Letter 1: From What Remains
Letters From The Ground 1: From What Remains
From Zoukak CollectiveTo Artists and Cultural Workers, thinkers, writers, philosophers in the US, EU and Commonwealth countries,
Imagine.
A father hugging a shoe box, holding the unrecognisable remains of his son.
From what remains, we write you this letter.
From what remains, we see the story. The story that we find ourselves avoiding when you ask us how we are doing.
In what remains there is no space for politeness. There is no space for resilience.
In what remains nestles honesty.
What remains is what we face; the shoe boxes of our realities.
When you ask how we are doing we find no words.
What we can tell is what we face.
We are facing military technologies based on artificial intelligence and weapons that are internationally prohibited. Israel targets our civilians, families, journalists, writers, thinkers, artists, social workers, medical and relief professionals, and political leaders. It destroys our cities, villages, land, historical landmarks, and olive and oak trees.
Since 1948 we have been living a strategy of systematic annihilation of our Levantine societies at cultural, geographical, societal, and political levels. The current killing of our babies, the extermination of complete families, the jailing and abuse of our men, women, youths and children, the deliberate bombing of our foetuses and the burning of our displaced people alive in Palestine is reaching Lebanon accompanied with a clear intention to continue stealing our resources and to settle. This is just a recent escalation of a systematic crime that has been ravaging our land and bodies for decades. It is not complicated.
When you sometimes describe our situation as complicated and that you find no words, we find no words either.
When you say that you are worried about us, we find no words. We realise that we are concerned.
We are concerned when we see censorship in your countries; artists, scholars, academics, journalists, students and employees are constantly being cancelled, silenced, or challenged whenever they directly or indirectly reference Palestine. The current atrocities are unfolding before our eyes. They are documented online and offline. Yet, somehow, life goes on. What is this censorship trying to hide?
We are concerned when we see that the prevailing logic in your public debate is often hijacked by focusing on the symptoms rather than on the root causes. It uses frames such as “conflict”, “terrorism” and “civilians casualties” rather than “occupation”, “settler colonialism”, “apartheid” and “freedom fighting”. The conflation between symptoms and reasons is a problem of logic. We are concerned as - beyond logic - it shows a severe lack of justice.
We are concerned when we see your societies normalising and legitimising violence and killing. We see your societies producing a culture and a way of thinking that reconciles, justifies, or distracts from violence, thus, allowing power-over dynamics to prevail, with a complete failure of ethics.
We are concerned when we see the flagrant increase of fanatic and xenophobic discourses in your societies, where Islamophobia is being normalised and racist ideologies are becoming the de-facto reality announcing a complete political failure.
“How can we help you?”, you ask us. We find no words.
We only see through what we face. What we face is where we stand.
Here we stand.
We stand holding to the power of politics rather than the politics of power.
We stand firm in our commitment to life, resisting “historical disinformation”, as the deliberate distortion of the past upholds systems of oppression and sustains occupation and colonisation.
We stand in this land as a living example facing the disinformation exported by Israel. Israeli soldiers stand on this land as a living example of celebrating brutality, spreading photos and videos of killings, torturing people, holding parties and dinners in front of a population they deliberately threw into hunger. Israeli leadership advertises their military industry as “Tested in Gaza”. That's simply an indication of something deeply troubling.
We stand committed to our belief in political biodiversity and to the socio-historical nature of our region that is under a crushing pressure since the creation of Israel in 1948; as a national-religious colonial settler political project; a project that is foreign to our philosophy and our practice of life rooted in diversity and connection. The cultural and historical richness of our societies says it all.
We stand committed to our belief in a region where political equality between diverse religious groups is a daily practice representing an organic continuation of its history where Jews, Christians and Muslims lived together for centuries without major threats to their co-existence until European colonial times.
We stand committed to our belief in what may sound like a utopia—a project where diverse religious groups in our region coexist with political equality as a daily practice, preserving our heritage.
And from where we stand, what remains are questions.
What can you do to address the concerns that are putting at risk the foundations of your own societies?
What can you do to defend the basis of your social pact of equity?
How can you defend your freedoms?
What are you ready to lose, in order to gain your freedom?
How can you create art that puts an end to the normalisation and legitimization of violence?
What can be done to stop art from being a medium that neutralises any possible rebellion?
What can be done to loosen the market's grip on art and culture?
How can your art fuel scrutiny of your own recent history as an attempt to deconstruct this inner and outer violence generated by your governments and within your societies?
What can be done to create an alternative political practice with new paradigms of matter, collectivity and safety?
How can you stop accepting the way scientific technology, the pride of “western” civilisation, is serving first the market of weapons, arms and systems of control and surveillance that entertain violence?
What can you do to stop your governments and most of your opinion leaders from supporting Israeli massacres, destruction, colonisation and occupation by sending weapons, providing diplomatic cover, orchestrating the media’s narrative and stifling domestic opposition?
What can you do to stop the international humanitarian law - and the institutions that your country champions to uphold it - from losing credibility, thus leading to larger instabilities and violence across the globe?
How can you defy the economic interests of your countries, particularly in relation to trade routes and gas and oil pipelines that pass over our dead bodies to secure maximum profits for your elites and mere crumbs for the rest of your societies?
How can you stop our reality of today in our region that your countries have been shaping for more than 100 years, from becoming your reality tomorrow, once militarization and fascism become the only accepted norm in your societies?
What can you do facing projects and institutions that serve death?
So we can serve LIFE; together.
In the memory of Hassan Hamad, Palestinian Journalist who was targeted and murdered by Israel in Gaza on the 6th of October 2024, and whose body was so severely dismembered that his father had to carry his remains in a shoe box.
In the memory of Heba Ghazi Ibrahim Zaqout visual artist and teacher of fine arts who was killed on 13 October 2023 with her son in Gaza.
In the memory Refaat Alareer a Palestinian writer, poet, professor, and activist from Gaza and who was deliberately killed on 6 December 2023 by an Israeli airstrike in northern Gaza, along with his brother, sister, and four of his nephews, and whose last words were “If I must die, you must live to tell my story (...). If I must die let it bring hope let it be a tale”.
In the memory of Shireen Abu Akleh who was a prominent Palestinian-American journalist who worked as a reporter for 25 years for Al Jazeera, before she was killed on the 11th of May 2022 by Israeli forces while wearing a blue press vest and covering a raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank.
In the memory of the 12-year-old Muhammad Al Durra mortally wounded by Israeli gunfire in Gaza in 2000 while crouching behind a concrete cylinder next to his father who was waving for help.
In the memory of Ghassan Kanafani a Palestinian author and politician, a leading novelist of his generation and one of the Arab world's leading Palestinian writers assassinated by Israel on the 8th of July 1972 with his 17-year old niece Lamees.
