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.

Known otherwise as the Flamingo Revolution, the massive civic participation has articulated five non-negotiable demands, starting with the resignation of Prime Minister Edi Rama together with his entire cabinet. The consistency, the novelty in the forms of political articulation, and the ever-growing scale have drawn worldwide attention and coverage in major international media.

The information that Kushner and Trump are behind the interventions in these protected areas, coupled with the deprivation of the local population’s right to common property, reeks of patterns of settler colonialism fused with venture capitalism: the privatisation of land and resources by outside capital, backed by political power, at the expense of those who have long depended on them. 

Criticism of the Albanian government for subordinating itself to a colonial order in order to gain international legitimacy while intensifying oppressive local practices is mounting steadily and has surfaced repeatedly throughout this protest. The protest has drawn together thousands of citizens, activists and environmental organizations, local communities, activists from human rights groups, as well as pro-Palestinian activists and collectives in Albania. 

“I left the barbed wire in occupied Palestine, and I found it in Zvërnec. A week ago, I left the executioners in occupied Palestine and found them in Zvërnec. Edi Rama is not the Prime Minister of Albania, he is Israel’s governor in Albania… That the fence will be removed, there is no doubt. That the project will be cancelled, there is no doubt. What we demand is resignation!”

These were the words by Baki Goxhaj at the 1st of June protest against the ecocidal project in Pishë Poro-Nartë, delivered no more than two weeks after he returned from the Global Sumud Flotilla mission towards Gaza. 

Baki touched the hearts of Albanian-speaking communities everywhere when he participated in the mission in May this year. Israeli military forces intercepted his vessel and detained him for three and a half days. Shaken by the violence he experienced and witnessed against his companions, he affirmed publicly that they have been subjected to ‘extreme violence’ and ‘torture practices’. 

Baki has followed the Palestinian cause for over 15 years. However, the fact that all of Albania’s political, intellectual and cultural elites, who are tied to Rama’s power, have aligned themselves with Israel and condemned Palestinian resistance following the events of 7 October 2023 marked a turning point in his political engagement in the public sphere. 

As an activist of the Palestina e Lirë (Free Palestine Collective), he has been involved in a number of initiatives since 2023. These include drafting the petition ‘Not in My Name’, which was signed by over 6,500 people in opposition to Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama being awarded the presidential medal of honour by Israeli President Isaac Herzog in 2024. He has also filed a criminal complaint against Chief Rabbi Joel Kaplan for participating in war crimes and crimes against humanity. 

Locally, he has been working alongside his partner Eriselda Balliu in the coastal city of Vlorë. He has also created the ‘themulsimvote‘ platform to help Muslim voters make more informed decisions in primary elections (2025) and vote against parties that support genocide.

Connected Struggles

Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians has mobilized many cities across Europe, including Southeastern Europe. Nevertheless, with the exception of Slovenia, almost no official statements condemning this genocide were made from governments of this region. 

Dissent and solidarity in Albania, Kosovo and Albanian diaspora, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia,  Croatia, Slovenia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Greece, and Bulgaria came from citizen protesters, activists, collectives, and religious communities. Political articulations were expressed through protests, marches, student encampments and actions in support of the BDS movement and the Global Sumud Flotilla. Demands included a ceasefire, an immediate halt to the genocide, accountability for genocidal acts, the arrest of Netanyahu, sanctions, the termination of economic agreements with Israel and boycotts of artistic, cultural and sporting organisations. 

There was also a call for an end to double standards in relation to both Ukraine and Palestine and for respect for international law. In Albania, the government’s strong alignment with Israel, which occurred alongside the ongoing genocide in Gaza, provoked revolt and waves of anger and indignation among Albanian citizens. Despite political challenges, this created fertile ground for the Palestine solidarity movement in Albania. 

The Rama government’s alignment with Israel has prompted many activists to engage in more intense solidarity with Palestine. Dorela Binjaku, a feminist activist and member of the same collective explains, “As long as it is our own government doing this, we cannot remain silent because silence is complicity.” 

Some of the activists we spoke with are also involved in other causes, including anti-colonial movements. The wealthy Western states contribute disproportionately to displacement and migration, that is in turn managed through increasingly exclusionary border regimes, through the exploitation of nature and the global commons as well as military interventions and conflicts. 

Fioralba Duma, co-founder of the Free Palestine Collective, has a long history of working with migrant rights in Italy and Albania, and with marginalized social groups without political rights. It was through her work on the Palestine cause that Fioralba came to understand decolonisation more deeply, and how this critical lens could be applied to the political and social dynamics in Albania. 

This implies an in-depth understanding of history from a Palestinian perspective, and a critical love for one’s country that affirms positions locally and globally which support humanism and international law, while condemning the Albanian government’s complicity in the genocide. As Duma explains, referring to Serbia’s war against Kosovo (1999) and the genocide of muslim Albanians in Çamëria (1944-45): 

“Free Palestine’s approach is this: we are Albanians, we have lived through genocide, and we understand what it means. It’s not a special status that we hold; but we lived it, and that means we understand it and we don’t want anyone else to ever experience it either. Today it’s the Palestinians; tomorrow it could be an entirely different people.”

A Solidarity Ecology

The Palestine solidarity movement that emerged in Albania after 7 October 2023 is notably heterogeneous, comprising individuals and groups with sometimes opposing political stances. The Palestinian cause has focused on articulating an end to the genocide, boycotting, divesting from and sanctioning the Israeli State, holding the Albanian government accountable for its recent collaborative stance, terminating all agreements with Israel, and recognising Palestine’s right to self-determination. 

These demands have created conditions in which diverse groups have been able to overcome deep ideological, political and religious differences, and even direct opposition, to unite in protest against the genocide unfolding in Palestine. As a solidarity ecology, Palestine has brought together queer and LGBT+ activists, feminists, progressive leftists, Muslims, Christians, conservatives, patriots, nationalists and even conspiracy theorists. 

Despite mutual distrust and suspicions about the potential instrumentalisation of the cause, these groups have engaged in lengthy negotiations to unify their voices. In the words of Duma, “Palestine has helped us cross these borders”. As emerges from interviews with other activists, Palestine is the issue that pushes everyone to transcend their own specific, radical positions, which may differ sharply from one another. 

They emphasise that now is the time to focus more than ever on Palestine, on solidarity and on mutual cooperation, and they do not hesitate to affirm that this inclusive process has made them more open and given them a broader sense of solidarity towards those who do not think as they do. “It is Palestine that unites us,” Duma says. 

In a context marked by fragmentation and significant challenges to political organisation, stemming from social, political, historical, economic and international factors, the Palestinian cause has sparked hope that differences can be overcome, both within organisations in the country and across regional Balkan organising. 

