Mustapha is one of over 100,000 workers–mostly migrants from North and West Africa–who tend the vegetables grown under more than 32,000 hectares (320km2) of plastic-covered greenhouses in the Spanish province of Almería, nestled along the south-east coast of the Mediterranean. The region produces over 3 million tonnes of produce (tomatoes, courgettes, cucumbers, peppers, aubergines and more) destined for export to western Europe–Germany, France, and the UK mainly. 

Most of the 14,000 farming families have grown food in these greenhouses since Franco gave them small parcels of land in the 1940s, with the sole purpose of achieving national food security. Some are now extremely wealthy. Some struggle to make a profit. Probably, all of them employ migrant workers and the vast majority are likely to be doing so illegally–low-paid undocumented labour is the only way many of them can make ends meet. 

Food Imperialism

The Spanish government has recently announced the regularisation of almost 1 million undocumented workers–many of the workers in Almería who are given papers will try to move on from exhausting greenhouse work to better-paid jobs in restaurants and hotels. The empty jobs will soon be filled by people surviving the grueling journey on foot from Istanbul or by small wooden boat from West Africa to the Canaries. There are always people whose livelihoods have been destroyed by poor trade agreements and overfishing back home.

This is food imperialism – the way in which corporations and nations in the Global North exert control over the Global South by dictating what food is produced and exported to ensure the world’s wealthiest citizens have a constant supply of affordable, year-round produce on their supermarket shelves.

Our food system is the product of hundreds of years of unequal distribution and control of global power. The British Empire controlled the production of sugar and palm oil to feed its malnourished and tired workers back home–relying on slave labour and productive lands in the tropics to provide the expendable resources needed to continue to reap profits as they deplete these lands and waste their people. A lot has changed since the empires of old–today’s empires belong to the likes of Unilever and Cargill. Food is still treated as a commodity to generate profits, but the playbook of actions needed to keep the bloated food system functioning is less of a secret these days.

When my co-hosts and I began interviewing experts for our new podcast series, Edible Empire, we wanted to map out this modern playbook and uncover who really pays the hidden costs of our food. What we found is that today’s corporate giants rely on the exact same mechanisms of control as the empires of the past. As political economists like Professors Raj Patel and Harriet Friedmann point out, the global food system has always been structured around these regimes of power, transitioning from colonial monopolies to corporate ones. Today, as Professors Jennifer Clapp and Phil Howard warn, an unprecedented concentration of corporate power means a handful of firms now dictate global agricultural policy, market access, and ultimately, what ends up on our plates.

Palm oil is a perfect example of food imperialism–the ubiquitous, often hidden ingredient across foods and cosmetics, driving catastrophic deforestation across Southeast Asia. Researchers like Professor Jonathan Robins have documented how this versatile crop came to be embedded in global capitalism, while activists and researchers on the ground, such as Farwiza Farhan and Professor Helena Varkkey, see the direct ecological and social fallout—vital rainforests cleared and Indigenous livelihoods lost to feed Western consumerism under the guise of sustainable development.

The same pattern plays out in the intensive dairy farms half a world away in Aotearoa New Zealand, where the work of researchers like Drs Mike Joy and Milena Bojovic highlights the severe local ecological degradation caused by industrial farming. The harm extends far beyond New Zealand’s borders, however; as artist and researcher Dr Crystal Bennes notes, this intensive system relies on phosphate fertiliser extracted from the illegally occupied territory of Western Sahara, where half the population has been displaced to refugee camps in Algeria. It is a textbook example of hidden externalities: wealth is accumulated in the Global North, while the geopolitical, social, and environmental damage is borne by vulnerable populations in the Global South, hidden from view from consumers.

Awareness is Everything

Neoliberalism has created extreme freedom in food markets, allowing continued profiteering as ecosystems collapse and livelihoods fail–Mustapha left his home in The Gambia because his family could no longer find enough fish to sell at the market, and no money meant no food. He stepped into a small wooden fishing boat and took the 11-day journey to Tenerife knowing that 1-in-5 people who took that journey would die. 

He was a lucky one—he made it to Spain and found a job (most days) in the greenhouses in Almería. Living in a slum made from discarded pallets and greenhouse plastic, he could save enough money to send a little home to support his sisters and parents. But as investigators like Hazel Healy and Brigitte Wear have revealed, the fish back home continue to be exploited by the Global North. Their populations have been destroyed by industrial overextraction for the production of fishmeal. These pellets have been fed for decades to carnivorous salmon in thousands of farms dotted around the fjords of Norway—salmon that are then exported to wealthy countries around the world. As West African marine ecologists and activists like Dr Aliou Ba and researchers like María Alonso Martínez have documented, this creates a bleak cycle where local food security is stolen to supply luxury seafood abroad.

This is food imperialism.

Ultimately, our damaging food system relies on a lack of public awareness to continue; the inner workings of these complex, global supply chains are too easily hidden from view. But awareness is everything, and there are alternative paths forward. Thinkers and activists like Anitra Nelson, Million Belay, Ali Thomas, and Chris Smaje offer powerful visions of hope rooted in degrowth, food sovereignty, minimising food waste, and agroecology. They show that smallholder farming and local food networks can dismantle this corporate stranglehold, replacing exploitation with equity.

To challenge this system, we first have to see it clearly. We need to understand where our food comes from, and recognize that the choices we are presented with on supermarket shelves are not really choices at all.

Neal Haddaway, Benjamin Eitelberg, and Emma Strutt are the creators of Edible Empire, a new podcast series exploring the hidden costs of the global food system. You can listen to the full interviews and subscribe to the series at www.thesalmonandthetomato.org/listen. 

The post Edible Empire: How Our Food Supply Chains are Destroying the Planet appeared first on Untold.

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Following the controversial agreement between Italian PM Giorgia Meloni and Albanian PM Edi Rama to process asylum seekers outside the EU, two detention centres in the port of Shengjin and the village of Gjader were opened in October 2024. 

Despite being located in northern Albania, the camps are completely under Italian control and have shifted to serving as ‘deportation hubs.’ 

Shrouded in secrecy, little is known about the deal. Albanian and Italian authorities rarely answer Freedom of Information Requests about it. The public only knows what officials announce sparingly to the press. The number of migrants behind the grey walls of the detention centre is ever-changing, and no official records are made public. 

Currently, 90 people are held in Gjader. Usually picked directly at sea and dumped in cells, but called “guests” in the official forms. 

Access to the centres is extremely restricted for human rights observers. Through the few testimonies of survivors, Italian and European MEPs who visited, it was revealed that detainees face isolation and languish without communal or recreational spaces.

For Fioralba Duma, an Italo-Albanian activist and member of the grassroots migrant and civil rights collective Mesdhe Collective in Albania, detention centres are impossible to be humane. “This is a ‘black hole’ site invented for this occasion. The environment in detention centres is extremely pathogenic,” she adds, recalling the case of an Albanian man committing suicide in migration detention in the UK. 

Whilst no deaths have been recorded so far, former detainee Younouse Kone revealed to journalists that he witnessed two suicide attempts in the short time he spent in Gjader. Likewise, the facility’s ‘Critical Incidents’ sheet, shown only to MEPs, listed multiple incidents of self-harm. 

Albania’s Complicated Journey with Democracy 

After a successful tourism campaign, rebranding Albania’s image from a poverty-ridden, isolated country of emigration to an idyllic getaway, drawing investment by the likes of the Kushner and Trump families, Prime Minister Edi Rama has been on a fervent crusade to raise Albania’s status as a ‘success case’ in a region often marred by political and economic instability. 

