This post has been intended as ‘Sunday Sampler #3’ for weeks now, and I’ve had to rewrite it several times over to accommodate the ongoing temporal & geopolitical horrors. If I anything skips in time in this edit, forgive me as I am existing in too many temporalities these days, but hopefully you’ll still know what I mean.

Regular readers know that in my

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THE LAND IS EVERYTHING TO US: An ONLINE learning series I am offering via Wendy’s Subway for 4(!) Sunday sessions starting November 16th, until December 7th (12-1:30 PM EST). There are only a few slots left, so if you want to learn with me please sign up ASAP. And just to be clear I receive a very modest honorarium regardless of how many participants there are. I am not promoting this because the sign ups have any bearing on my pay, but because I just so badly want people to come learn with me/together for the sake of our cause. I am grateful for the people at Wendy’s Subway who reached out to ask if I’d like to teach A workshop and humored me by agreeing to host a whole series of 4…one session wouldn’t be enough to even begin to scratch the surface of these topics. I truly hope that everyone that joins will leave with a more thorough structural understanding of how this all is tied together, one that they can then go out into the world and proliferate with justifiable confidence.

Anyone who has been with me on this ride for longer than the last two years knows I have been beating this drum for almost a decade, that I have utilized every medium available to me (dinners, essays, photos, published works, videos, rants, research, workshops…lmk if you have more ideas ha) to get my points across to as wide of an audience as possible. It really doesn’t ever feel like enough, especially when it becomes painfully obvious that most people (many Palestinians included) do not seem to have anything beyond a superficial understanding of the role “food” plays in zionist settler colonialism and occupation of Palestine. No, it is not simply about who “owns” or “invented” falafel or hummus, or even just that our food has been “stolen”. It is far worse than that.

Enough of the sound bite sensationalism found in instagram reels that distracts from the depth of the real issues that are killing us every moment. I am starting to feel desperate for people claiming to be earnestly engaged with our struggle to truly grasp the intricacies of food, land, plants, identity, and health in our context (beyond the aforementioned superficialities/ romanticization/ self-orientalizing and nostalgic content), and how those elements have been violently interacted with by colonizers to ethnically cleanse us for 100 years. This also goes for Palestinians who think that they know everything simply because they are Palestinian, which in my opinion, is liberalism in action. I care more about your principles and how you enact them, the education you have sought and how you use it to think critically, than I do about identity being weaponized to excuse one’s ignorance, arrogance, or bad political analysis and example. I have been recently saddened by seeing Palestinians who present themselves as working in service of the land, also collaborating with the same normalizers, zionists, and settlers who have contributed to both the degradation of the land but the suffering of our people. How can we claim to be defending the land when we are in collaboration with the ones who sell us out, and then also signal to others that this is acceptable behavior? Hopefully we will touch on some of these dynamics, including the ways class is implicated in every aspect of our struggle, in the sessions.

There are deeply sadistic levels to this violence and none of it is happenstance, either in origin or the symptoms it produces. In my opinion it should be a prerequisite to understand these issues to engage with our struggle at all, as they are at the core of it. As the title of this session says: The Land Is Everything To Us.

Allow me to quote myself from this 2024 post on LAND DAY:

For me, for us, liberation is our land. Not in the sense of borders, passports, ID cards and nationalities as dictated by the current global conditions of control demanded by capitalist society—but in its essence, meaning, sense of belonging, mutual reciprocity and responsibility, the connection between those who live on and with it, as they always have, as countless generations before did.

We, as a collective, have always been in deep relationship with our land, long before violent settler colonialism strengthened our resolve and steadfastness, long before flags and icons became the reductive symbology with which we perceive the intimacy between humans and the lands that hold them. Long before the path to martyrdom became the way of life for so many of our relatives. Palestine is the olive trees, it is the sanasil that striate the hills, it is the forests we have never been allowed to wander through, though we know they exist. We have the songs, we have heard the stories, we have seen the pictures. Palestine is the sea in which we cannot swim. Prior to the arrival of the british colonizers, literacy hovered at around 3%, for the simple reason that the language our people were fluent in, wasn’t found in books, it couldn’t be read anywhere other than in the bark of the madrone, the tracks of the hyena, the water worn stone in the crevices of the wadi. It held, and still holds, an intelligence and a wisdom in languages that can only be passed down by doing, by telling, by teaching, by living within, by sharing—through love. Palestine is the wind and all the scents it carries with it, the dusty kiss of fig leaves, lingering velvet on my nose, but also the carcass of a dead dog in the neighbors orchard, that no one wants to deal with. Palestine is the sun’s reflection off of white stones carved out of its’ own body to build our homes.

