jewish settlers. 

With the outbreak of WWII the German nationals were interned and later deported by the British as war enemies, and sent to Australia or Germany. The British turned Sarona, the former German colony in Jaffa, into a military and police base. After the British withdrawal in December 1947, the Hagana seized the compound and used it as the headquarters of the newly established Israeli Defence Forces in the following year. 

In stark contrast to the mass destruction of Palestinian sites during and after 1948, the houses of German Templers were put under cultural heritage protection and renovated through expensive investment by the Israeli government in the 1990s and 2000s, becoming tourist attractions and shopping malls.

Planting Pine Trees to hide the Ruins of the Nakba

After the Nakba, the ruins of Palestinian homes have been hidden through a large afforestation project by the Jewish National Fund. Planting millions of European pine trees transformed the landscape on an unprecedented scale, with no end in sight, while the indigenous olive trees are being uprooted to this day. 

Going through the family archive I inherited, I come across photos, documents, letters, and maps that describe the environmental and urban developments of Haifa in great detail. As a gardener working for the German mission on Mt. Carmel, my great-grandfather planted European pine trees already during the British Mandate. Like other colonists, he took part in bringing tools and techniques from Europe and implementing the so-called “modernization” on the land with the cheap labor of Palestinians.

When I visited the pine forests on Mt. Carmel—possibly due to my Swiss-German passport—I realized that one of these forests is informally called “Little Switzerland”. The overwriting of landscapes with European identities is a classic colonial tactic to erase Palestinian belonging. 

I wonder if the name had something to do with my great-grandfather’s Swiss roots. His return to Haifa in the early 1950s was possible due to his Swiss citizenship, and a right that was denied to displaced Palestinians. He then worked as a gardener for the Israeli government in a pine tree nursery, contributing to the afforestation that masked Palestinian villages. 

Yet, he also was an evangelical Christian, heavily invested in missionary work. In his memoirs he recalls proudly how he managed to secretly distribute Bibles to Jews, despite his new employer’s prohibition to do so.

When I asked my grandmother how he felt about the displacement and disappearance of over 80% of the Palestinian population in Haifa, she said he probably never really thought about it. The Nakba was never mentioned in our family. I also noticed that not a single name of the Palestinian workers was documented in my great-grandfather’s writings, despite their daily interactions prior to 1948. 

My ancestors spoke fluent Arabic with a typical Haifa accent. However, later generations learned Hebrew instead and sent their kids to Israeli schools—and to the Israeli military. 

They see the genocide in Gaza as the fulfillment of Biblical prophecies rather than a continuation of settler-colonialism and an extreme excess of global imperialism. Violence against the colonized is once more justified with the misinterpretation of the Bible, marking who will continue to be erased.

Family Archive: Silence, Gaps and Erasure

Looking at the family archive I inherited, the invisible and the missing parts become ever more noticeable to me. Recently I met a Palestinian protestor in Berlin who told me that their grandfather was working as a child laborer in one of the German colonies. I also learned that the German employers had cut the Palestinian workers’ fingernails to a painful extent, so their fingernails would not harm the fruits when picking them from the trees. 

These stories show the reality that is systematically hidden. I wonder about all the other stories that were not documented in any archive and what happened to the 70 Palestinians who worked for my great-grandfather, planting European pine trees on their own land. 

Where did they escape to during the Nakba? Are they also watching the news as these trees, not made for the Mediterranean climate, burn? Are they part of the 70% Palestinian refugees who are trapped in Gaza as Israel bombs and starves them with the complicity of the West?

Palestinians’ rightful demands for freedom, the right of return, and self-determination are systematically erased from the Western consciousness. But the armed resistance on the ground has forced the world to not look away any longer. 

The Palestinian struggle for liberation has ignited a global movement in solidarity with the oppressed people—from Gaza, Congo, and Sudan to Haiti. Imperial and colonial violence repeat in various forms, but follow a similar logic of dehumanization, exploitation, and genocide. 