Tracing back to Albania’s troubled past, the agreement is problematic. According to Sidorela Vatnikaj, a Tirana-based activist with Mesdhe, “if Albania were really a fully democratic state, the deal wouldn’t have happened. Albanian citizens only got to find out about the deal once it was signed by Rama, and Italian media started to report on it.” 

“This is a worrisome sign for the state of public transparency and an indicator of how the Albanian government could be acting in other issues. It shows that anything can happen without the public’s consent. The Rama-Meloni deal is the most visible violation of democracy and the state of law,” Vatnikaj explains.  

Indeed, the campaign hasn’t gone unchallenged. For Vatnikaj, one of the most acute problems was how mainstream Albanian media reported on their movement. “Albanian media framed our march as ‘anti-immigrant’ mobilisations trying to create a false narrative that these are ‘racist’ protests.”

Ranking 83rd on the World Press Freedom Index, media independence in the country is compromised by conflicts of interest between the business and political worlds and inadequate legal frameworks. 

Duma also notes that the group has suffered intimidation, directly affecting local organisers, one of whom, based in Lezhe, had their mother fired from her civil service position due to her activism – later reinstated after a complaint. 

Two other Albanian activists were detained for going to the opening ceremony of the Shengjin detention centre when Meloni was present, and hanging a protest banner from the rooftop of a building and using a sound system to play the announcement of the occupation of Albania by Italian troops during WWII. “We have the right to protest this, and we did so peacefully without causing any damage, yet our comrades were still detained”, Duma explains.

Activists believe that the deal is enforcing neocolonial dynamics, with Vatnikaj pointing out that the arrangement breaches Albania’s sovereignty for the sake of its ‘special relationship’ with Italy: “In essence, we handed over parts of our land to a completely Italian-run, Italian-funded administration. Are we actually an equal and respected part of the European community when we are being used as a “dumping ground” for migrants?”

For Duma the deal is a form of blackmail: “It implies that we have to accept things like that because of the financial or political support we have received from Italy regarding EU accession talks” or the supposed ‘welcome’ Albanians received in the 1990s as migrants in Italy, which in Duma’s words had nothing to do with the government and all to do with mutual aid groups, local communities, churches and individuals helping out of kindness.

How Activists Fight Back

“These camps were built for our parents in Europe,” one of the Mesdhe activists explains whilst giving a speech during a protest. The agreement now forces Albania to confront the fact that most of its citizens remain a target for ‘fortress Europe’. 

From violent pushbacks to detention, exploitation and criminalisation, the generations of Albanians who experienced the aftermath of regime collapse and mass displacement have had their life trajectories changed by such restrictions. The society they left behind was also deeply changed by their absence, with whole villages being almost emptied. 

For Albanian activists, this reality fuels their incentives to protest regressive government policies that do not represent the country’s historical experience. 

Duma says that for the Albanian activists, the agreement is viewed through the lens of whether it adheres to Albania’s historical memory as a displaced people and to Albanian values of hospitality. Vatnikaj adds that the deal goes against Albania’s very core as a nation, where “every family has a story to tell about the hardships Albanian immigrants have faced abroad”. 

Activists mobilised quite quickly in response despite the novelty of the situation. When the first ship arrived, they “welcomed” it with a banner reading “The European dream ends here.”

However, it took hard work before the group managed to get outside the walls of the Gjader detention camp in November 2025. Vatnikaj recalls that when they first started organising, they needed to figure out many things, as immigration in that context hadn’t been an issue in Albania before: “We mobilised around the unifying message of standing for human and migrant rights”. 

Solidarity beyond borders has been essential for the movement. Vatnikaj explains that Albanian activists are working with collectives in Italy and Europe, marching together, and organising assemblies: “We need knowledge, and we need people to fight with. Cross-border solidarity is essential.” 

In Duma’s experience as an Albanian migrant in Italy, striving to connect Albanian and Italian activist circles has been a lifelong aspiration. This goal has powered her resolve to create a shared space where activists can make meaningful exchanges. “Italian activists have helped us a lot with capacity-building and information-sharing. Now we have been building these platforms to join forces and create solidarity networks, with second-generation migrants in Italy being a crucial link between Italian and Albanian-based activists. Having them by our side is giving us hope. It is a really powerful gesture that they have joined us, and now we can say we are friends in the truest sense,” she adds. 

As a result of one of those assemblies, the idea for the collective march was born, which is now set to become an annual action for as long as the detention centres remain. . 

Activism has also been happening on an institutional level through advocating as a coalition with Italian parliamentary deputies and producing research on the topic. Activists have also been pursuing a legal challenge to the agreement, despite an underwhelming response from EU legal circles. 

Some wins on individual cases have also been scored when Italian courts or the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled against their deportation to Albania, and it has been proven a fruitful avenue, as many of the detainees sent to Albania have been returned. 

The Way Ahead 

With economic development resulting from tourism and construction, the issue of migration, that has always preoccupied public discourse, is now shifting from Albanians as migrants themselves to the country slowly becoming a destination for seasonal and manual labour, as workers from as far as the Philippines or Colombia come to the country in hopes of making a living.

Vatnikaj with her collective have been assisting Nigerian migrants coming to Albania to work highlighting a small shift towards Albania becoming a destination for foreign workers: “It is not uncommon to have their rights violated, so now immigration becomes a more visible phenomenon and for us we can demonstrate how exploitation and abuse can manifest in the Balkans”. 

Whilst activists prepare for further mobilisations, Duma says that it is paramount for them to expose the suffering of those in the migration routes who are often trivialised: “The far right has done a lot of damage by infiltrating people’s minds and making them accept this situation as a positive thing that needs to be done.” 

Vatnikaj adds, ”Between Albanian, Italian and European officials, this agreement is talked about as a success, but to us, activists and ordinary people alike, this is a moral failure.”

Vatnikaj now finds herself disillusioned with the ideals she was raised with. Growing up hearing that in Europe, states respect human rights and civic freedoms, many of these beliefs don’t hold anymore. “As migrants, we have experienced abuse, discrimination and racism abroad, and it is hard for me to believe that our country is now doing the same,” says Vatnikaj. 

Emerging from a decades-long dictatorship, many grew up hearing phrases such as “Albania needs to be part of Europe because Europe is a Utopia. Europe is the dream,” because of the presumed respect for democracy, prosperity and freedom. “Now that we see how those in the margins are treated, we don’t really have any state to look up to as the blueprint for all those freedoms. It feels like we lost our dream,” Vatnikaj explains.

With Western countries looking to expand and emulate this model, this is an uphill battle. The deal between Italy and Albania is not the first attempt by an EU government to use a third country as a return hub. In attempts to externalise asylum and create offshore processing centres, after a short-lived arrangement with Rwanda, the UK is courting Macedonia, after being rejected by Albania for a similar arrangement. In that dim backdrop, activists continue their fight. 

The post “These Camps Were Built for our Parents”: Albanian Activists Resist Italy’s Offshore Detention Experiment 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.

***

It is a cold, rainy day, and I am hurrying over to a bus station next to the university campus where I teach to reach Berlin’s Central Train Station on time. Luckily, the bus station is close by, and after two minutes of walking, I arrive. Suddenly, a vehicle stops abruptly in front of the station.

It appears as if the van is out of fuel; it is not the city bus, but a private cleaning company service van. A man steps out in a hurry. It is unusual for a vehicle to park at a bus stop. Its unusualness and unexpectedness caught those waiting for the bus off guard, including me. The driver sharply diagnoses the station’s glass panes, turns his head up towards the time screen, and then adjusts his neck and head posture to check the ceiling as if he is looking for someone or something specific dangling from it.

