save the date (and our next book)
+ recap of our jan convening, focus passages for February
Hi everyone,
Hoping for as gentle a Monday as possible for you. We have a few updates!
Mark your calendars for Wednesday, February 28th, at 8 PM ET/5 PM PT (register for the Zoom here). We’ll meet virtually to discuss Letters to Palestine before moving on to our next book for March and April: The Palestine Laboratory. We chose this book not only to continue our learning and understanding of the settler-colonial condition of Palestine so as to be in stronger solidarity with their liberation movement, but also because the book is a deep analysis of Israel’s military, weaponry, and surveillance technology and its collaboration with the U.S. police and military state. It will be a more dense and journalistic read than Letters to Palestine, but we look forward to reading and discussing the text in community to better understand, contextualize and imagine abolitionist futures locally and globally.
Our focus passages for our February convening will be “How Not to Talk About Gaza” by Colin Dayan (94-102), “Diary of a Gaza War, 2014” by Najwa Said (107-125), and “Yes, I Said ‘National Liberation’” by Robin D.G. Kelley (139-153). We highly suggest reading the full book this month as each essay and poem carries deep insight.
Thank you to those who gathered with us last month to discuss and learn; it was heartening to be in dialogue with you all. Click here to read our January discussion questions, and see a few points raised in our discussion:
“Divest From Guilt” - there are many ways to authentically show up in solidarity
Interrogating our impulse/external pressure to extend empathy towards and humanize those who are committed to dehumanizing and anti-empathy (or, “why are we kowtowing to what about-ism”)
Leveraging interventions and tools - acknowledging the inadequacy/illegitimacy of laws but also mobilizing to exhaust what’s possible within the “justice” system to build momentum (ie: Defense for Children International - Palestine (DCIP) v. Biden.)
Examining our own complicity and owning responsibility while also speaking out
Here’s some resources that were collectively shared:
Got more calls to action or resources to share? Feel free to reply back to this email or comment on Substack - we’re all ears.
In solidarity, <3 APIs4Abolition