To all of our comrades and friends,

Gaza has been turned into a killing field. Families flee from rubbled homes to tent camps engulfed in fire. They are starving, and men dig ditches. Jewish-American teenagers run target practice on children’s faces; their dogs and their drones hunt the emaciated and afraid. A nation of youth forced to watch their fathers break into tears vows a revenge to be dispensed by God; a nation of heroic ambushes by mujahideen, of makeshift classrooms, of nighttime forehead kisses, burning clearings, and cratered faces, all of this, at once: a huddled and exhausted and imprisoned Palestinian people, who will not fly the white flag of capitulation.

Every word is an obscenity. Save the martyr’s will, every word falters in the face of this misery and bravery. This, then, is where we return, two years into the liquid mirror, two years since the war of extermination in Gaza began — to those martyrs’ wills, which we keep.

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The new issue of The New York War Crimes is out today, two years since October 7, 2023, a date we both honor as a day of resistance and commemorate as the beginning of a new and brutal phase of Zionist genocide. To mark this dual passage of time, the twelve-page issue coheres around tributes to Gaza’s martyred journalists, told to the editorial collective by their family, friends, and colleagues. Together, these memorializing accounts form fragments of Gaza’s testimony, radiating outwards and pooling at the ankles of the Arab comprador. The elites of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, the West Bank face down a new rhythm of people on foot, land aflame.

The pieces are accompanied by a translation of a letter written by the Lebanese revolutionary Georges Abdallah during his 41 years in French prisons, which we excerpt at the end of this bulletin.

Today, he has returned home to his people; draped in yellow at the one year commemoration of the martyrdom of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, he joins the choral demand — ringing out from the streets of Sanaa and Dahiyeh — to the rest of the Arab and Muslim people: Where are the millions?

By way of answer, we bring dispatches from the folds of a marked absence, testimonies from those who have shouldered the greatest cost in resisting the U.S.–Zionist campaign of annihilation. In a haunting photo essay capturing southern Lebanon more than a year into its occupation, firebombing, and war of attrition, Fatima Joumaa confronts her own camera: “I had wanted my images to resist death, but the birth of every image is an implicit acknowledgement that what was captured has ended.”

Here, she converses with writer and translator Alaa Alqaisi, since departed from Gaza’s “white deserts of wasted flour.” Crossing checkpoints and bridges into an “interval without meaning,” Alqaisi finds herself even more tightly bound to the city that she could not protect.

At the heart of the issue are remembrances. Eight journalists in Gaza speak about their martyred, beloved colleagues: a daughter of Jabalia mourns Anas al-Sharif; a son of Shuja’iyya mourns Mohammed Qreiqeh; a wife, the husband she lost two weeks into the genocide; a cousin, a cousin.

Who will rise for Gaza? This is a question that has been answered, in part. It is the question that headlines our issue, the spirit of the times, the only question worth asking in our schools and streets. In effect, it is the challenge to culture, of culture: to meet obscenity with steel, cowardice with commitment, death with life — to make the image an act, to make the word a will.

[Download the full issue here]

Help Nour Abdel Latif

A year ago Nour Abdel Latif, the writer, educator, and young mother of three, was living in a tent on the beach in Rafah. She said she wanted to write something for our newspaper, but was not sure what, if anything, would come out of her. To her own surprise, several days later she filed a sprawling testimony, which she called a “genocide diary.”

In January, during the brief, doomed ceasefire, Nour filed a second testimony, this time recounting her family’s return to Gaza City. What they found when they finally arrived, Nour wrote, was a world reduced to ash, the streets she once knew disfigured beyond recognition. 

The occupation again escalated its genocidal campaign, engineering a brutal famine in the Strip. Nour published a poem on her social media called “If I Must Starve,” inspired by her martyred teacher, Refaat Alareer.

Nour told us that she would stay in the North as long as possible, but last month, as occupation forces pressed closer and closer to her family’s home, she made the excruciating decision to head south again. 

You can donate to help Nour buy food, clean water and other basic supplies for her young children. Please help keep Nour and her kids alive. Help them escape this campaign of deliberate starvation. Please give them back some hope.

Back in a tent on the beach, she sent us another poem, “Beneath Here and Gone,” which reads in part:

How can I press a city to my chest?  

Embrace its streets, its homes, its windows?  

How can my heart stretch wide,  

To hold a longing this deep?  

And how can I kiss its wounded ground,  

Without my soul collapsing?

Read the rest here.

Read more from the issue

A number of articles from the Two Year Edition are now available online:

• Syrian playwright Saadallah Wannous in As-Safir newspaper in 1978: “O’ radio stations, O’ rulers, a little silence. In that coffin lies a homeland, a cause, and hopes of a lifetime.”

• Palestine Action on making the struggle continuous: “The last year should relieve any of us of the delusion that we’re going to be able to make any kind of change in the world without sacrifice.”