It turns out that he is looking for pro-Palestinian stickers and posters. The unexpected action made me wonder why someone would want to make sure to remove Palestinian posters and erase their traces.

Graffiti writing and stickering as a game of (in)visibility

Authorities’ removing graffiti, stickers and other related forms of self- and collective expression is no exception in street art politics. It is a game, as graffiti writers and muralists describe it, where what is written, pasted or stencilled on the wall is ephemeral. If not the authorities, then ‘ordinary people’ would tear their opponents’ stickers off or cover their graffiti writings by spraying or splashing paint or stickering over them, crossing them out, adding a word or a symbol to alter the meaning to their favour.

For instance, many Israel supporters add “from Hamas” to “Free Palestine” [Fig. 3], or draw a ‘triangle’ on top of an already painted ‘flipped triangle’ to form the Star of David instead of Hamas’ inverted red triangle (IRT) icon.

Palestine supporters might also put a stickered watermelon over the word “Fuck”, leaving only “Hamas,” or merging the Star of David into the Swastika to create a parallel between Zionism and Nazism – a design of the Lebanese typographer Pascal Zoghbi.

Zoghbi’s design is widely seen in Germany through the murals of Musa La Rage . This process of removal, covering, editing, and commenting on each other—especially on the Palestinian side, whose voice is contested in Germany—reflects broader issues of visibility and grievability. These scriptural and visual acts serve as crucial diaries for understanding resistance and solidarity at a time when pro-Palestinian voices are not only underrepresented in German and Western European media and art galleries, but also suppressed on social media by pro-Israel actors. This includes Instagram “civil watch” accounts dedicated to pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian graffiti in Berlin, whose users even tag Interpol in the comment sections of Palestinian posts.

These practices take particularity in Germany, especially in Berlin, where we see that street forms of solidarity with Palestine are not only removed by pro-Israel supporters but also by the German police, whose brutality goes beyond the dimensions of legality.

How can we understand this act of contracting a worker to “clean the station”? How does this “cleaning process” relate to Germany’s stance on Palestinian solidarity against the Israeli occupation?

Since 2008, Germany has declared unconditional support for Israel as part of its Staatsräson (the Reason of State). This political philosophy is based on the promise of “Nie Wieder” (Never Again) to address and honour the cultural memory of the six million European Jews who were killed during the Holocaust by the Nazis.

Accordingly, any debate about Jewish people, Israel and Zionism must go through this canon.

Resisting the guilt and extending griveability

Nevertheless, Palestinian street solidarity resists this reasoning. Aesthetically, the place chosen for stickers, graffiti writing, and painting is not solely a matter of visibility – a spot visible to people as they stand (bus station), enter (public toilet) or walk from one point to another, and preferably higher so that Israel supporters and the police do not remove it– but also of meaningfulness [Fig. 4].

For instance, many posters were hung on the East Side Gallery Wall from the river’s side (home to a few graffiti pieces and white canvases), while the names (and stickers) of Gaza and Palestine are displayed on the other side of the wall, facing the street (home to commissioned murals exhibited for tourists). Graffiti of “Free Gaza” can also be seen on the Berliner Mauer at Bernauer Straße, where parts of the separating wall are still standing with memorials, notices, looped short videos of patrolling soldiers, and pictures of the people who were killed by GDR guards while escaping from East to West Germany.

These official walls are for ‘learning’ about a dark part of German history as well as grieving the bodies and souls of those who passed away by seeing their pictures, reading their names and watching videos of East German Wall guards patrolling [Fig. 5].

Spraying Palestine or Gaza on the Berlin Wall challenges the scholarship that (Western) history has ended with the fall of the German wall, and it places Palestine alongside Germany’s own history of separation, remembrance and guilt.

History continues in Palestine. The graffiti of Palestine on the Wall memorial shows a parallel present-day Palestinian reality, which tourists would neither find informative signs on nor see in the various museums dedicated to human suffering and wall separation. Similar writing can also be found on parts of the Berlin Wall at Potsdamerplatz, where someone wrote “Palästina” twice below the metal sign of information, entitled “Dennkmal Mauer – The Wall as a Monument,” making the wall not solely a historical landmark of the past, but also a symbol of the actual wall of apartheid built by Israel in Palestine [Fig. 6].

These graffiti on the Wall of Berlin, and memorial sites extend “grievability” to Palestinians at a time when Israel has made trauma a weapon of war and while coverage of the Palestinian genocide in mainstream Western media coverage has been tightly policed and increasingly racialised.

The police as the new church

Pro-Palestinian expressions are often interpreted as antisemitic, pro-Hamas and terrorist, or at least aggressive. Germany’s practice of accusing Palestine supporters of antisemitism is a political move. Germany has long tried to de-Nazify its image to the world by organising the World Cup of 2006 and introducing the Erinnerungskultur (Culture of Remembrance) to address the Holocaust and the inhumane and unjustifiable killing of the Jewish population.

This culture of remembrance and political policy to acknowledge what the Nazis did to the Jews translates into the state’s reason as a guarantor of Jewish safety in Occupied Palestine (and elsewhere). This policy of guilt and remembrance has implicitly made the Palestinian statehood and right to return for refugees against the guilty German project of self-cleansing.

This double standard does not solely appear in the brutal police intervention, defamatory anti-Muslim and anti-Arab speech in newspapers (labelling pro-Palestinian students “Jewish haters” (Juden-Hasser), cancelling artists and the removal of solidarity aesthetics, but also shows in the reinterpretation of solidarity expressions in order to whitewash their Nazi legacy.

As an example, the debate on the use of the inverted red triangle by Palestinian supporters was triggered by local media and politicians, referring to the symbol as a “Nazi reference.” Also, a doctoral student who was holding a poster reading “NEVER AGAIN” was arrested by thirteen police officers and had their poster confiscated, accusing the student of another “Again,” a reference to Nazi-camps and the “extermination” of Jewish people [Fig. 7].

Another colleague had notified the student that the police might have a Nazi-focused interpretation based on reading the Palestinian Question through anti-Semitic German history. To avoid that, the student added “never again for everyone” in the margin of the poster. However, the police refused to accept any interpretation other than their own.

Policing aesthetics and criminalising symbols

What role do aesthetics play in a German context characterised by official support to Israel, its Staatsräson and Nie Wieder? How do the aesthetic forms of solidarity with Palestine interplay with Germany’s history and denounce its complicity with genocide? In other words, how does ‘wall washing’ relate to ‘self-cleansing’ and ‘whitewashing’?

Most police “interpretation” of pro-Palestinian signs do not happen on site, for it is already based on a textbook against anti-Semitic symbols and signs, titled “Leitfaden Zum Erkennen Antisemitischer Straftaten” (Guide to recognising antisemitic crimes) [1]. Among the many Palestinian signs, the textbook considers anti-Semitic, the BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions), Handhala (signifier of Palestinian personhood, displacement and exiled childhood), the key (the right to return), and Palestinian visual symbols of solidarity and resistance are put in a booklet next to fascist and Nazi signs.

Each symbol has a small text ideologically changing its meaning to make it “anti-Jew.” For instance, for Handhala, the textbook reads that this icon is “a comic book character meant to symbolise the supposedly defenceless Palestinians. [Instead,] The comics advocate violent action against Israel.”

In reality, Handhala was originally designed by Palestinian caricaturist Naji al-Ali (1938-1987), whom Israel assassinated in London, which the textbook does not mention. As for “Intifada until victory,” it reads that “the first (1987) and second (2000) Intifada were violent Palestinian uprisings against Israel. The slogan heard at anti-Israel demonstrations implies the annihilation of the State of Israel.”