The land dies without the love of those it has nurtured—ecosystems tumble into chaos and inertia, seasonal streams dry up with finality, the plants stop returning, birdsongs left unheard by the leaves that came to know their words after a thousand years of listening, the trees forget to flower—not so long ago that the fellaheen were still tying strips of blessings in their woven branches. It was only a few months ago that the olives were left to rot off their stems as Gaza was shrouded with white phosphorous, and the ones that have long cared for their beloved trees were left to rot under the rubble of the lives they had managed to build despite almost 2 decades of globally ignored siege. Who remains to run the presses? Are there any donkeys left to pull the carts of harvested fruit? How many trees were doomed to become firewood, months ago? There will be no oil until next fall’s harvest, and even then…inshallah.

Each one, teach one. xx

If you have read this far and are not yet a paid subscriber, I really think you should change that :). If you don’t want to/can’t to but still want to materially support me in continuing this work you can paypal (amannya@gmail.com) or venmo me (@Buppybillow)…(without any notes or emojis that relate to palestine, please). Thank you to everyone who has ever/continues to support me and my ability to do the work that I do, I appreciate you all so much.

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Even though I actually do write every day, I can’t possibly edit fast enough or make sense of everything quickly enough to regulate the frequency of my output on here. So I’ve decided to finally try something I’ve been considering well before the genocide began: a weekly offering of things I’m interested in / thinking about / looking at. Not everything is specifically about Palestine, but the way my mind works, everything is connected through the conduits of my being, which happens to be Palestinian. Additionally, sometimes I’m just a human that likes things. I’d really love it if people used the comments to engage or discuss any of the things I share, rather than me just talking to a screen again :)

Do let me know what you all think of this offering in general, if enough people respond favorably I’ll keep it going in addition to the longer form reflections and essays (any editors out there that want to volunteer themselves to grease the wheels of production over here…please get in touch.) Also, please take the poll to help decide what the next post will be.

I’d like to start off this series with this clip I’ve listened to over and over in the last few weeks, the context of which is somewhat foundational to how we should be approaching this moment of having so many people newly involved and moved by our struggle for liberation over the last 2 years:

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As ever there are so many things I could write about, on this subject or everything else, again and again, but sometimes it all feels paralyzing so instead today I thought I’d share a brief moment of life here in Palestine, one that maybe offers a tiny window into what it is like to practically exist with the constancy of an illegal military occupation.

Yesterday as the sun was setting over a horizon that I can’t reach, I went out to gather four kinds of medicinal plants currently growing in between the chalky white stone of some of our hills. I was alone wearing olive green with a bright green bag slung around me. Just across the little valley before me, a new illegal road we aren’t allowed to follow, surrounded by shiny metal fencing & barbed wire, stared at me. A bit further back, on another hill, one of the occupations’ ridiculously tall towers of surveillance stared back at me too. On my camera roll photos of plants, rocks, bugs, and landscape were interrupted by photos of the ugly disruption to the topography & this looming blue grey tower. Usually when I go past these towers in the car I look in the little cubby hole windows that follow the spiral of their staircases, counting birds nests, signs of life and defiance, and thinking of fairy tales (as I often am).

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When I originally wrote this, it was Earth day™. I spent the day on the land, working on the cooperative organic farm my friends started in their village about 7 years ago, helping to prepare the earth to receive seedlings to grow food for the community, and wild gathering “weeds” on my own to process into medicine for my slowly growing apothecary here. This work is an extension of my project called The Palestinian Plant Archive, which takes many forms that I will continue to share about here and elsewhere.

How many emails did I receive, posts did I see, about this day that is supposedly about remembering and honoring and caring for our planetary home? How many of those emails or posts were from individuals or organizations that have had nothing to say about the 7+ decades of ecocide that has been taking place in all of occupied Palestine? Or of the bombs dropped over the last 19 months, the damage visible from space. How can anyone claim to care for the earth and the ever imperiled environment, without deeply caring about, and fighting for, those who are at the frontlines of its defense? But we should be used this hypocrisy by now, as we are forced to become used to everything. Who honors the earth more than those who choose the ultimate sacrifice to fight for it, with whatever resources or weapons are available to them? Our liberation and our salvation will not be found in marketing emails or social media posts.

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7/6/2023

I spent the last few days in Battir visiting the hajjas :) We made shish barak, also known by their (new to me) name then3in Iktat, or ‘cat’s ears’.

Now I am in Ramallah Tih7ta, where I have been watching a military raid develop all around me, for the purpose of demolishing the house of Islam Faroukh, a prisoner accused of carrying out an attack in ‘48.