The agency of colonized people doesn’t rely on the recognition of Western scholars, or state archives. A Palestinian friend told me: “To stand in solidarity with our people, you have to see our struggle through our eyes.” This shift in perspective has reached a large number of students, activists, and critical thinkers in the past two years, who organize to dismantle the settler-colonial Zionist project. 

Palestinians lead this shared struggle with decades of experience, and a deep understanding of the oppressive system.

Choosing to be an Outsider rather than a Bystander

When I left the evangelical congregation I knew that the religious authorities would often punish those who leave. They would withdraw social and financial security, and sometimes hound its former members severely. I moved to Berlin to both escape, and to form a new life in my new-found freedom. It took some time, but eventually I made new friends with those I was taught to fear: queer folks, Palestinians, and many others. 

After 7 October 2023, I felt the same social alienation in Germany when more arrests followed, each one more arbitrary than the other. Once I was accused of incitement to hatred for holding a sign that said “From the river to the sea, we demand equality.” The police said it’s a signifier for terrorism. A few months later, the Landeskriminalamt (State Criminal Police) came to my home to investigate my “crime.” When I asked the officer if he really thinks that demanding equality could be considered hate speech or terrorism, he looked quite embarrassed. After all, he was just doing his job—as were the millions of Germans during the Holocaust. 

The apathy and silence of German civil society is what shocks me much more than any arrest or police violence. Millions act as if what happens in Palestine had nothing to do with them or their tax money. I understand that this isn’t just individual denial or hypocrisy but deeply embedded in the state-led conditioning. I get it. Breaking away from the Zionist ideology surely comes at a cost—but when staying is no option, the price to leave is never too high

Striving Toward Collective Liberation

Germany’s harsh repression against solidarity with Palestine mirrors its unprocessed colonial and Nazi past. Mechanisms of silence, shame, and the projection of guilt onto innocent people repeats over generations and on the institutional level. Just like the religious belief I grew up with supported colonial empires to mobilize masses, suppress opposition, and justify wars, the German Staatsräson serves to manufacture consent for Israel’s genocide, apartheid, and oppression. 

The scope in which to think and ask questions is predefined, same as the evangelical vision of reality is predetermined. It functions to maintain power over the narrative and exclude those who don’t surrender to the self-serving agenda of an unjust system. 

Congolese activists recognize the intersections between their struggle and the Palestinian struggle for liberation, and team up with the BDS-movement to share knowledge and expose the exploitative nature of Western domination. When thinking about decolonization, every complicit government and institution needs to be held accountable. 

They will likely blame it on “the Jews” once the Zionist project is no longer profitable; this puts all Jewish people in danger based on their identity—no matter whether they oppose Zionism or not. 

I believe that collective liberation is impossible without dismantling Zionism in all its shades, foremost Christian Zionism. To reject Zionism as a colonial project is not to reject Jewish existence or belonging. On the contrary: it is to refuse the instrumentalization of Jewish trauma and survival for colonial ends. The Jerusalem Declaration of Antisemitism, published in 2021, offers an alternative framework that distinguishes the legitimate refusal of Zionism from antisemitism—a urgent and necessary step toward building decolonial and intersectional solidarity for all oppressed peoples. 

Decolonization must dismantle Christian and Jewish forms of colonial thought without collapsing them into each other.

Germany’s anti-BDS and IHRA resolutions are not just about targeting freedom of speech. The movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions stands for much more than just an opinion; it seeks to hold those companies and institutions accountable who profit from exploitation and mass murder. 

To break with the racist and openly fascist framework of Zionism through boycott, sanctions and disinvestment is an ever more urgent quest in times of genocide. Strikes are a powerful means to withhold labor force and raise collective pressure and awareness, giving power back to the people and holding the higher powers accountable, not alone but with each other—while hoping that the one and only God who cares for humanity, regardless of race and gender, will care for us.  

The Bible says it already: Lucky are those who don’t run after money but care for each other as for oneself. I recently read on Instagram that the opposite of depression is not joy but expression, and I couldn’t agree more. That’s why the voices of the oppressed will never ever be silenced.

The post A Journey through a Swiss-German Family Archive: From Colonial Palestine to Today’s Repression of Solidarity 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.