Since October 2023, pro-Palestinian protests in Albania have been among the most sustained in terms of duration, mobilisation of resources, and social media attention, even if they have not always been massive in scale. As Duma affirms, engagement with Palestine has democratised activist spaces, with the call for liberation serving as a unifying symbol of solidarity. 

Another activist, part of the group Shalqi për Paqe (Watermelon for Peace), who was initially involved in pro-Palestinian internationalist movements outside Albania, emphasises the importance of building bridges as a metaphor for cooperation between different people, highlighting the need to care for others despite their differences: “If we are going to create a bridge, people have to meet in the middle. If we are going to build a bridge, it has to be a safe one for everyone to be on that bridge.”

From interviews with activists describing the nuances of engagement within their respective groups, the concept of comradeship emerges as a common political horizon. This political bond helps to overcome specificities and political particularities in order to engage in emancipatory, egalitarian political struggle. As one activist explains, “We can be comrades; we don’t need to be friends.” Some activists place a stronger emphasis on intersectionality, while others focus more on local and situated decolonial practices built on the concept of patriotism.

Creative Disruptions

From November 2023 to June 2026, pro-Palestinian organizations in Albania have organised, co-organised and participated in numerous nationwide protests, primarily in the capital city of Tirana. Alongside these mobilisations, activists have established social media platforms aimed at disseminating information, mobilising supporters, networking and circulating announcements related to local and international actions and initiatives. 

Pro-Palestinian activists, including grassroots groups such as Palestina e Lirë, Shalqi për Paqe, Liri Palestinës, the Balkan Solidarity Network and other activist and online groups, have launched national campaigns to boycott socio-cultural activities organised by the Israeli Embassy in Albania and to sustain boycotts of Israeli products. These campaigns are in line with the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Since its inception, the pro-Palestine movement in Albania has involved public demonstrations in streets, buildings, historical monuments and peripheral neighbourhoods. The ‘Palestina e Lirë’ collective operates horizontally in an effort to be as inclusive as possible, maintaining a state of readiness for swift and unexpected actions in physical public spaces and online. 

Fioralba refers to these actions as ‘disruptive actions’. According to her, the difficulty of organising while a genocidal war is unfolding and across social networks lies in the frequent emergence of misunderstandings, and the impossibility of sitting down to talk properly, meeting in assemblies and strengthening relationships around shared values. 

Actions are often organised through social media, with people who don’t know each other personally coming to an agreement. These actions have an impromptu character, which sometimes puts the action at risk until the last moment. However, this mode of organising emerged from urgency, and activists have transformed these precarious conditions into strengths, giving their actions an element of surprise while minimising the risk of sabotage or infiltration by the authorities.

Some of these actions include: unfurling a large Palestinian flag in Tirana in opposition to the visit of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken; protests against the visit of President Isaac Herzog to Tirana; and a banner near the National Museum reading ‘Ukraine 2 years: 30,457; Palestine: 144 days, 30,000″, which highlights perceived double standards in responses to war and Russian aggression. Other actions include graffiti condemning the IDF’s genocidal acts, expressions of support for imprisoned activists in the UK, solidarity with the Freedom Flotillas‘ humanitarian actions, and broader calls for Palestine’s liberation.

The Albanian government’s, and in particular Prime Minister Edi Rama’s support for the Israeli state has been widely exposed, criticised and challenged by writers, scholars and activists. As an alternative to campaigns calling for ‘non-action’, such as the boycott of the International Israeli Cultural Week in Albania, activists from various collectives have developed platforms for collective cultural and artistic creation in response and in opposition to Rama’s ‘cultural diplomacy’. 

In June 2024 and 2025, these grassroots groups established and curated the Month of Palestinian Culture in Albania. Activities included poetry readings, meetings with activists engaged in the Palestinian cause across the Balkan region, marches and protests, film screenings, discussions with Palestinian authors and activists, feminist readings, Palestinian culinary evenings and “Queers for Palestine” cinematic events. 

These activities were hosted across multiple social centres and alternative spaces in Tirana, Vlorë, Elbasan and Kamëz, in collaboration with independent, activist- and community-run venues such as Kur’ajo Press (Bulevard Art Space), Tek Bunkeri, Smart Centre and Drejtësi Sociale. Some of these activities extended beyond Albania through cooperation with activist centres in Kosovo, including the ‘Sekhmet’ Centre and the Feminist Collective, among others.

In addition to these engagements activists consistently sought to raise awareness of the Palestinian cause alongside other issues. For instance, they incorporated calls for Palestine into the ‘Flamingo Revolution’ protests, LGBT+ protests and 8 March feminist protests of the last three years. Activities such as marathons and football tournaments were explicitly organised in solidarity with the Palestinian cause, raising its profile through symbolic gestures, active participation, and coordinated dissemination on social media platforms. 

Furthermore, these collectives issued calls of solidarity with Iran, Lebanon, Sudan and others, such as the Albanian student movement in North Macedonia. Through anarcho-feminist activism, Binjaku emphasises:

“Colonialism is not only territorial, it is patriarchal, it is racial, it is class-based. The freedom of Palestine is freedom against all these forms of violence. You cannot support a liberation that ignores violence against queers, against women, against the poor. There can be no true liberation without the liberation of everyone. It is not only a war for territory; it is a social and bodily war, an assault that affects us all, an assault against existence, against truth, against life.”

A notable innovation in grassroots organising has been the interconnection of the Balkan region around the Palestinian cause. As activists explain, one of the first meetings leading to the creation of Balkan Solidarity Network took place online, through the event “Connecting Struggles: A Palestinian Perspective”, held as part of Palestine Cultural Month, and organised by Palestina e Lirë, Shalqi për Paqe, and Boulevard Art and Media Institute (Kur’ajo Press). After this encounter, a physical meeting was organized in Ljubljana in 2024. The Network was established as a platform that mediates and strengthens connections between anti-colonial, feminist, queer, and anti-imperialist struggles across the Balkans and beyond. 

This period was accompanied by the question of whether groups in the region, historically on opposing sides, would be able to come together. This marks the transition from local organising in individual cities in Albania, to national organising across Albania, to pan-Albanian organising, encompassing all Albanian-speaking spaces beyond official borders, and finally to regional organising, spanning the countries of the Balkans and Southeastern Europe, and extending further internationally.

If It’s Small and Insignificant, Why Police It?

In an interview with Middle East Eye, Yoel Kaplan – the Israeli chief rabbi who has been present in Albania since 2012 – dismissed the Palestine solidarity protests in the country as “tiny and irrelevant”, likening them to “bad publicity is still good publicity”. He added that he has the backing of Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama and that, consequently, the protests will have no real effect. 

In September 2025, activist Baki Goxhaj submitted a complaint to SPAK (the Special Anti-Corruption and Organised Crime Structure), accusing the aforementioned Chief Rabbi Yoel Kaplan with six offences, including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Kaplan has publicly and proudly acknowledged that he participated in combat as an IDF soldier alongside his son. 