This booklet was published in December 2021, and its captions are the same as those of the police, showing how ideological interpretations are supported and enacted by law against others.

Colourful rage

The Guide to Recognizing Antisemitic Crimes was published in 2021 and does not include the watermelon or the inverted red triangle, which are also treated as antisemitic by German police. Its symbolism, however, was born out of colonial artistic censorship.

Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour (b. 1947) explains that the idea of watermelon came from Israeli soldiers, who, in 1981, interrogated Mansour and two of his colleagues about why they were doing political art instead of painting ‘nice women,’ ‘nude figures,’ and ‘nice flowers,’ which they would buy from them, the police added.

“The flag was forbidden, and so were the colours, which is why we, as artists, were not allowed to use these colours. One of our friends, Issam, started arguing with the authority person, asking him what he would do if he made a flower but with those colours. The soldier became angry, saying that ‘even if it is a watermelon, we will take it and confiscate it. Do not do anything in these [red, black and green] colours.’”

On the one hand, the watermelon sign offers a new language of solidarity—one charged with joy rather than with the sorrow of the Nakba and other classical symbols that embody affective sadness. This fruit symbol reflects the spirit of resilience that has accompanied solidarity protests, offering, at the same time, new possibilities to express support in places where the icon of Handhala is considered antisemitic [Fig. 8].

This builds on the existing presence of the watermelon as a summer decorative motif—seen on ice creams, umbrellas, earrings, and many other objects—thereby challenging German censorship of solidarity with Palestine and embodying resistance itself.

On the other hand, the adoption of the inverted red triangle in protests and graffiti around the world, including in Germany, can be interpreted in two different ways.

First, the red triangle serves as a symbol of empowerment and a reclaimed emblem for most Palestinian supporters, who use such symbols to express solidarity and to symbolically challenge Israeli genocide and Western complicity.

Second, when a red triangle is painted on the walls of campuses or newspaper buildings, the authorities experience it as if it were written on their own bodies—turning graffiti into a physical act. If the (German) state uses law and policing to inscribe its power onto pro-Palestinians, by prohibiting some protests, banning the use of Arabic language in demonstrations and using violence against protestors, for example, then marking a “place of meaning” (memorial wall) or “place of authority” (police station)—even by simply writing a word (Free Palestine) or symbol (inverted triangle) of defiance on its walls—becomes, in turn, a way of writing back onto the body of that authority [Fig. 9].

In his book The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge, Frank Stern explains how “Germany — striving for sovereignty and integration into the West — was able to instrumentalise philosemitism in its domestic and foreign policy as well as a moral stance against local, deeply rooted antisemitic rightwing extremism.”

On the one hand, Palestinian solidarity bothers Germany because it always makes the state feel guilty twice; Palestinians are paying for what the Germans did to the Jewish people. On the other hand, the visibility of the Palestinian struggle and the existence of the Palestinian people with their claim to land make the post-Holocaust Jewish success incomplete. Therefore, being genocidal and complicit with the extermination of the Palestinians seems to be a ‘moral salvation’ for Israel and Germany.

The elimination of the Palestinian people would make the former’s guilt vanish (or evaporate) and make the Zionist project successful as a story of survival.

In this sense, Sami Khatib reminds us that the pseudo-question “Do you condemn Hamas?” becomes equivalent to “do you support the Western world order, its ruling ideology (Human Rights Discourse), and do you condemn the entire spectrum of Palestinian resistance, from peaceful boycotts to the Hamas attacks of October 7?” In other words, “Palestinians should accept their colonial subjugation, should not resist, and should, ideally, disappear and with them the annoyance of the Palestinian question.”

The aesthetics and writing of remembrance and solidarity of Palestine in Germany demonstrate the limits and double standards of German remembrance culture and solidarity. It shows how condemning genocide and the killing of civilians is manufactured in accordance with ideological motivations to justify one’s own history, where some humans and bodies are seen as not worthy of life because one decides to.

The post Palestine on Berlin’s Walls: Street Art, Censorship, and the Politics of Solidarity in Germany appeared first on Untold.

***

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.

But as AI becomes more embedded in governance and security, its role in border enforcement and immigration control has grown rapidly. These technologies often reproduce and intensify racial discrimination, particularly through algorithmic bias. This is no less relevant in the U.S. government’s utilization of the so-called “smart border”. 

What happens when AI is deployed to decide who can move, who is detained, and who is excluded at the border? 

A Human Rights Framework

In response to a 2023 meeting with United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) and the Immigrant Rights Clinic and International Justice Clinic at UC Irvine (UCI) School of Law submitted a report detailing how AI disproportionately harms Black migrants and migrants of color and giving suggestions for change in the future. 

There are already legal frameworks governing how states should use AI under international human rights law. Chief among them is the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), ratified by the United States in 1994.

ICERD requires states to: Prevent racial discrimination in all forms (Art. 2(1)(a)) ; amend policies and laws that perpetuate racial discrimination (Art. 2(1)(c)) ; guarantee equal treatment before the law (Art. 5) ; ensure remedies for victims (Art. 6) ; and hold private actors accountable (Art. 2(1)(d)).

By these standards, the U.S. is legally bound to ensure that AI does not reinforce racial inequities.

Surveillance Before the Border

In reality, however, BAJI and the UCI Clinic detail how the U.S. AI Border Enforcement Policy violates many of these rules at every stage of the immigration process. 

Even before migrants reach any land  border, AI systems track their movements. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) deploys autonomous surveillance towers and drones to identify “objects of interest,” replacing human patrols.

The rapidly expanding use of surveillance towers and Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) at the U.S.-Mexico border raises grave concerns about racial equity. To begin with, those under surveillance include large numbers of people fleeing violence, persecution, and even torture, who are entitled to seek protection in the U.S. under domestic and international law. However, due to their more limited access to formal immigration procedures, migrants of color are forced to risk their lives to cross the border. 

Second, the use of Anduril Towers, sUAS, and other forms of AI-powered surveillance systems at that border perpetuates discrimination by marking those migrants as lawbreakers and threats to national security rather than people seeking safety and security. 

The disproportionate surveillance on migrants of color translates to a disproportionately high death rate for those same groups as they get pushed into more dangerous terrain.

CBP claims new AI-powered systems are more humane than physical border walls. According to CBP, the smart border can help deter irregular crossings and increase migrant safety by having the capability to detect, capture, and safely deport migrants who find themselves lost in the desert or mountains. 

Yet, the data has shown the opposite is true—increased implementation of “smart border” technology has led to historically high rates of migrant deaths. 

AI at the Port of Entry

Formal entry routes are also shaped by algorithmic bias. The CBP One app, once required for entry applications, demanded a selfie to verify applicants. Yet the system frequently failed to recognize darker skin tones, misidentifying Black faces at a rate 10 to 100 times more often than white faces, according to legal scholar Priya Morley in AI at the Border: Racialized Impacts and Implications.

The app was also inaccessible for many communities: it lacked translations in key languages spoken by Black migrant populations, adding another barrier. Although CBP One is no longer available, debates about its reinstatement continue under the current administration.

Algorithmic Risk Scoring

Even if migrants pass the first stages, they face the Automated Targeting System (ATS), which compiles domestic and international databases to predict who might overstay a visa.

Though risk assessments are commonplace in immigration systems, the ATS system perpetuates already existing bias. For example, when Nigeria was added to a list of countries facing heightened travel restrictions in 2020, Nigerians became disproportionately flagged as high risk by the ATS.