How bizarre it is to be sitting here typing on my computer, texting, smoking, eating delivery

Living in what feels like an unfolding of chaos, a collapse.

Pressure, survival mode, constantly expecting crazy shit because that is what we know to be true.

Sound bombs, tear gas, car alarms, yelling, tires screeching, doors slamming, ambulances, air condition, keyboard tapping, phone buzzing, just now times.

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The Solstice has long been a special day to me, a heliocentric moment to remember our smallness, our collective and individual place in time and space, in natural cycles that continue amongst the horrors of humanness. For 8 years now, I have marked the occasion with a fire cooked meal, with friends, with strangers, music, flowers, the earth. The circums…

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today we mark 76 years of Nakba (The Catastrophe) day. 

it feels inaccurate to make note of this without taking this moment to clarify that the Nakba was not an event that took place on a singular day— it has never stopped, and it has in reality been over 100 years that various pale shades of colonizers have been laying the foundations and demented infra…

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I assume that many of you know me through my work as a cook, or, as an artist that often uses food as a medium to talk about everything else…see this post “about” webs.

Over the 5+ months of horror that have somewhat predictably passed without stoppage, the last thing I’ve wanted to write about is food, though it is clear that the majority of my culinary…

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48 years ago, the occupying zionist forces murdered 6 unarmed Palestinians, and wounded countless others, while they demonstrated against the expropriation of thousands of dunums of Palestinian land. Nothing out of our ordinary—for 100 years, occupying colonial European entities have unceasingly murdered our people for their refusal to leave or stop loving their lands, for their insistence on remaining as they are, where they belong. Land Day is another day to remember and acknowledge the breadth, duration, and intensity of the violence applied by imperialism and colonization to try to seize power and domination over every living thing, especially on our lands, but really, everywhere.

Palestinian liberation encompasses so many of the conditions and circumstances faced by countless marginalized communities around the world, and at the core of our struggle is our guide, our compass, our purpose: the land. The violent dispossession of Palestinians—fellaheen, bedouin, landworkers, pastoralists, agrarians—has continued, unabated, for a century. Today, the citizens of Masafer Yatta, bedouin communities throughout the West Bank, and Palestinians living in different parts of occupied Jerusalem, are just some of the communities still under direct and constant harassment by the occupying military and violent armed settlers. I also hope that it is extremely obvious to everyone by now, that the over 2 million citizens of Gaza who have been displaced and forced to endure horrors beyond comprehension, for close to 6 months now, are at the center of a very obvious assault of total destruction with absolute global impunity in service of ethnically cleansing the land in order to make way for further israeli & amerikkkan occupation, land grabbing, and resource extraction. Every day our people are being murdered by drone strikes, bombs, and guns provided and paid for by foreign tax money, as well as by the deprivation of access to basic human needs, decreed and enabled by the same entities. And every day, our people continue to resist, regardless of the cost, refusing to leave their homes, their land, that which they belong to.

For me, for us, liberation is our land. Not in the sense of borders, passports, ID cards and nationalities as dictated by the current global conditions of control demanded by capitalist society—but in its essence, meaning, sense of belonging, mutual reciprocity and responsibility, the connection between those who live on and with it, as they always have, as countless generations before did.

We, as a collective, have always been in deep relationship with our land, long before violent settler colonialism strengthened our resolve and steadfastness, long before flags and icons became the reductive symbology with which we perceive the intimacy between humans and the lands that hold them. Long before the path to martyrdom became the way of life for so many of our relatives. Palestine is the olive trees, it is the sanasil that striate the hills, it is the forests we have never been allowed to wander through, though we know they exist. We have the songs, we have heard the stories, we have seen the pictures. Palestine is the sea in which we cannot swim. Prior to the arrival of the british colonizers, literacy hovered at around 3%, for the simple reason that the language our people were fluent in, wasn’t found in books, it couldn’t be read anywhere other than in the bark of the madrone, the tracks of the hyena, the water worn stone in the crevices of the wadi. It held, and still holds, an intelligence and a wisdom in languages that can only be passed down by doing, by telling, by teaching, by living within, by sharing—through love. Palestine is the wind and all the scents it carries with it, the dusty kiss of fig leaves, lingering velvet on my nose, but also the carcass of a dead dog in the neighbors orchard, that no one wants to deal with. Palestine is the sun’s reflection off of white stones carved out of its’ own body to build our homes.