• Our contributors take stock of the shatter-scape of forcible de-development, containment, and normalization across the Arab–Iranian region that has birthed the current holocaust: “Violence and political remolding of regional enemies have always been central to U.S.–Israeli policy.”

Download the full issue as a PDF. Copies are being printed in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and more North American cities, plus Dublin. If you would like to print and/or distribute the paper where, write to nywc@wawog.com.

Call out the NYT’s collusion with the NYPD

On Sunday, September 28, in New York City, Anna Owens and Sarah Schaff were arrested and charged for allegedly participating in an action at The New York Times headquarters. Alexa Wilkinson, a prominent photojournalist, was arrested and charged for photographing its aftermath and for posting the photographs on social media, alongside their own political speech and a link to a published political analysis of the Times’s institutional anti-Palestinian racism. 

The NYPD, the District Attorney’s office, and The New York Times are colluding to intimidate, isolate, and silence anyone who stands against the U.S.-Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people. We unequivocally support all acts in service of liberation. The movement stands undeterred.

Read WAWOG’s full statement on the arrests, the sniveling hypocrisy of The New York Times, and the strength of our movement. To sign on behalf of your group or organization, click here.

They cannot buy our silence

When Jeffrey Goldberg was Greta Thunberg’s age, he volunteered at the same Zionist prison camp, Ketziot, where she was held for several days after being kidnapped from the Global Sumud Flotilla on October 1. If prestige media outlets like The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The New Yorker seem reluctant to report this, it is partly because they know—and continually refuse to say—that what she faced is a fraction of what Palestinian prisoners endure for weeks and months without trial.

In December 2023, Thaer Abu Assab was beaten to death in his cell at Ketziot after he asked a guard whether there was a ceasefire. He had been in prison for 18 years, nearly half his life. “There is no dignity anymore,” said Amer Abu Hlel, a young man held at Ketziot for nearly two years without charge or trial, after his release last year. The guards forced him to shout praises of Zionism; when he prayed for Gaza, they threatened to rape his sisters.

When we hear that Greta Thunberg was beaten, dragged by her hair, and made to kiss the Israeli flag, we understand this attempted humiliation not as particular or aberrant but as part and parcel with Israel’s escalating war on prisoners. Here, the prisoner is the one who insists on freedom. The guard is the one who fears it. What would he do with it? Instead of a spine, he has an iron rod.

Writers, at the very least, should not be following orders. If you work in a newsroom, you have an ethical duty to not only report but historicize and contextualize what happened to Greta, what happened to others on the flotilla, and what is still happening to all Palestinian prisoners. If you have influence, use it to spread the word. Zionists can buy magazines, newspapers, and television stations, but they cannot buy our silence.

Do something today

• In New York City, flood the streets for Gaza!
  Tuesday, October 7, 4:30 p.m. at Newscorp (1211 6th Avenue)
  Let New York City echo with the names and memories of those taken by Israel’s drones, bombs, bullets, prisons, and siege. For more protests and updates, follow @wolpalestine on X or on Telegram at t.me/wolprotest.
  

• In Philly, rally for rage and resistance!
  Tuesday, October 7, 4 p.m. at 1500 Spring Garden St.
  Join the Philly Palestine Coalition and anti-Zionist groups to demand an end to local complicity, collaboration and recognition of Zionism. Bring family, friends, and neighbors to uplift indigenous, anti-colonial liberation struggles and learn how you can join ongoing efforts to end the genocide in Palestine. Join a campaign, get connected, and help us end the curse of Zionism.

• In DC, listen to PYM DMV’s radio show!
  Tune in to WPFW 89.3 FM for “That’s What Breaks the Heart,” a marathon program highlighting the resistance of the Palestinian people and their connection to their land, today until midnight.

• In San Francisco, honor the martyrs!
  Tuesday, October 7, 7:15 p.m. at Gleeson Plaza (2495 Golden Gate Ave)
  Join USFCA SJP’s vigil to honor all our martyrs. Bring candles, flowers, keffiyehs.

• In Oakland, stop military shipments to Israel now!
  Sign this petition, but don’t stop there. Take lessons from dock workers in Morocco, Spain, and Italy on how to enact the people’s arms embargo.

We leave you with the words of the Arab militant Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, who returned to Lebanon in July after nearly 41 years in prison in France:

Gaza will never fly the white flag of capitulation. Neither the Zionists nor any other criminal force will ever succeed in breaking the will of the resistance in Gaza.

Shame on all those who, faced with genocidal Zionist barbarism, call us to look elsewhere!

May a thousand initiatives flourish in favor of Palestine and its glorious resistance!

Capitalism is nothing but barbarism, honor to all those who oppose it in the diversity of their expressions!

Together and only together will we win!

Palestine will live and Palestine will win!

To all of you comrades and friends, my warm revolutionary salutes.