Officials claim these systems are preventive, not punitive. Yet their very design perpetuates structural racial discrimination, contradicting U.S. commitments under ICERD.

Inside the U.S.: ICE Enforcement

Once inside the U.S., migrants encounter further AI-driven discrimination from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during detention and interior enforcement.

ICE uses predictive algorithms such as a “Hurricane Score” to determine who merits heightened surveillance. There is a lack of transparency on the factors that affect one’s Hurricane Score. Because the algorithm is provided by a private company, B.I. Incorporated, which has strong ties to the prison industry, the government has not had to disclose the factors of this score. 

ICE also uses the Repository for Analytics in a Virtualized Environment (RAVEn) platform to analyze trends and patterns across a series of data sources to further assess the risks migrants may pose in the U.S. RAVEn draws from biased local law enforcement data and international databases from offices across 56 countries. Migrants cannot opt out or even consent to data collection.

The lack of transparency and possibilities of redress in these systems has raised more grave concerns about compliance with ICERD articles and anti-discrimination regulations. 

AI in Immigration Relief

Finally, under immigration relief systems, AI is being used by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to sort evidence and detect fraud in applications. The training model Asylum Text Analytics (ATA), is a system responsible for identifying fraud by reading asylum application text. 

Oftentimes, ATA may prejudice non-English speaking applicants. This is especially true for those who speak more niche languages and translate through the same providers, because ATA may weed out those with legitimate claims whose applications contain similar phrases or narratives as other applications. 

Rather than simplifying its application process, USCIS also uses an AI-powered Evidence Classifier to “review” millions of pages of evidence ranging from birth certificates to medical records and photos for USCIS adjudicators. These AI reviews can negatively impact migrants who may have atypical documentation, oftentimes exacerbating racial discrimination. 

Decolonizing AI at the Border 

BAJI and UCI argue that addressing these harms requires a decolonial approach to AI. They invoke Cosmo uBuntu, an African philosophical framework rooted in collectivism and shared humanity rather than individualism. This involves the voluntary embracing of uBuntu (personhood) as “a foundational value system in our participation in planetary conviviality, without forcing universality.” 

In contrast to the Western-centric, individualistic views on humanity, African cosmology embraces the humanity of all humans. 

To align with ICERD and truly decolonize AI, African and diaspora communities must be actively involved in conceptualizing, inventing, innovating, and operating AI systems.

The AI systems currently used by DHS fail to incorporate any decolonial perspectives, perpetuating and exacerbating racial biases rooted in colonialism, extraction, suffering, and death.

Policy Recommendations

Individuals who may be negatively impacted by the use of AI must be promptly notified about such decisions, and provide them an option to opt out of AI systems where appropriate.

Federal laws governing DHS’s use of AI must prohibit and prevent any AI use that would result in racially discriminatory results or exacerbate structural racial discrimination. They should mandate effective discrimination-prevention measures,  independent oversight on implementation, robust public disclosures, stakeholder consultation with diverse populations, and access to effective remedies by those who are negatively impacted by DHS’s use of AI.

City policies must include an explicit pledge not to share information with DHS if it is expected to be used for AI development or deployment by DHS or its vendors.

Embedded in each of these calls is one that resounds: Until AI systems can be free of discrimination and until diverse perspectives are meaningfully included in their development and use, they must not be allowed to be used on any border.  

The post Decolonizing AI at the Border: When Algorithms Decide Who Can Move appeared first on Untold.

Today, we opened our archives too.

In full honesty to you, our dear reader, this opening has its origin in a time when this over-consumed cloth was impossible to rip – the only reality we knew and inhabited. In this spirit of acceptance and defeat, however, we believed there was still something meaningful to say about a past, a revolutionary time, that felt closed and sealed forever as a political project.

You can retrace this origin of this collection in the acts of documenting and archiving that, since the revolution, had been powerful tools for recording the realities of war. They also became a form of resistance against oppression and the foundation for demands of justice and accountability in Syria and its diaspora. The preservation of stolen, smuggled, salvaged materials – be it videos, memoirs, images, testimonies, or stories – has been a powerful medium to keep the revolutionary ethos alive, proving to the world that this ‘event’ existed.

A living tapestry 

We envisioned the introduction of this collection on the act of archiving as both a continuation of this trajectory and a departure from it. Our endeavour sought to capture how archiving infiltrates the way we think, speak, and attempt to write about the revolution – what came before and after – as our own thoughts penetrate facts. The constitution of these archives waives the personal and the collective, the lived and the imagined, the past and the present. 

They are fragments that unfold as a living tapestry – a clock, a song, the sea’s infinite waves, a broken TV, the green buses and a bureaucratic site. Each fragment of our archive vibrates with its own resonance, defying the constraints of order and resisting unified narratives. Each word becomes a gesture of defiance, a refusal to let fleeting moments of hope and despair fade unread. 

Before December 8th, 2024, these fragments were all we had to comprehend a history shaped by loss and exile – to make a claim on time through what was archived and written. But when the unimaginable turns into reality, time returns to the present, carrying the possibility of hope and restoration which also infiltrated our own words. The clock of history ticks once more and time starts to flow again. It reminds us that history – and these archives – are not static repository of “what was”, but a living, creative force that shifts and breathes, bearing the weight of what was and the promise of what could be. New light illuminates spaces of grief and melancholia, fear and humiliation we thought we understood, but never fully grasped. What we once treated as eternal had to be reimagined as the cloth and its threads are now ripped apart.

Writing, archiving

This has been true prior to December 8th, 2024 and, even more, in its aftermath. As we wrote down these archival fragments, we noticed their becoming a conduit through which history is continually reimagined and reshaped. These fragmented archives weave together the disconnected threads of history and breathe life into memory. Time collapses and reforms, no longer linear, but circular, offering moments where endings become beginnings, where loss unfolds into the possibility of renewal. Our act of writing became a transformative vessel, a time machine that navigates the fragile boundaries between memory and the present, contributing to the formation of these archives and their constant reconfiguration.

Writing and archiving are not merely intellectual exercises but emotional and political acts – a refusal to surrender memory to silence. Even objects shed their passivity and become subjects—autonomous, breathing entities. The Citadel of Aleppo evokes childhood – a labyrinth of the past, reshaped by the revolution. A bridge is formed between these sites of memory, embodying both shelter and loss. The loss is palpable in the devastation of Aleppo, but also in the silence of the sea, which carries countless untold stories, dreams of survival, and death. A clock, once silent, begins to tick defiantly, reclaiming lost time from the abyss of forgetting. On the dance floor in Berlin, the echoes of Abdul Baset al-Sarout’s voice merge into a new rhythm, intertwining Syria 2011 with the neon-lit nights of 2019, where past revolutions dissolve into pulsating beats and scattered fragments of hope. 

In our attempt to write down our own archive and archiving our own fragments, we pursued meanings in the chaotic and fragmented expanses of memory. In a world where ruptures and losses shape the surface of history, we search for fragments whose stretching towards each other offer insights into the “how” and “why” amidst the “what.” This search for meanings becomes a vibrant and fluid, at times even fugacious, confrontation with the past. Rather than dwelling in simple explanations, we sought meanings in the ambiguity of experience.

In what follows, dear reader, we share the meanings carried by the echoes of lost voices, pieces of revolution, the bitterness of missed opportunities, the taste of unexpected renewals. Yet, meanings, like archives, remain ever elusive – a fleeting shimmer, a thought we believed we’ve grasped, only to see it slip away. In this pursuit, these archives become spaces of metamorphosis – an ongoing process that confronts us with questions we may never fully answer,  propelling us forward today, as they did yesterday.