Three months later, in December 2025, the Anti-Terrorism Directorate of the State Police filed a criminal complaint against Goxhaj for “inciting hatred and discord” – an offence carrying a prison sentence of two to ten years. Listed as ‘evidence’ in the complaint, were Goxhaj’s social media posts criticising the Zionist views of Albanian MPs, journalists and intellectuals. 

All of the posts cited as incriminating acts dated from after September – the same period in which Goxhaj had filed his complaint against the chief rabbi. Ultimately, the case was dismissed due to a lack of evidence. 

In an article titled “Anti-terrorism terrorizes Muslims”, Goxhaj summarised the entire history of his persecution and dismantled every argument put forward in the State Police directorate’s complaint. He concluded that “the violence of Rama’s Zionist system will only deepen against Muslim believers, especially those who speak out”.

The Albanian state’s serious investment in intimidation as evidenced by the level of attention given to it, sits in direct contradiction with the assumption that Palestine solidarity mobilisations are ‘irrelevant’. 

Consider, for example, how the police cordon surrounding every protest in solidarity with the Palestinian people has prevented protesting communities from marching freely through the capital or in front of the prime ministerial building. This alone speaks volumes about the state’s criminalising and surveilling atmosphere. 

Far from the ‘calm’ that Chief Rabbi Kaplan suggests, the state appears deeply unsettled. In January 2026, two protests were held in response to Edi Rama’s official visit to Israel – widely regarded by the Albanian public as the “shameful visit” due to its normalisation of genocide – during which Eriselda Balliu, a protester, educator and activist, had her posters torn by a plainclothes police officer. She was then forcibly removed from the area near the prime ministerial building and detained alongside fellow protester Enes Jashari. After spending several hours at the police station, they were released.

From the very beginning of its organising, the Palestine solidarity movement in Albania has been accompanied by these small acts of repression and policing. In June 2024, a protest organised by the Free Palestine Collective was surrounded by what appeared as an excessive number of police officers alongside two rapid response vans and the anti-explosive unit (Forcat Renea). 

In July 2025, the police cordoned off Skanderbeg Square, preventing hundreds of protesters from marching towards the Prime Minister’s Office. The same thing happened a month later on 16 August 2025, when protesters were again denied the right to march freely. The September 2025 gathering, though notified in accordance with legal requirements, was blocked outright by police forces. 

Activists have noted that, in the overwhelming majority of protests, the police have intervened using subtle tactics aimed at stopping or demotivating protesters, such as changing the time or day of the protest, changing the location, blocking marches, postponing dates, using disproportionate force and making outright arrests. Despite these attempts, the state seems more intimidated than intimidating. 

Against Genocide, Across Borders

Activist groups across Southeastern Europe have articulated what scholar Francesco Trupia has called “spontaneous and transnational postulates of solidarity” in line with global pro-Palestinian anti-colonial movements of the Global South. These groups are motivated by emotional and historical experiences tied to post-colonial, post-socialist, and post-genocidal processes, as well as by different premises and current contexts. 

Historically marginalised, these groups are nevertheless grounded in specific local realities in relation to Palestine. Operating under difficult social and organisational conditions, ranging from state-controlled media censorship to ongoing intimidation and criminalisation attempts, these movements have been careful to avoid any accusation of antisemitism in their anti-Zionist statements about Gaza and Palestine, as seen through the lens of feminist, urban, environmental, intersectional, and anti-colonialist activism.

Pro-Palestinian mobilisation in Albania has not broadly rearticulated any socialist legacy rooted in the history of friendly relations between the Albanian state and Palestine during the socialist regime, but has instead mobilised a new political language which links a systemic critique of the Albanian government’s neoliberal practices with collective traumas of war and genocide in Kosovo and Albania. It also reclaims Holocaust memory and the Albanian protection of Jews, insisting on them as reasons not to tolerate genocide and crimes against humanity. 

At the same time, it appeals to society on moral and legal grounds. Palestine has served as a prism through which the personal traumas of post-genocidal generations in the Balkans have been viewed and rearticulated – collective histories of expulsion, war, segregation and occupation. 

For nearly three years, Palestine has been at the centre of historical analogies used to mobilise against genocide, regardless of ideological differences. After many months, mass protests in Albania have also embraced the Palestinian cause, challenging the colonial practices of Israel and the United States which affect even the most marginalised communities worldwide. 

The post Citizens Against the State: How Albania Answered Its Government’s Embrace of Israel appeared first on Untold.

And this is precisely where the problem begins.

Because Jared Kushner didn’t arrive in Albania with a shovel in his hand. He didn’t  personally put up wire fences. He didn’t personally declare himself a strategic investor. He didn’t  personally change the logic of protected areas. He didn’t personally place the Albanian state at the service of luxury tourism. Kushner may be the international symbol of the arrogance of money. But the door to Albania is not opened from Manhattan. It is opened from Tirana.

And in Tirana, for more than a decade, the political key has been called Edi Rama.

Ypi’s article clearly sees the danger: Albanian nature is being turned into a luxury commodity, the coastline into an investment catalogue, the islands into yacht dreams, while the people remain spectators on their own land. 

But where it should strike by name, the article begins to speak through fog. It speaks of the “Albanian government”, of “global capitalism”, of “oligarchy”, of “the rules of the system”. All of these are true. But the system does not sign documents by itself. Oligarchy does not vote laws by itself. Global capitalism does not command the Albanian police by itself. And “transition” does not appear at press conferences to defend the resort.

This is done by the government. This is done by power. This is done by Rama.

The Absent Seller

In this sense, Ypi’s article is critical, even though it feels somewhat as if it has been guided by someone, but it is not severe. It is elegant, but not sufficiently fair. It carries a certain hypocrisy of sensitivity toward the protesters, while remaining soft toward the political architect of the model those protesters are opposing. It understands the revolt, but it does not fully name the blame.

The title itself is meaningful: “Look at the protests Jared Kushner has caused in Albania”. But no, the protests are caused by Edi Rama. The protests are caused by a captured state. The protests are caused by a governing model that has turned Albania into a workshop of permits, towers, concessions, and strategic investors. 

But in Ypi’s article, the blame is placed on Kushner. The foreigner is a convenient villain. He is easier to hit. He is safer to mock. Especially for a British or European audience that knows the Trump family as a symbol of arrogant wealth and narcissism.

But for Albanians, the problem does not begin with Ivanka “discovering” an island from a yacht. The problem begins with a Prime Minister who behaves as if Albania were private property to be presented at investors’ tables. The problem begins with a state that bows before billionaires and rises against its own citizens. The problem begins when the government says “there is no final agreement”, while on the ground fences, private guards, machinery, and mass violence already appear.

This is the moment where the article should have become sharper. It should have asked: who allowed this? Who defended it? Who normalised it? Who used European integration as a cover for the privatisation of public assets? Who has turned “development” into the most beautiful word for the disappearance of Albanian nature and property?