The land dies without the love of those it has nurtured—ecosystems tumble into chaos and inertia, seasonal streams dry up with finality, the plants stop returning, birdsongs left unheard by the leaves that came to know their words after a thousand years of listening, the trees forget to flower—not so long ago that the fellaheen were still tying strips of blessings in their woven branches. It was only a few months ago that the olives were left to rot off their stems as Gaza was shrouded with white phosphorous, and the ones that have long cared for their beloved trees were left to rot under the rubble of the lives they had managed to build despite almost 2 decades of globally ignored siege. Who remains to run the presses? Are there any donkeys left to pull the carts of harvested fruit? How many trees were doomed to become firewood, months ago? There will be no oil until next fall’s harvest, and even then…inshallah.

We too, die without the love that only the land can give to us. Something beyond familiarity, a kind of knowing that transcends senses, an unconditional love that simply understands and accepts regardless of the flaws that present themselves as the reality of our fellow humans, and the inevitable disappointment that often brings. I feel constantly lost in the separation, the distance; a soul going through the motions…a different kind of suffering. There is a disingenuousness I feel tending to lands that belong to others; out of body, out of mind, out of spirit.

With Palestine, so often the focus is on death, destruction, horror…and rightfully so. I think about it all the time, for my entire lifetime. Before, while experiencing it, and now, as I watch it from afar, as I hear about it, as I watch it happen to those I don’t know but love anyway, to those I know and love, and those they love. It touches and taints our lives in so many different and unexpected ways, beyond the abject violence many have grown accustomed to watching. And though it is truly ugly, the world deserves to look into the placid mirror of its own reflection. There should be no escape for anyone, no looking away from that which is done to others, to the earth, with disregard, with carelessness and no thought to the future, or to life.

I want you to know, you must know.

Still, my duality demands that alongside this, I continue to also share who we are without focusing on the material imposition of the will of those that choose to do harm to us. My intention of sharing our beautiful moments here, or anywhere else in my work, will never be to humanize (and please be eternally wary of anyone, Palestinian or not, who is misguided enough to believe or state that this is a path to liberation, as if it is anything less than a slippery liberal slope into assuming the subhuman role assigned to us by racist society everywhere…), but to reify and expand the understanding that we are indeed an all encompassing everything, embodying and living the intricacies of the human condition, just like any other living beings existing within the confines of our modern enclosures. Yes, our every day is violence, is loss, is pain, is death—but the collective and individual insistence on continuing on, refusing to be stagnated by circumstance, is a depth of beauty I have never experienced anywhere else. In every moment there is laughter, and there are tears, there is an insistence on life side by side with the death. There is poetry, there is romance. There is unforgivable pain, and there is transcendent grace, beyond belief or imagination. They exist inextricably intertwined, steadfastness rooted in love, made only more incredible in this contrast. This is what it is to love the land, to love beyond oneself, as the land loves us. It is perfect, and it is ours.

Palestine is the truest love.

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Lately, i’ve been thinking about spiderwebs; their tensile strength, beauty, ephemerality, organization, and irreproducible singularity. To the casual observer, it seems that these complex structures are solely for the purpose of trapping prey, yet their functions are far more advanced. They are not only a means for procuring sustenance; they also serve as an external neural network and a listening device, an extension and enhancement of sensorial capability that allows for more intimate understanding of the surroundings. 

What we call “nature” functions as a series of interconnected webs, an (un)conscious system of support & communication—one without declared assignments of purpose, perceptions of value, or systems of debt—there is only what is, and how those things fit together—or don’t. All that has ever been achieved by living beings is the result of mutually influential networks of support & communication that have served to aid in the manifestation of said effect. We, humans, and every other thing on this planet, form the confluences and connections of an infinite web; every junction forms a network that connects to a multitude of networks, that theoretically, could be impermeable, unaffected by minor interruptions. The individualism & imposed separation of humans from one another and the ecologies they are a part of, is against this natural structure, and has led to an ever increasing state of dissonance for all life on this planet.

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Gratefully, slightly less to report for last week, though still it is horrific. Jericho has been under siege, innocents have been murdered with impunity, inequity reigns supreme, basically: the usual continues unabated by the international community in the stolen land occupied by the ‘chosen people’.

I would like to add that the earthquakes that hit Tur…

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I’m hoping that by now you have heard about the most recent massacre in Jenin, though I’m certain you’ve already heard about the martyr Khairy Alqam(21) and his shooting operation targeting illegal colonial settlers in an illegal settlement in occupied Jerusalem. The disparity in accurate Western reportage on Israel and Palestine once again has followed…

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As we begin the last week of the first month of a new year, Palestinians have already been forced to mourn the deaths of 18 people, at least three of them children. And while death is the most outright and obvious form of denying the rights of the living…Israel, Zionism, and th…

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