This text was written prior to February 2025 and is part of the dossier “Eternity Unwoven,” curated by Veronica Ferreri and Inana Othman.

The dossier is a collaboration of Archivwar with Untoldmag and Arabpop. Its Italian version is available in Arabpop Vol. 8 “Cose” (Arabpop logo)

Graphic project: Greg Olla

The publisher remains available to rights holders regarding any images for which it was not possible to identify or contact the owners.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Resarch and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101064513 “ARCHIVWAR – Archives in Times of War: Scattered Families and Vanishing Past in Contemporary Syria.” 

Funded by the European Union. Views and options expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Execute Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

The post Eternity Unwoven: Echoes of the Unwritten and Poetics of the Archive appeared first on Untold.

Do you think it will not come, my love?

I watch you with each tick of the clock,

Arriving from afar, my love

Fairouz’s words caught me off guard—her voice piercing the heavy shadows of memory like a sudden shaft of light, perfectly synchronized with a video of Homs’s Clock Tower Square in an Instagram reel. Those brief twenty-one seconds were enough to reshape an entire archive of the last 13 years. Years that began with a revolution shaking the walls of silence, restoring our ability to hope—before it was all veiled in the fog of eternity, and its heartbreaks exploded across every horizon.

Suddenly, the ticking of the clock returned, transcending both time and sound. It pulled us inward, into the depths where we had buried our disappointments, our hopes, and a deep sorrow tinted by the futility of all things—no matter how dazzling on the surface—when measured against our shattered faith in justice, and the specter of ruin clinging to our souls. The voices of our disappeared, silenced in Assad’s slaughterhouses, still echo. Those prisons appeared to us as impenetrable and everlasting, despite everything we had documented, shared, written, screamed, and shown the world. Then came the chimes, gathering the scattered fragments of our souls, flooding them with feeling. It wasn’t just a fleeting glimpse of the past but a rupture, piercing the core of the spirit, dragging it through every station of pain and heartbreak—only to return it to one single moment: the now. To the lingering doubt that perhaps tomorrow has not been completely stolen from us, that the dreams, however shattered and dispersed, might yet find a way to gather and be reborn!

In those few seconds, my heart trembled, and my soul gasped for breath, as if the dream we had nearly forgotten could still return, could once again be our guiding compass—a sudden, magical moment after a long and relentless darkness.

 December 7, 2024

How do I describe the taste of hope returning suddenly after years of forced absence—after we had taught ourselves to live without it, to accept its loss just to survive with what remained of us?

A few fleeting seconds in that reel were enough to stir a feeling I thought had vanished forever. It was more than hope—it was the return of tomorrow as a space for dreaming, for imagining, for waiting.

On this very day, the gates of Adra Prison opened. The same prison where, over years of captivity, my father wove me a beaded bag—bead by bead—as if stitching together a life in a time held captive.

In the realm of the unforeseen,
where prison carves its borders like a blind sculptor,
life takes shape through sound—
an eternal ritual defying time’s barrenness.

But what is time, when it knows no edges?
Our memory, mother, is a hidden prison,
a void that devours the past,
carving hollows of forgetting.

Yet in its wakefulness,
life is reborn—and with it, a quiet rage,
spilling into poems,
into voices that carry us forward.

Mama, you taught me to weave rhyme with my body,
to dance when words abandoned me,
because voice rises from the body—
a typewriter translating pain into motion.

But why do our bodies remain silent now,
when we are more parched than ever for meaning?
No, mother, this silence is not the salt that preserves, as you used to say,
but the silence of a room thick with shadows—
stories trapped in cellars,
a room without light,
where time loses its threads.

Fear, mother, is the shadow of a coiled poem,
spinning without end, searching for a lost horizon.
And yet, beneath it, the voice remains—
a monument of light,
a will that draws us back to the beginning,
again and again.

Yesterday

The opposition factions declared their control over Aleppo and their advance toward other Syrian cities: Hama, Homs. I did not yet realize that tomorrow would be the day when, after decades, the archive of oppression, fear, dreams, and exile would be unearthed. A day when the Assad regime’s legacy of horror and destruction, still too vast to fully reckon with, would be laid bare. It would be a day no Syrian would ever forget.

We didn’t sleep that night. At that moment, the archive of all those years came alive—just like us. We recalled who we had been, before disappointment and the needs of survival overtook us, before our lived reality drifted away from our inner selves—deprived, wounded, and haunted by sorrow.

I have always been drawn to archives. I imagined them as extraordinary time-traveling machines, capable of crossing eras and geographies, gathering infinite worlds where emotions and perceptions converge. But what captivated me most was their relationship to loss: the loss of what was once familiar, cherished, longed for, only to become exiled, deferred, erased, or forbidden. Like a homeland, like my father in prison, like the memory of revolution and the dream itself.

When Assad and the Baath Party seized power in the early 1970s, ushering in what came to be known as Assad’s Eternity, a new phase of political and spatial monopolization began. A culture of submission and repression took hold, as the regime built an ever-expanding archive of fear—etched into our bodies, embedded in our daily lives, woven into our language—recycled and passed down through generations. This archive took many forms: the memory of the Hama Massacre in the 1980s, the prisons and detention centers, the imposed language of obedience, the Baathist indoctrination in schools that sought to shape the Syrian individual in the image of the regime. Then, at the turn of the millennium, a fleeting specter of hope appeared in the form of the Damascus Spring—a moment that quickly revealed itself to be a carefully laid trap, witnessing yet another betrayal of hope.

 The Hour of Dreams and the Making of the Impossible

On March 15, 2011, the Syrian revolution erupted like a sudden flash of lightning, piercing the veil of silence and fear, forging the impossible. Despite the crushing weight of disappointment that later settled over the revolutionary dream, a new archive was born—one that was digital, spoken, and alive in ways unlike anything before it. It carried the faces and voices of the revolution, inscribing a memory that could never be erased. Homs’ Clock Tower Square bore witness to some of the most defining moments of this memory, in a city that carried titles like a mirror reflecting its people: Umm al-Faqir (Mother of the Poor), Umm al-Hijara al-Sawda (Mother of the Black Stones), the capital of humor and wit—until it earned yet another title: The Capital of the Revolution. That square held everything: a peaceful protest that turned into a massacre, then into a funeral and mass arrests, then into a sit-in, only to be followed by yet another massacre. The cycle of blood and siege rewrote tragedy into new scenes, replaying the same horror in different forms.

Clock Tower Square was more than just a place; it became a living symbol of the revolution, a pulse that reached into every rebellious neighborhood in Homs, every town and village that raised the banner of freedom. As A., a friend and activist from Al-Qusayr, recalled:

“After the Clock Tower Massacre, the regime tried to erase its traces from our collective memory. They banned us from gathering there, from demonstrating in its space. So, we said: If we cannot reach the Clock Tower, then let the Clock Tower come to us. And so, symbolic replicas of the square’s clock appeared in every revolutionary neighborhood”, like shattered fragments of Homs’ beating heart, scattered everywhere.

The songs of the revolution—and yours, mother—
carried us like the waves of the Mediterranean once did every summer,
before we arrived in Germany.
Rhythms bore our dreams, and the weight of forty years of silence,
holding us—both within our homeland and in exile.
Hope was a phoenix, a key,
carving waves of meaning into words.
On March 15, thirteen years ago, the clock struck zero,
marking the beginning of a future without end.
The voices of freedom wove the fabric of our being,
and let the voice break through—
in the kingdom of silence.