Ypi says beautifully that Albania is not for sale. But she does not go all the way in saying who is behaving like the seller.

A Theoretical Fog

The article also carries an old habit of academic left-wing thought: whenever the blame becomes too concrete, it is dispersed into abstractions. It is not Rama, it is capitalism. It is not the government, it is globalisation. It is not laws made for clients, it is ‘the rules of the game’. It is not power, it is ‘the system’.

This is comfortable. In fact, very comfortable. It is like sleeping peacefully in the large bed of theory, where the ideological ghosts of the 20th century whisper that individuals do not matter, only structures matter. Somewhere in that theoretical calm, even the shadow of Joseph Stalin (with whom Ypi has personal experiences) through history and memory  may appear as the distant echo of a world where everything was explained through system, class, and history, while personal responsibility disappeared into the fog of dialectics.

But Albanians do not have the luxury of living in theoretical fog. They live in a country where decisions have names, signatures have dates, companies have owners, permits have institutions, police have orders, and the government has a prime minister.

Therefore, when we speak about Narta, Sazan, Zvërnec, Rrjoll, and the Albanian coastline, it is not enough to speak about a “development model”. We must speak about a model of governance. And Rama’s model of governance is clear: Albania as a luxury showcase for foreigners, as a construction site for the connected, as a tourist postcard for propaganda, and as a country of emigration for its own citizens.

Albania 2030

The greatest irony is that Rama sells this as modernisation. Whenever a major project appears, we are asked to see it as a step toward Europe. As if Europe were a private resort. As if European integration were measured by the number of luxury hotels. As if flamingos, lagoons, monasteries, public property, local communities, history, and national culture were provincial obstacles to the grand dream of “Albania 2030”.

In reality, this is not Europe. It is a new orientalism with a European façade. It is the idea that a small country must accept anything, as long as the investor is big enough. It is the philosophy of submission with a smile: give the land, give the sea, give the island, give the law, give the silence, and in return receive the promise that one day you will look modern in tourism brochures.

Here Ypi’s article has one great merit: it understands that the protest is not simply about the environment. It is about dignity. It is about public property. It is about the fundamental question: to whom does Albania belong?

But again, she stops before the next question: who is treating Albania as if it no longer belongs to Albanians?

The answer is not only Jared Kushner. The answer is not only Ivanka Trump. The answer is not only global capitalism. The answer is also the Albanian power structure that opens the door to this model, publicly defends it, calls it development, sells it as vision, and then accuses citizens of being old-fashioned, politicised, or enemies of progress.

At this point, the article is softer than it should be. It criticises the socialist government, but it does not dismantle Rama as a political figure. It does not place him at the centre of responsibility. It does not treat him as the architect of a system where the strategic investor is more important than the strategic citizen, where public property is weaker than private capital, where the police often appear more careful with power than with the people.

The Ugliness of Power

Ypi writes beautifully about the young people, the protest, the songs, the flowers, the cleaning of the streets. This part is humane and fair. The Albanian protest deserves to be seen as civic, peaceful, and dignified. But the beauty of the protest must not soften the ugliness of power. 

A people who give flowers to the police do not absolve the state when the state remains silent before violence. A protest that cleans the square should not be used as moral decoration for an analysis that does not fully clean up political responsibility.

The article also strikes at the old opposition, and here it is right. The Albanian opposition has for years failed to build moral trust. It has often been part of the same theatre, the same bargains, the same culture of transition. 

That is why the protest is strong precisely because it is not its property. The protest is cleaner than the parties. More credible than exhausted leaderships. More alive than the television studios where the same people are recycled, people who have commented on every crisis and helped produce them.

But if the opposition is captured by the past, the government is captured by the present. And the present has a name, power, mandate, and responsibility.

In the end, Ypi calls Albania a light for Europe. This is a beautiful idea. But Albania cannot be a light for Europe if, inside the country, the state behaves like a real estate agency. It cannot be a light if the government sells nature and public property as promotional assets. It cannot be a light if the people must take to the streets to remind the prime minister that the country is not his property.

Albania can become a light only when protest does not remain poetry for European newspapers, but turns into concrete accountability: suspension of projects lacking transparency, a full investigation of decision-making with arrests and imprisonment, including of PM Edi Rama, real protection of protected areas, judicial oversight, publication of the project documents, an end to private violence, and the end of laws made for select investors.

Therefore, Ypi’s article should be read, but also challenged. It is valuable because it carries the voice of the Albanian protest into an international newspaper whether suggested by someone or not, we will not enter into that story, because we know it. But it is insufficient because it leaves Rama more protected than he should be. It attacks the system, but not enough the man who has built, decorated, and sold this system as “Renaissance”.

In Albania, the problem is not only that Jared Kushner wants a resort.

The problem is that Edi Rama behaves as if Albania was born to offer that resort to someone.

And this is why the protest must not stop at the slogan “Albania is not for sale”.

It must go further:

Albania is not for sale, because Albania is not the property of the Prime Minister, and the Prime Minister must be investigated and arrested immediately if he does not resign.

*This article was originally published in Albanian in AlbaniaHistory on June 12. This English translation is published with permission. 

The post A Convenient Villain: How Blaming Kushner for Albania’s Protests Stops at Edi Rama’s Gate – A Response to Lea Ypi’s Article in The Guardian appeared first on Untold.

“You know, Diana, we are in Germany. We can’t use words like genocide or apartheid. We don’t know who will be in the audience, and I want to protect you. If an extreme right person interrupts, I’ll have to interfere and control the conversation. I am totally with you, I understand you, but you know the history here, the culture of memory. Someone might be offended, or not understand you.”

With these words, a German scholar, well established and working in a reputable institute, tried to convince me to choose my words.

It was October 2024, one year into Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Lebanon was also under attack.

And I had just realized that the panel I was invited to, addressing Beirut’s history, would talk about the city without addressing the war Israel was waging against it. So I told him it made no sense for me to speak only about history or music while ignoring the ongoing destruction, erasure, and genocide in Palestine and Lebanon.

He then invited me for a coffee to “discuss” my intervention.

The panel was meant to celebrate Beirut as a city always on the edge, a city that loses itself year after year. The city of intellectuals and culture, the city of cafés and books. A city worth mourning, but only in its metaphors.

Not the suburbs. Not the South. Not the Bekaa. Not that Lebanon.

Not the people whose histories disturb. Their ways of mourning, their rituals of grief, their resistance, are not worthy of their attention, nor part of this story. Maybe they are too mournful, too religious, not refined enough for their taste, for this imagined Beirut, cleaned, curated and made to fit a certain language.

So of course, better to leave aside the ongoing destruction by Israel, the ethnic cleansing, the dehumanization of an entire community. The stories of entire villages in the south being erased. The noise of the histories and memories I would bring into the conversation.

