It is so powerful and necessary for Mohammed El-Kurd to mention so many victims by name and how they were killed. And he’s been doing that throughout the book.

It’s a a serious malady, the way we talk about Palestinian deaths as if in a collective—as we’re discussing stomping on a hoard of ants—and as if they all died because of their militancy. So many are children, teenagers, who just happened to catch the eye of an IOF/settler terrorist.

It gives so many people the medium to care (and if you still haven’t even started caring, that’s sincerely shameful) about Palestinian death when individual Palestinians are named. For liberal zionists or both-siders, it makes them reconcile with the odiousness of the ideology they laud. And if that doesn’t make them care, they’re utterly and irrevocably lost.

On the same note, I want to make people aware of a durational performance 🔗 by the artist Santiago Sierra at A/POLITICO.

In their own words, “Arabic speaking performers uously, the names of Palestinians killed in historic Palestine by the Israeli state, its forces and settlers since the establishment of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948.

The reading runs 24 hours a day until the list is complete. Where a name has not been recorded, the reader speaks the Arabic word مجهول (Majhul), meaning „Unknown”, followed by the location of the death.”

[…]The names have been compiled from established source lists and online databases, alongside UN records, legal files, public registers, archival material and other published sources. These records exist largely because of the work of the Palestinian people and their commitment to documenting and remembering their lives and deaths.”

[…]In the context of the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the continued recovery of names and records, this is not a final account, but part of an ongoing process of gathering and checking names to honour as many victims as possible.”

I think they’re doing really honorable work, compiling and painstakingly naming every single victim and giving voice to the voiceless. I think we’ll finally grasp the full extent of Israeli crimes when the performance reaches its conclusion (indefinitely).

There’s no donation or anything required as far as I can tell, but I just wanted to let others know that this something people are doing as part of raising awareness, and it’s important work.