The Temporality of Siege

Amid the darkness of the siege that engulfed Homs’s opposition neighborhoods between 2011 and 2014, suffering was not the only story. The siege was more than just walls tightening around lives—it became a stage of resilience, a space where human creativity emerged in survival, resistance, and the pursuit of life, even as death loomed from every side.

In the besieged neighborhoods of Baba Amr, Khalidiya, and al-Qusour, life pulsed with scenes of solidarity and innovation. The struggle for survival unfolded in stories that refused to be confined by suffering alone, revealing moments of everyday resistance: a mother teaching the neighborhood children, youth building networks of mutual support, and laughter echoing in defiance of the shellfire.  

 The siege was not merely a tool of destruction—it was a test of the will to endure. As one resident of Homs described: “I don’t want to speak only of our suffering, but of the life we lived. Of our laughter, our solidarity, our attempts to stay alive.” To exist under siege was an act of resistance in itself—one that refused surrender and inscribed a new memory of the revolution, a memory that did not speak only of oppression but of the human spirit’s relentless fight to live.

 The Green Buses… The End

One of the most searing scenes etched into memory was the evacuation of Homs’s residents from the besieged neighborhoods aboard the green buses—a moment pulsing with grief, betrayal, and despair.

As part of a 2014 agreement brokered under UN supervision, these buses carried the last opposition fighters out of Old Homs, sealing the regime’s full control. But the green buses became yet another symbol of a time when dreams were suffocated. Since 2011, the Syrian regime had used them to forcibly displace the people of Homs, after years of siege and relentless bombardment that had drained every last possibility of hope and survival.

The Tomorrow That Came After Eternity

On December 8, 2024, the Assad regime fell, ending 53 years of continuous repression. The impossible—the dream Syrians had carried for so long—had finally become reality. That day marked a turning point—a moment when Syrian history began to be rewritten. The people of Syria began to sketch a new image of hope, one that returned despite disappointment and deep fragility, pulsing once more in their hearts, no matter how far they had been scattered across the exiles of time, geography, and grief.

Today, the clock ticks again—this time as a symbol of freedom, of justice reclaimed, of a homeland being rebuilt. The revolution was never only against a dictatorship; it was also a struggle to reclaim stolen time. Its return was a rupture, a shock that reshaped both our existence and our memory. It was not just a moment in history—it was a bridge between past and future, a long-lost dream finally stepping into the present.

The Syrian Archive: A Guardian of Pain, Fragility, and a Window to the Future

The archive of the revolution is both a child of hope and its creator, brimming with urgency and awakening. Through documenting their revolution and preserving their lived experiences since March 15, 2011, Syrians have defied the temporal void that repression sought to impose. This archive—holding the stories of protests, political activism, detainees, massacre victims, and mothers who lost their children—is not just a record of the past. It was not just a reminder of the past, but a bet on another turn of the future.

The Death of Eternity and the Return of Time

I remember—
but my memory is not a bridge to the past.
It is a window opening onto a distant horizon.

The historian stands at a threshold,
not only to look back,
but to weave time into a tapestry—
a tapestry of hope entwined with sorrow,
fragments and shadows forming a space pulsing with meaning
for those who dare to dive into its depths.

Look at me—
yesterday, I was a prison for a tyrant,
a dusty mass of hollow words,
where the voices of the marginalized faded within my walls,
and their stories disappeared into my cells.

But today, I am the pulse rising from beneath the rubble,
a light tearing through the veil of darkness.
I am a video capturing a city breathing through ash,
an image distilling terror,
a voice gasping: “I am alive… I am here.”

I am a time machine no tyrant can possess,
open for all to see.
But is truth ever fixed,
when it is as fragile as those who speak it—
those who documented their revolution
to defy the abyss of forgetting?

“Why do you document?”
they asked the witnesses and the survivors.
And they answered:
A cry against oblivion.
A testimony before the world.
A mirror reflecting the unimaginable
in the face of the possible.

But documentation was more than a cry—
it was a quiet hope
that pain might one day bear justice,
that what was crushed today
would not vanish into the void of tomorrow.

I am the archive.
I do not merely preserve the past;
I carry a promise—
that the mothers who wrote farewell letters,
the children who painted the sky beneath falling bombs,
the elders who told the stories of Homs
will not disappear into the corners of oblivion.
They will not be swallowed by silence.

I am not a repository of yesterday’s remains—
I am the beginning of what is possible,
a space where the narrative is reclaimed,
where justice is reborn
from the wombs of pain.

This text was written prior to February 2025 and is part of the dossier “Eternity Unwoven,” curated by Veronica Ferreri and Inana Othman.

The dossier is a collaboration of Archivwar with Untoldmag and Arabpop. Its Italian version is available in Arabpop Vol. 8 “Cose” (Arabpop logo)

Graphic project: Greg Olla

The publisher remains available to rights holders regarding any images for which it was not possible to identify or contact the owners.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Resarch and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101064513 “ARCHIVWAR – Archives in Times of War: Scattered Families and Vanishing Past in Contemporary Syria.” 

Funded by the European Union. Views and options expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Execute Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

The post Our time is tomorrow appeared first on Untold.

جنة جنة جنة يا وطنا [Paradise, Paradise, Our Country is Paradise] 

Words and the relentless music penetrate my body, inebriated and exhausted as it rests on a sofa of a semi-stranger, with the only bond we share being Syria. Night eventually descends in summery Berlin, while I am listening countless times to the song Janna Janna remixed by the Syrian-German band Shkoon.

Its beginning and end dissolve into a flow of sounds, words and beats. Darkness reaches the palm frond framing the window, its slow motion devouring every single object of that unfamiliar living room. The night is untamed, almost ruthless, in its carnivorous mission, ingesting my own body and mind, too, until now occupied by the crescendo of the synths and the pounding of the beat. The entire space and myself, the past and the present, dissipate profanely and profoundly.  

***

May 2021, Berlin, a desk

It was not the first time I listened to this song, even to this specific remixed version. As happened to a lot of the traditional musical repertoire, the piece was reinvented with new meanings in March 2011 and became the soundtrack of this historical period, the revolution, after protests sparked in Syria. The song, also, became tied to one of its uncontested icons, Abdul Baset al-Sarout, a young prominent football goalkeeper who had embraced the revolution and led the protests in Homs with his words and presence. He later turned into a Free Syrian Army fighter in the wake of the brutal repression and siege laid down by the al-Assad regime in his hometown, a transformation captured by the documentary Return to Homs by filmmaker Talal Derki. The song and its infinite re-interpretations also became the sonic landmark of my nightlife in the German capital, since my arrival in May 2018. I witnessed its innumerable metamorphosis–that did not scratch its sacred power–in the many Arab parties populating pre-pandemic Berlin. 

***

February 2019, Berlin, a nightclub

An unremarkable winter night. An electro dabke version of the song instigates a powerful energy reverberating on the dancefloor. Squeezed next to each other, partygoers are greeting each other, some others dancing and drinking, others simply chatting. The moment this song starts, this heterogeneous group becomes a single entity. My friend Azad, standing next to me, is also infected by the song and the atmosphere. He starts to shout, singing along. Holding my hand, he initiates a spontaneous dabke line where I follow his voice and body. We ignore the heat, the lack of space and oxygen; we dance, sneaking around single dancers, trying to find an empty spot for our next steps amongst the other chains of people whose hands clasp together. The song is replayed immediately, the energy still inhabiting the room with force as sweating bodies and loud voices continue to move and sing in unison. 