On that same day, a rocket hit Ras el-Nabaa, less than 200 meters from my parents’ home, where my aunts and their families were staying. Just meters away, seconds away… yet a million lifetimes away from me. Bombs, erasure, families gone, memories shattered.

The silence goes on, relentless.

And yet, here I was, sitting there, safe in Berlin, listening to him asking me to watch my words. To be careful with my language, not to disturb the fragility of German history.

He kept reassuring me that he would “protect” me, in case some “extreme right wing” guy, the usual monster everyone fears, would interrupt the panel. Because my words would offend him. Would offend them.

Our words scare them. Our history still unsettles them.

But for him, there was no problem using this fear. No problem disciplining me through his own imagined violence. His history, his memory, was something I was expected to accept. To carry.

***

Since October 7, I have heard so many European scholars, people who built their careers on our region, tell me quietly, in private, that they are “with Palestine”, or that they are ashamed of their government.

Quietly. Always so quietly.

But when it comes to speaking publicly, to standing against what is happening in their own institutions, their silence is so loud. They speak about freedom of expression. They love that phrase. But when it comes to Israel, or to questioning German memory and the structural racism it created in their institutions, suddenly it disappears.

Since I became German, some even laugh about it. They come to me, joking, almost hysterically, creepily: “Now you are part of it. Our German guilt. Our memory.”

They laugh and laugh. And my world turns upside down. They laugh while my memories shatter, piece by piece. They laugh while everything around me loses meaning. They laugh while I live this constant dissonance. Here, in Berlin, everything is calm, yet so disturbing. There, everything is collapsing, yet it makes so much sense.

They laugh and laugh, in silence, living their everyday lives, convinced they are safe in their own small, individual worlds. As if safety was natural. As if it was not built on distance. On silence. On what is not said.

***

It is 9am. A peaceful, sunny day in Berlin. March 2026.

I am sitting in the office. I hear a sound.

Drones.

I feel it in my body. I move in my chair, and I look around. Does anyone else hear it? No one reacts. I look again. I am in Berlin.

I have told myself, with a lot of guilt, that the sound of drones is something new to me. That I wasn’t used to it, nor internalized it. Not yet. Not like my family and friends there. They had become hunted by that sound. I kept telling myself this was not my trauma.

But my body tells me otherwise.

It reminds me that it has already absorbed this fear, the fear of something hunting us from above. It didn’t forget the shiver it creates. Fear travels with us. It does not stay there, nor respect borders. It sits in the body, quiet sometimes, then suddenly very loud.

My body has carried this for years. The fear of planes haunting the sky. We used to call it umm kāmel. It watched us. Today they call it zanāni. Now it hunts, speaks, erases you like a bug.

My heart starts beating fast. I look outside. I am still in Berlin. It’s just the neighbor cutting the grass in this nice, fancy and quiet neighborhood. But in my body, it is a drone. Following me here. Into this calm, safe life.

I ask my colleague: do you feel something?

She says yes.

For a second, I think maybe she feels it too. Maybe she understands something of this. Maybe I am not that hunted.

Then she says: yes, this weather… this long winter in Berlin. It’s so depressing.

Yes, I say. The winter.

***

It always comes back to the same moment. The same questions. The same hunted memories.

February 2024. Sitting at a table with German scholars. More than 20,000 people already killed in Gaza.

One of them, a specialist of the region, was speaking loudly, almost proudly. He was talking about the Israeli war on Gaza, its repercussions in Europe, and the pro-Israel stance of universities. He criticized those who expected more from German scholars.

Then I said: “But German scholars are not really fighting back, nor willing to take a clear stand. Maybe this is the moment to give something back to the places you build your carriers on. Even a little.”

Something changed.

His eyes turned red, his face tightened. He looked straight at me and asked me:

“But do you condemn Hamas?”

The post “Now You Are Part of It. Our German Guilt. Our Memory” appeared first on Untold.

That silence has enveloped south Lebanon, and it is becoming yet another moral failure of an era defined by live streamed genocides, the death of international law, and pride in war crimes.

What is happening in south Lebanon is not, by any serious measure, a proportionate military campaign. It is the systematic hollowing out of a people from their ancestral land, and an eradication of life from that land itself.

To date, Israeli attacks on Lebanon since October 2023 have killed more than 7,000 people and injured more than 24,000, according to conservative numbers by the Lebanese Health Ministry, with the majority civilians. More than one million people – a fifth of the population – are displaced, while medical workers, journalists, and civilian infrastructure have been systematically targeted.

This mass displacement is not a byproduct of the war. It is its stated objective. Israeli officials explicitly stated in late March 2026 that they were demolishing south Lebanon houses and villages “in accordance with the model as Gaza,” and that 600,000 displaced people would not be allowed to return “until the safety of Israel’s northern residents is guaranteed.”

Despite a ceasefire agreed in November 2024, over 15,000 Israeli violations were recorded by UNIFIL, with Amnesty International documenting near-daily Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon throughout the 15 months period, until March 2, 2026, when Israel formally resumed full-scale war.

A Civilizational Wound

South Lebanon is not simply territory. It is among the most layered, historically dense regions in West Asia. The villages of Jabal Amel carry centuries of Islamic scholarship, poetry, and legal tradition. This is a land that has outlasted empires. Tyre (Sour) is one of the oldest continuously populated cities on earth, an ancient Phoenician port that gave the world its purple dye and the alphabet’s early spread. It has been sacked, rebuilt, and survived Alexander the Great, the Crusaders, and every empire that passed through. On October 23, 2024, Israeli airstrikes destroyed large swathes of the city, with one strike landing 50 metres from the ancient ruins, today the city is under evacuation orders by the Israeli army. 

Then there is Nabatieh,  the beating heart of Jabal Amel, and another city under evacuation orders. Its name is tied to the Nabataean traders who moved between Sidon and Damascus. For centuries it has connected the mountains to the coast, the inland villages to the sea, a crossroads where the whole of the south converged. 

At its centre, the Monday Market stretches back 500 years, a weekly ritual that survived Ottoman rule, civil war, and years of Israeli occupation. By late 2024, roughly 85 percent of the city’s buildings had been damaged or destroyed, along with some 300 businesses. Israel did not stop at the ceasefire, what remained was struck again when fighting resumed. A UNDP assessment found that “58 percent of agricultural assets in the Nabatieh district had been destroyed”, the highest proportion anywhere in the south. 

Nabatieh, like other towns and villages in the South, has been destroyed before, in 1978, in 1982, and in 2006. People rebuilt each time. 

What Israeli airstrikes and ground incursions are doing to this landscape is beyond the mass murder of people. It is destroying a world, systematically flattening architecture that predates the state of Israel itself, obliterating millennial olive groves and family homes, forcing the flight of entire communities whose roots run deeper than most nations. When heritage sites, mosques, and village squares are reduced to powder, something is lost that no reconstruction can return.

