When sharing information online, please keep in mind that both Instagram and Facebook have policies suppressing information regarding the occupation of Palestine. For more on that suppression, please read:
Facebook Report Concludes That Company Censorship Violated Palestinian Human Rights
Tech Platforms’ Treatment of Pro-Palestinian Content Raises Bias Allegations
Israel/Palestine: Facebook Censors Discussion of Rights Issues
On Instagram Shadow Banning Palestinian Posts
To continue countering the prevailing Western media narrative which justifies the extermination of Palestinians, the following countermeasures have proven successful at bypassing being flagged by a racist algorithm.
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Places to donate:
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Decolonize Palestine
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Created and maintained by two Palestinians living in Ramallah, Decolonize Palestine is an introductory website for English-speakers who need a primer on the current conditions and history of Palestinian oppression, as well as deconstructing and unpacking common myths about Israel. As thousands march in cities around the globe in the name of Palestinian liberation, new opportunities to educate people on the basic facts and propaganda tactics arise. This resource is a reliable and useful tool within the chaotic and misinformation-ridden media landscape.
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Right to Maim by Jasbir Puar (2014)
In 2017, TNI excerpted Jasbir Puar’s Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, which would come out later that year. One of Puar’s main goals was to intervene in the white, liberal field of US disability studies, which had adopted the “pride” model from gay rights––a movement whose foundational Islamaphobia, or “homonationalism,” was covered in her preceding book, Terrorist Assemblages (2007). As Puar argues, it’s hard to feel “proud” of a disability incurred from imperial warfare. Puar begins the excerpt and book by connecting the 2014 attacks on Gaza to the 2014 murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, two events which catalyzed the “Ferguson to Gaza” framework.
But despite the material links between these two places––including, of course, the fact that the US military and the IDF regularly swap resources and personnel––Puar notes a major biopolitical difference: while anti-Black policing usually shoots to kill, the IDF typically “shoots to maim.” Even though Israel describes this as a “humanitarian practice,” Puar correctly identifies it as a form of slow and deliberate death, one which leaves “many civilians ‘permanently disabled’ in an occupied territory of destroyed hospitals, rationed medical supplies, and scarce resource.” The aim here is “creating injury and maintaining Palestinian populations as perpetually debilitated, and yet alive, in order to control them.”
If Israel’s current attacks on Palestine––which, based on the most recent order to evacuate southern Gaza, could soon entail a ground war––represent a flip in strategy from “shoot to maim” to “shoot to kill,” they are also further proof that these two biopolitical strategies are always linked. The ease with which Israel now not only shoots to kill, but garners international support for doing so, is enabled by “shoot to maim” policies which render Palestinian life next to worthless on a population level. And yet, despite this brutality, it is Israel which claims ongoing victimhood. As Puar notes, "The might of Israel’s military—one of the most powerful in the world—is built upon the claim of an unchanging ontological vulnerability and precarity."
“Wall of Names” by Maryam Monalisa Gharavi (2014)
"As the massacre of Gaza reached its tenth day we began laying out the names of the dead, their ages, and the locations in which they were attacked.
We consulted information registered by the Gaza Health Ministry (who risk their lives to make this record possible) and compiled by Al-Akhbar English and Al Jazeera English.
We are trying to keep pace with the names as they are released, but the list grows before cartridge ink has dried on the page.
The document we are using is available for public viewing, downloading, and printing. We are updating it as often as we can.
(This is not an art installation.)"
—Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Judith Kakon, and Cecilia López
"Palestine is Free (If You Want It)" (2021)
To honor the 73rd anniversary of the Nakba, TNI published a round-up of statements, movement groups, news items, books, and movies which center Palestinian liberation––including a 1948 letter from Albert Einstein. Addressed to (who else) the “Editors of The New York Times,” Einstein, a German-born Jew, wrote that “among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergency in the newly created state of Israel of the 'Freedom Party' (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties."
This Saturday, TNI was proud to publish “The First Week,” a dispatch from the Palestinian Youth Movement. An excerpt is available below, and the full piece is available here:
"Gaza is the story of the Palestinian people. It is a story of displacement and refugeehood, of imprisonment at the hands of a foreign occupier. But, most importantly, it is a story of sumud (steadfastness) and resistance: resistance that is driven by a love for one’s people, a love for one’s homeland, and a love for life and freedom. Now and onwards, you must not allow your friends and comrades to turn their backs on the Palestinian liberation struggle. You must not allow them to falter in the face of the events of this week, or to devolve into insipid both-sideism or pragmatic armchair generalismo, or to publish cowardly denunciations that do nothing more than provide a left cover for an impending genocide on the people of Gaza. Most importantly, you must not allow them to lose sight of why the oppressed people resist; that it is not only understandable, not only an occupied people’s right, but also just and true. We hope this bulletin will help guide what principled solidarity can look like right now within the imperial core, and arm those in solidarity with us with tools to resist the military-industrial complex that is hellbent on our people’s extermination.
Your priority must be communicating a set of realities clearly and unequivocally. 2.4 million Palestinians are currently being held hostage by Zionists, who are martyring thousands with genocidal impunity. All the crossings are closed. The Zionists are indiscriminately using bombs and internationally-prohibited weapons on a densely populated concentration camp full of entrapped civilians. There is no water or electricity. Mass arrests of Palestinians…”
TNI is currently looking to publish short-form news commentary for the Sunday Reading newsletter. These 200-500 word pieces will be topical and ideally offer fresh insight and perspective from our wider global readership on the latest events happening around the world. We can offer $50 for these short articles, and they will be published here within the newsletter and at the Sunday Reading blog. Please pitch us with drafts attached at [email protected].
That is also the email to send any pitches for the site: we are always looking for long form (2k-3k word) analytical essays on a rolling basis. We are currently looking for coverage of the suppression faced by those advocating for Palestine, the international right-wing movement, and the range of Cop City projects across the US, but please pitch us outside of those topics as well. Thank you!
Our next issue, TRAD, will be out soon, please subscribe to receive it in your inbox. We are a volunteer-run 100% reader-supported endeavor.