I did not reflect much in that moment about what was happening –as similar to other such moments punctuating my nocturnal life. I just danced, I let myself be carried away by the sound and the vibe. There was no time, space and, even, willingness to dissect the power of the song as it was all about living in the moment, savouring its addictive and hedonistic flavour like an animal starving in the middle of a dying forest. Maybe those moments on the dancefloor were just so cathartic because they were about holding onto something beautiful that was about to end or it had already ended but we were not ready to let go. 

Revolutions never last for an eternity, nor should they. Yet, those moments of pure magic can survive, or we want (we need) them to survive, not to fall down, collapse forever–and us–with them. They always remind me of Eugenio Montale’s poem, I Limoni [The Lemon Trees], his wandering in a noisy city made of cement punctuated by a moment of pure beauty as he suddenly glimpses a lemon tree hidden in the courtyard of a building. Maybe the revolution had the smell of the lemons Montale was desperately seeking, that ultimate treasure that life, the world, and nature can offer to ordinary people. Maybe the paradise–Janna Janna–was Montale’s lemon trees. 

***

October 2022, Berlin, an old kneipe

For Azad, –the friend who held my hand in captivity dancing dabke that night– the song is an allegory of his revolutionary past. Three years after that night; a lifetime after the revolution, we talk about my ideas behind this text. He smiles at me and his partner, with a hint of bitterness, saying that he forgot about that night, but he remembers the song as part of his young self reaching the square to protest, dance, listen to Janna Janna and to fulfill the promise of a different future for Syria. His enduring attempts always failed as the regime’s snipers and their bullets were always faster in dropping the curtains at these rebellious gatherings and claiming some people’s lives in the process. 

***

August 2015, Lebanon, a school courtyard

For me, that dabke reminds me of those evenings spent in the courtyard of the school in the midst of agricultural fields. Created by the Syrian community displaced from rural Homs, the school and its courtyard–situated not far from its informal settlement – became the stage for any sort of event that required a sahra [party]: celebration of an engagement, a wedding or just ordinary life. The singer with his voice and the musician with his electric piano animate those dark nights and their summer breeze amusing the usual crowd while guests arrive from far and not so far away. 

Sometimes, we just listen to his singing, making up impromptu celebratory or ironic lyrics about one of us. Other times, the electro dabke pushes us in the middle of the courtyard/dancefloor as circles of men and women, sometimes mixed, dance not far from children playing around. The atmosphere is not always joyful, nostalgia and melancholia arise amongst a tensed silent audience as his voice recalls the past and what has been lost. 

There was no revolutionary fervor in those summer evenings. Janna Janna and all the other revolutionary songs never made it to the courtyard –to be honest, the revolution seemed to have become a chimera by the time of my arrival in August 2014. Sarout was never mentioned there either. Yet, those moments also were revolutionary in their own essence: they were celebrating the ‘minor struggles’ to be alive and continue to live despite displacement and the devastation of the war. 

***

Berlin, October 2024, a bed

The dancefloor was neither the street nor the courtyard. Yet, Berlin 2019 managed to bring Syria 2011 and Lebanon 2015 back as if we were inside a half-broken TV from the nineties, in which, from time to time, one channel blended with another one –as if time and space collapse making it impossible to distinguish what we were doing, with whom, where and when. The dancefloor, after all, was just a vacuum that helped everyone postpone a sense of an ending and a future repeating an eternal past. After all, this was Berlin, it was not Sarout singing, it was only a remix. Like my friend, I also danced the night away. But that waning dusk on the sofa was different. It was not a time of reckoning the end, but a time of remembering its beginning.  

***

August 2012, London, a crowd, the Syrian embassy

Another Saturday afternoon in front of the Syrian embassy in the most imperial looking parts of Central London. ‘Janna Janna’ is filling the air of those revolutionary protests: we are not Syria, but Syria and the revolution are here. For the young and older generations of Syrians protesting from a distance, this is a moment of hope, euphoria, togetherness until then unimaginable, as fear and silence brought from Syria were carefully cultivated and generationally transmitted even in the diaspora.

I was happy to touch again those moments that were, so far, buried by the passing of time. Yet, they felt more distant than ever, belonging to a parallel universe that crashed in front of the violent reality. 

***

June 2019, Berlin, a computer screen

A week after me lying on that sofa,Sarout died after being wounded in battle between Hama and Idlib. My Facebook newsfeed becomes a reel of mourning for this man and his legacy: the video of him singing during the protests, his interviews and pictures of the funeral attended by thousands of people in Idlib. In Lebanon, members of the Syrian community I lived with commemorated his death, abandoning their usual carefulness in posting anything political and revolutionary at their own very real risk. In Berlin too, the news feels devastating––he was a symbol of the revolution, but almost an embodiment of the Syrian predicament and its contradictions. His death feels like a kitchen knife cutting deeply through the skin and flesh of a finger.

***

November 2024, Berlin

We are no longer on a dancefloor, its darkness and the darkness of the night did not protect us from the reckoning of this bitter end; there weren’t any lemon trees to uncover in any hidden corner. Like the TV of my childhood where white, black and grey lines dominated the screen, eating up one channel and the intrusive other, the feelings, people, years and places belonging to the revolution became mixed up with neither beginning nor end. A dream I did not live but watched in front of a broken TV showcasing fragments of my diaries, fieldnotes and memories. Maybe I can only archive these fragments, making some order and clarity in between these monochromatic lines as a final act of mourning, or as a way to deal with the lingering melancholia. I put a date, a place, I unpack and deconstruct the secret beauty of a lemon tree, the captivating lyrics of Janna Janna, reminding myself that even revolutionary icons like Sarout are human.

***

 7th December 2024, Berlin, Sonneallee/Arab Street,

I am walking towards Sonneallee to catch the bus to go home and watch the speech of Bashar al-Assad that never happened. My friend Nawal and I are stopped by a young boy standing in front of one of the many Syrian patisseries that found their homes in this long avenue. Wearing the Syrian revolutionary flag like the mantle of a superhero, he stands next to an old stereo singing Janna Janna, offering sweets to people passing by to celebrate the imminent fall of Bashar al-Assad. The revolutionary flag reappears in a blink of an eye, worn like an accessory by men walking in the street or attached to the Keffiyeh and the Palestinian flag at the entrance of many shops. 

The day after, even Sarout reappears in flags and posters brought by the jubilant crowd celebrating the collapse of the regime and its eternal aura. I smell again the lemon tree as Janna Janna is blasted in the middle of Kreuzberg, almost symbolizing this surreal moment of touching paradise with the point of that finger, effortlessly, at least for the here and now.

I do not know what to do with this text now that it tells a different ending written only in November from the one we witnessed more recently. I want to delete that part, but I can’t. I am tempted to rewind the tape, letting the interferences in the screen just be what they have been, without any order or logic, to preserve that revolutionary momentum as it was, as it is now, and with it, those who are not here with us, celebrating the many ways in which they also contributed to make the unimaginable and unforeseeable become history. 

This text was written prior to February 2025 and is part of the dossier “Eternity Unwoven,” curated by Veronica Ferreri and Inana Othman.

The dossier is a collaboration of Archivwar with Untoldmag and Arabpop. Its Italian version is available in Arabpop Vol. 8 “Cose” (Arabpop logo)

Graphic project: Greg Olla

The publisher remains available to rights holders regarding any images for which it was not possible to identify or contact the owners.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Resarch and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101064513 “ARCHIVWAR – Archives in Times of War: Scattered Families and Vanishing Past in Contemporary Syria.” 

Funded by the European Union. Views and options expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Execute Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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