This is ethnic cleansing: the forced displacement of a population from its ancestral land through systematic terror.

Killing the Land Itself

But Israel’s war on Lebanon does not stop at human communities. It extends into the soil, the forests, the water, the animals, and the very biological substrate of the south. This is not collateral damage. It is a deliberate strategy, and it is documented.

During the 2024 Israeli war, Lebanon lost around 1,910 hectares of prime farmland, 47,000 olive trees, and roughly 1,200 hectares of oak forests, some of the last remaining native woodland in the region. Among the casualties was Harj al-Raheb, the Monk Forest, on the southern edge of Ayta ash-Shaab, a 16-hectare woodland of ecological and cultural richness that had endured for centuries. Satellite images now show white craters where green canopy once stood, alongside extensive bulldozing that stripped the terrain bare. Fire and phosphorus erased in months what has lived there for millennia.

The weapon of choice for much of this destruction is white phosphorus, a chemical substance that ignites on contact with oxygen, burns at up to 800 degrees Celsius, and releases thick toxic smoke. Human Rights Watch verified its use in at least 17 municipalities across south Lebanon. In at least five of those, the munitions were used in populated areas, landing on the roofs of residential buildings. The stated rationale is to burn down fields for visibility. Trees, in other words, are a threat. Forests must be destroyed. Nature itself is the enemy, just as the US military had done in Vietnam using napalm to burn life during their murderous imperial campaign against the country’s national liberation movement. 

More than 918 hectares were hit in 191 documented white phosphorus attacks from October 2023 until the 2024 ceasefire alone, according to data collected by Lebanese researcher Ahmad Baydoun and the environmental group Green Southerners. The long-term consequences remain unknown, but easy to predict. 

Even though Israel shelled Lebanon with white phosphorus repeatedly between 1982 and 2006 in its various wars of aggression, there have been no local studies on its long-term environmental impact, due to lack of resources, political inaction, or the difficulty in accessing samples. The poison persists in the soil; but the science to measure it has been mostly unused.

Then, as if to ensure that whatever survived the bombs and fire could not sustain life, came the herbicides. In early February 2026, Israeli planes sprayed toxic chemical substances across Lebanon’s southern border, covering approximately 8.5 square kilometres of agricultural land, forests, and livestock grazing areas with glyphosate at concentrations up to 50 times higher than standard agricultural use. Lebanon’s agriculture and environmental ministries found glyphosate levels 20 to 30 times above average in soil samples from the affected area. Glyphosate is banned in Lebanon and classified by the World Health Organization as potentially carcinogenic to humans.

The targeted area contained ancient oak, terebinth, and laurel forests that provide habitat for wildlife, alongside olive groves that produce oil and soap, tobacco plantations, and grazing land. As environmental researcher Hisham Younes, founder and president of Lebanese environmental group Green Southerners, puts it: “This spraying does not take place over an intact ecosystem or healthy soil. It occurs over land already severely stressed and degraded by the intensive use of white phosphorus, incendiary munitions, and the accumulation of heavy-metal residues from sustained bombardment.” 

The glyphosate is not the beginning of the destruction. It is the finishing blow, applied to a landscape already burned, bombed, and poisoned, ensuring that even if people are allowed to return, there is nothing left to return to. That life will no longer be possible, for humans, plants, and animals alike.

Lebanon’s agriculture minister described the spraying as “consistent with known practices along the border, where such substances are used to create vegetation-free zones, effectively resulting in systematic desertification.” Lebanon’s government-backed environmental report has gone further, formally accusing Israel of ecocide and documenting damage to forests, agricultural lands, marine ecosystems, water resources, and atmospheric quality, concluding that the scale and intentionality of the destruction “constitute what must be recognized as an act of ecocide.”

Israel’s war, as is the case with previous colonial wars across the world, is one on the land as a living system, on the biological heritage of a civilization, on the ecosystems that sustain human and non-human life alike, waged with chemical weapons, incendiary munitions, and bulldozers, in full view of the world.

The US War Machine

The south of Lebanon is home to communities that have lived in this region for over a thousand years. Entire villages have been evacuated by force and erased. Families have been killed in their homes, in their cars, on roads marked for civilian evacuation.

This is not incidental. Striking the predominantly Shia population of south Lebanon, and Lebanon in general is the goal. When a religious community becomes a military target in the eyes of the aggressor, and in the narratives of much of the regional and international media, we have crossed into the now too common space of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

None of this happens in a vacuum. The bombs falling on Lebanese villages are, in a direct and documented sense, US bombs. The aircraft delivering them are US aircraft. The intelligence enabling the targeting has, by multiple credible accounts, has US fingerprints.

The United States has not merely failed to restrain Israel, it has actively armed, funded, and provided diplomatic cover for a campaign that has drawn condemnation from human rights organizations, UN officials, and international legal bodies, both in Palestine and in Lebanon. Each time a resolution calling for accountability has come before international bodies, the US position has been to obstruct, or sanction international judges, rapporteurs, and any organization that dares speak the truth.

This makes the United States not a neutral broker or a concerned ally urging restraint, but a co-belligerent (together with various other Western and Arab countries). When cluster munitions, bunker-busting bombs, and incendiary weapons are supplied to a military deploying them in densely populated civilian areas and ecologically sensitive forests, the supplier shares responsibility for what follows, including the genocide, ethnic cleansing, and ecocide.

One Unhinged Logic

It is impossible to understand Lebanon in isolation from Gaza. What we are witnessing is a single operational and ideological logic playing out across two theaters. In Gaza, the world has watched the near-total destruction of a civilian population with hospitals bombed, aid blocked, famine used as a weapon, with mounting horror and mounting futility. The patterns have become undeniable: this is not warfare constrained by the laws of armed conflict. It is warfare that has discarded those laws entirely and proudly.

Lebanon is the expansion of that logic northward. The same targeting of civilian, medical, and vital infrastructure. The same displacement of hundreds of thousands. The same deliberate erasure of agricultural and ecological life. The same impunity. Having encountered no meaningful international consequences in Gaza, the methods were exported. Why wouldn’t they be? The world demonstrated, repeatedly, that there would be no price.

This is what unchecked military power looks like when it is also diplomatically shielded: it grows, and it finds new applications for the same tools, from bombs to bulldozers to crop-killing herbicides.

The Silence of States and People

What is most disorienting and perhaps most dangerous about this moment is not just the actions of Israel and the United States. It is the silence of everyone else.

For Gaza, Arab states have issued statements of concern that function as moral performance without consequence while they maintained trade and security cooperation as the genocide was ongoing. For Lebanon, it was mostly silence. Most Arab governments offered barely even the performance.

European governments, with a handful of exceptions, oscillated between performative concern and active complicity over Gaza, and extended that into near-total silence on Lebanon. 

Solidarity movements outside the region have fractured along political, sectarian, and national lines. The Shia identity of the majority of the victims has meant limited solidarity in the sectarian environment plaguing the Arab world. Hezbollah’s violent role in Syria has complicated it further. But these are not explanations. Across the globe, Palestine solidarity networks have been almost entirely absent in opposing the ethnic cleansing of south Lebanon. Very few, if any, have mobilized.

Apparently this is not an important story, not compared to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. International media has been comfortable looking away while an entire civilian ecosystem is chemically sterilized and an ancient people are expelled from their land.

The principle that civilians deserve protection from collective punishment does not carry an asterisk that reads “unless their politics or sectarian identity are disagreeable.” 

Beyond Lebanon.

We are watching, in real time, the collapse of the international legal order – with all its deficiencies – that was constructed after 1945 precisely to prevent this kind of impunity. The Geneva Conventions, the Responsibility to Protect, the International Criminal Court, these institutions exist because the world looked at the ruins of the Second World War and said: never again, and we will build structures to ensure it. Those structures are not being eroded. They are being actively demolished, with US and Western diplomatic tools serving as the wrecking ball.

If a nuclear-armed, Western-backed state can conduct what legal scholars describe as ethnic cleansing and genocide, with full documentation, in real time, broadcast on every platform, and face no meaningful consequences, then the message is clear: the rules do not apply to the powerful. They never did, perhaps. But the pretense that they did was itself a form of protection, however limited, for the vulnerable. That pretense is gone now.

For Lebanon specifically, the consequences may be generational. The displacement of hundreds of thousands of people from the south creates demographic and psychological wounds that will shape Lebanese politics for decades. A country already broken by corruption, economic collapse, and sectarian divisions is being further hollowed out. The question is not only whether south Lebanon can be liberated and rebuilt, but whether the Lebanese state, such as it is, can survive another existential blow.

What is being asked of the world is not complicated. It requires the application of consistent principles: that civilians may not be collectively punished, that ancient communities may not be erased from their land, that the laws of war apply to all parties equally, and that silence in the face of documented atrocity is itself a moral choice.

The south of Lebanon is burning. Its people are scattered and left alone to face a ruthless war machine. Its forests are ash. Its soil is poisoned.

The world knows. And the world, for the most part, has decided to look away.

History will not be kind to this moment. The question is whether we wait for history’s verdict, or whether some of us, states, institutions, ordinary people with a voice, choose to act before there is nothing left to save.

The post Bombed, Poisoned, and Ignored: Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing of South Lebanon appeared first on Untold.

Calypse is us, and at the same time she speaks to us: the conscience of a generation condemned to resist and survive.

The comic has been created by the UntoldMag collective together with artist Francesca Cogni.

Episode 3: “Prove you Are Human”

The post Abu Calypse, Episode 3: “Prove you Are Human” appeared first on Untold.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How are you doing? How’s your family?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Sometime in the 1960s, the famous zajjal (Lebanese folk poet) Zein Shu’ayb (1922 – 2005) from south Lebanon performed with his troupe Zaghloul al-Damour, a poetic duel that was filmed and broadcast on Lebanese television. 

The recording survived and decades later, like many of Zein’s performances, it resurfaced on YouTube and was remixed on hip-hop and rap beats, circulating again in new videos. Listening to it today, the rhythm feels familiar to us, almost like a rap song, with its fast delivery, verbal challenge and repeated lines. Yet Zein Shu’ayb’s words echo a much older poetic tradition, which was performed in village gatherings before large mass audiences. 

In these various remixes, vernacular poetry that existed for centuries circulate easily on digital media, showing how public storytelling changes form without disappearing. Before hashtags and social media, history in the Arab world was already performed, debated and shared in public through voices like these.

History does not live in archives or behind campus walls. It is a public good — accessible, open and shared. It is an active and living force involving personal and communal practices that extend beyond researchers and university professors. This is the essence of “public history,” which brings the past into our streets and digital spaces.

Today, the accessibility and circulation of information define our age. It lives in coffee shops and museums, on theatre stages and YouTube channels, in family albums and neighbourhood archives. A growing popular interest in the past has given rise to thousands of podcasts and social media channels each year. As digital technologies make it easier to share interpretations of history, it becomes increasingly important to reflect on how historical knowledge is produced and communicated to wider audiences.

In the Arabic speaking world, these practices long predate the term “public history.” Moving between contemporary examples and older traditions, from the Hakawati to Zajal and Qawl, communities have transmitted memory, identity and political commentary through public performance for centuries. What is today described as “public history” is, in many ways, a continuation of these older traditions — now unfolding in digital and institutional spaces as well revealing how deeply rooted these practices are in the region.

Making History (More) Public 

The term “public history” emerged in the United States in the 1970s, when Robert (Bob) Kelley, a historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara, used it to describe a new training programme aimed at expanding career opportunities beyond formal education. Over time, the term came to refer more broadly to historical activities conducted outside universities, including curated exhibitions, walking tours and other forms of engagement.

Although initially connected to Western networks in the US, Canada, Australia and Europe, public history has become increasingly international and diverse. The popularisation of the term in the Western world does not mean that the practice originated there. Communities across the Global South have long engaged in forms of public history. More recently, these practices have been formalised through national associations such as the Rede Brasileira de História Pública (2012), the Italian Association for Public History (2017) and the Japanese Association of Public History (2018).

Defining public history is not straightforward. It can take different meanings in different contexts. At its core, however, it seeks to make historical narratives and heritage more accessible while encouraging communities to participate in shaping them through family archives, local initiatives and collective practices.

History in the Public Space 

Initially understood as history produced outside academia, public history often takes place in cultural institutions such as libraries and museums. When these institutions focus on historical topics, their outreach and engagement activities become forms of public history.

History museums have long been part of the cultural fabric of the Arab world. The Egyptian Museum (founded in 1858) and the National Museum in Lebanon (founded in 1942) can be seen as early institutional examples of public history through their public programming.

More recent initiatives are also accessible online, including the Women and Memory Forum in Egypt (since 1995) and the Palestinian Museum (since 2018). Public history can also be displayed and performed in theatres, on walls and in streets through guided tours and festivals. In its diverse forms, it creates spaces that connect society with material culture and heritage.

Communicating with the Public 

Making history public means communicating it beyond specialist audiences, reaching those who may not engage with academic books or research.

Public history employs a wide range of media, including exhibitions, documentary films, guided tours, board games, comics, graphic novels, websites and newspapers. With the rise of digital technologies, it has expanded into social media, podcasts and online collections.

In the Arab world, examples include the Qatar National Library’s podcast series and the community archiving initiative Keys to Palestine. Individual initiatives also contribute to this landscape, such as Charles Al Hayek’s Heritage and Roots channel and his LBCI television programme “بقصة لبنان” (“Lebanon in a Story”), now in its fifth season with co-presenter Yazbek Wehbe.

YouTube channels and podcasts have become particularly prominent platforms. The Al Jazeera+ series Al Jahbaz features content creator Bisher Najjar re-enacting moments from the history of the Greater Syria region through performance and satire, with references listed in each video description.

As with cultural and media institutions more broadly, political agendas can influence which historical narratives are curated and how they are presented to the public.

Public Participation 

Public history is by definition a collective process. Exhibitions, digital platforms and archives require time, skills and collaboration among curators, designers, educators and media professionals.

Some initiatives extend participation further through “co-creation,” involving members of the public in collecting and preserving objects, photographs and oral testimonies. Citizen committees may design and lead projects about their neighbourhoods or specific events.

In this way, public history can help restore agency and power to people. Rather than relying solely on national discourses constructed by states and authorities — which often marginalise certain communities — it may begin with smaller stories that complicate larger narratives.

One recent initiative in the Arab world is Shubra’s archive, developed in Cairo’s Shubra neighbourhood to document and share local history with its residents.

Many participatory initiatives rely on oral history. The American University of Beirut’s Ras Beirut project documents the history of a neighbourhood through residents’ voices. Other initiatives have recorded the social history of Palestine, including the Al Rowat storytelling platform, Nakba through oral history, and accounts of leading female figures, persecuted queer figures and political exiles. Some participatory projects operate “under the radar” to avoid external scrutiny or surveillance.

Oral history is often seen as a means of empowering marginalised and under-represented communities to influence and enrich official narratives. It also fosters critical engagement with contemporary social and political issues rooted in the past. The early Arab Nationalist Movement used the term tathqif to describe engagement with the public that combined education with political awareness.

An Ancient Practice 

Public history practices in Lebanon and the Levant can be traced back centuries, including mediaeval traditions and earlier Jahiliyya poetry that recorded and performed history within communities and at larger gatherings.

Three examples are particularly illustrative: the Hakawati, al-Zajal and al-Qawl.

The Hakawati is a storyteller who recounts tales from Arab heritage in coffee shops or open-air settings using vernacular Arabic. While traditionally male, women such as Shalabieh al Hakawatieh (Sally Shalabi) now also practise this art.

Similar traditions exist across the Arab world under different names, including Nabaṭī poetry in the Arabian Peninsula, Humayni poetry in Yemen, Malhūn in Morocco and Dubeit in Sudan. These traditions share features such as vernacular language, collective participation, historical transmission and public performance.

Al-Zajal, a Lebanese vernacular poetry tradition inscribed on UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List, is another example. One early documented case is attributed to Sulayman al-Ashluhi, a Christian monk from Akkar, who composed verses after the fall of Tripoli in 1289, recording the capture of the County of Tripoli (1102-1289), one of the Crusader states, by the Mamluks. In doing so, it recorded historical events in a form accessible to local audiences.

While al-Zajal refers specifically to the Lebanese folk poetry tradition, al-Qawl encompasses spoken word practices more broadly across the Arab world. Both traditions share several defining principles.

First is the use of vernacular language. Qawl is rarely written in classical, standardised Arabic, as its aim is to reach broad audiences, particularly in rural areas. It expresses local traditions and dialects, in contrast to the formal literacy often associated with urban centres. This gives Qawl a popular dimension and facilitates the transmission of knowledge in forms that resonate culturally and socially.

Second is the use of rhythmic stanzas and rhyme. All documented examples of Qawl employ this technique. As a means of publicly delivering knowledge, Qawl adopts strategies attentive to emotion and collective experience. Its musicality enhances memorability and echoes earlier literary traditions such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, Homeric poetry and Ugaritic texts, where rhythm supported oral transmission.

Closely connected to this is the central role of historical knowledge. History is a defining component of Qawl. Even when idealised, evocations of the past express identity, pride, community cohesion and socio-political satire. By embedding history in vernacular poetry, communities create local methods of transmitting memory from one generation to the next through public performance. Qawl has been used to record events, mark turbulent periods and commemorate political celebrations.

Finally, Qawl is defined by its public manifestation. Individuals or collectives perform as a troupe before large audiences, often in the form of poetic challenges accompanied by musical instruments. The practice promotes dialogue and acknowledges differences. Its verses may evoke tolerance and shared identity, but can also recount coercion and violence. Spontaneous, informal and emotionally charged, Qawl enables historical knowledge to be experienced collectively and retained across generations.

Through these vernacular traditions, history remains a shared and embodied practice — performed, contested and transmitted in public long before it was named as such.

Public History in Arabic 

Translating “public history” into Arabic is not straightforward. The term may be rendered as Tarikh Aam, but alternatives such as Mahali (local), Ahli (people’s) or Mujtama’i (community) capture different nuances.

The English expression combines both making history accessible and engaging in history with the public. Arabic allows more subtle distinctions between these dimensions. The verb تأريخ (to historicise) differs from the noun تاريخ (history) only by the addition of a hamza, reflecting the tension between history as inheritance and history as an active process.

If one wants to play with the Arabic language when translating the expression “public history” to reflect both its active and passive dimensions, one can simply add parentheses to the hamza, to show the possibility of both active historicization and the sharing of history in one word: 

تا)ء(ريخ 

As for the term “public” in Arabic, in the linguistic heritage of colloquial Levantine and broader Arabic-speaking lands, the term Ya ‘Ammi (literally “Oh kinsman”) is used to denote a sense of community. This also has common roots with the West Semitic “M” or “Am” (Canaanite, Hebrew, Phoenician), which denotes the idea of a group or people. As such, this mirrors some meanings associated with the term “public” in English. 

For other Arabic-speaking practitioners, the terms Ahli/Mahali (people’s/local) or Mujtama’i (community) feel more grounded in people’s everyday lives, in contrast with Āmm, which can also mean “general” and is not as commonly used in the Egyptian dialect and context, for instance. Ultimately, whether one opts for the more formal translation Tarikh Aam or decides to be more playful with the Arabic language, this article hopes to inspire more public conversations and discussions across Arabic-speaking communities. 

Why Public History? 

Many practices in the Arab world correspond to what is now termed “public history,” some dating back centuries. Using the term can help support and empower those engaged in these practices.

Public history reconnects scholars, archivists, curators, designers, podcasters, tour guides, heritage specialists and community groups who may otherwise remain separated by geography, discipline or institution. Rather than distinguishing between academic and non-academic, professional and amateur, it encourages collaboration to produce richer and more inclusive histories.

Finally, instead of distinguishing between academic and non-academic, professional and amateur, public history encourages universities, scholars and researchers to connect with local groups, communities and practitioners to produce a richer and more inclusive history.

It reminds us that history is not confined to the archive. It is shaped, performed and shared in public.

The post From Hakawati to Hashtags: Making History Public in the Arab World appeared first on Untold.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Voices, One Childhood, No Setting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Home, Not Symbol

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exile as Aftersound

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Having a conscience is making everything much harder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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