How should an anti-Zionist Jew respond to the genocide in Gaza and its ramifications? This was the subject of my book To See in the Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7 (2025). It was published on January 20, the first full day of the supposed “ceasefire” in Gaza and the inaugural day of Trump’s neo-imperial venture.
Today, it’s beyond troubling to see how dire the situation in Gaza has become. Britain and the US stand idly by as occupation forces fire tank shells at starving people in the rubble of what was once Rafah.
At the same time, the lunge to the right made by Anglophone universities has boomeranged back at them. In the early summer of 2024, it seemed expedient to university presidents to endorse the claim that all and any anti-Zionism is necessarily antisemitism, leading to the violent destruction of the encampment movement.
It soon turned out that the Trump administration was only too keen to agree. Using the universities’ own argument against them, Trump has cynically but effectively mobilized Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—designed to protect the civil rights of Black, Brown, Indigenous and other people of color—against universities.
If all pro-Palestine activity is antisemitic, as the universities themselves declared, then the civil rights of Jewish students are being violated. Even as I write this introduction, the administration sought on these grounds not just to withhold visas from international students going to Harvard but, astonishingly, to withdraw accreditation from Columbia altogether.
In the aftermath of the Occupy movement, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney had seen higher education as a potential “refuge” for social movements. No longer. At the same time, there has been a discovery in the encampments and elsewhere in the solidarity movement of what radical art critic John Berger called the “undefeated despair” he encountered in Palestine.
Being too close to despair, at first, I was hesitant to even organize any events around this book, for fear of seeming to capitalize on genocide. Friends—including those in this dossier—persuaded me otherwise. Given my privilege, it was, so they argued, incumbent on me to make as public as possible my refusal that this violence be justified in my name.
I am so glad they did. I have been so moved by the undefeated generosity and intensity of response from others participating in these events, whether as formal panelists or in the audience. Knowing little in advance about the book—there have been no reviews or publicity, given the topic—people have come in numbers, with a palpable need to discuss this catastrophe.
When organizing events around my book, US universities have been the most difficult places to work with. Some have refused to make rooms available. Others have insisted I take “adversarial,” meaning pro-Israel, questions. By contrast, there have been more than generous events hosted by London institutions.
It has nonetheless been the alternative spaces—whether the Medicine for Nightmares bookstore in the Mission District of San Francisco, or the Francis Kite Club in New York’s Lower East Side, or Oakland’s Tamarask organizing space—where the book has felt like it belonged.
I’ve published a lot of books over the years and, while some have done better than others, I’ve never experienced a response like this. I thought it was important to document and share some of it, perhaps for people who might want to organize their own discussion, whether in an activist space or a classroom.
This dossier brings together writing, poetry, mapping, and art from London, New York, and the Bay Area. Some of the people here have been with this project from the very start, while I have come to meet others because of it. It has formed what my comrades from the Bay Area Center for Convivial Research and Conviviality (CCRA) call a “temporary autonomous zone of knowledge production.”
The dossier rightly begins with the CCRA, who have contributed one of their signature c-maps (concept maps) of the book, using the free donor-supported Cmap software. Their map details the key concepts of the book around the Palestinian political theorist Nasser Abourahme’s insight that “Palestine is everywhere because it names a political subject of radical universal emancipation.” In other words, “Palestine” is how all of us get free. Seeing in the dark offers a set of tools to that end. Artist MPA offers a set of notes from the meetings in the Bay Area reimagined as posters.
What is the politics that Palestine offers? After a year of genocide in Gaza, seventy-five years of the Nakba, half a millennium of settler slavery, politics is and always was the meeting of the visible and the unspeakable. Unspeakable in that what is visible is so awful as to be beyond ordinary words. Unspeakable in that what is visible is forbidden to be said. Unspeakable in that language cannot contain the ways in which it is undone. So, it must be spoken in extraordinary ways.
What has been sayable about the unspeakable? It has been poets who have found ways to make language do what it should not have to do. Writing about the Holocaust, the poet Anne Michaels once put her trust in “the power of language to restore.” That restoration is care, solidarity, and love.
In the face of the sheer intensity of the genocide, simple description fails. There is no sentence that can connect the colonizer and the colonized in common discourse. Poetry works to reconnect the visible and the unspeakable. It crosses the border between inside and outside. It finds ways to make the unspeakable sayable. To create poetry in the moment where words fail us is always resistance.
As Palestinian poet Fady Joudah put it in 2024, the task for visual activists now is simply:
The middle of this dossier consists of a set of poems and reflections by poets. Palestinian American poet Priscilla Wathington has shared a new poem entitled “The Clock Men.” It speaks to the obscene interface of time, labor, and genocidal violence in which:
Omar Zahzah has shared the poems he read for us at Medicine for Nightmares. The density of the quiet around his voice could be felt on the skin and seen in the air:
Again, there is a stress on time and the different experience of the global moment, even as poetry, far from being the effete indulgence of conservative caricature, does nothing less than free the land.
Poet and organizer Steve Dickison was instrumental in bringing these wonderful poets to the events, which he also participated in. His response here feels like a new genre to me, combining as it does reportage, commentary, and poetry. Out of every emergency, there is an emergence, and these entangled, intersectional, and personal forms of writing will be part of that murmuration.
Artist and scholar Jill Casid uses the tarot card created by designer Amanda Priebe for the book as her starting point for a reflection on “solidary care work of taking back melancholy, that pathologized other side of grief and mourning to elaborate its potential as a medium for living our dying on a dying planet.” The care of this formulation, its poetry and its resonance, are exemplary of her ground-making work, shaping different practices into new possibilities.
The dossier ends with where the project began: the generosity of VAGABONDS (their caps) series editor Max Haiven to take a chance on what he rightly calls a “fraught” proposal. VAGABONDS is a series of radical pamphlets, whose design and format draw on the revolutionary tradition of France and Haiti. No university press would have taken an autotheory of violence in solidarity with Palestine but, through Max’s generous editing, VAGABONDS supported it throughout and, like the outside readers, made it much better.
Haiven challenges us, though, to think beyond this moment and ask: “What is the role of the radical book in the years to come?” In his view, a book is a community, whether passed from hand to hand, talked about among friends, or shared as a pirated PDF. This emerging commune, and its communism, is the specter haunting the colonizing metropole’s response to the genocide.
I think of this formation as a murmuration, the spontaneous assembly of birds that constitutes a four-dimensional dialectic across time and space, a mediation that is never complete. It is the refusal to consent to the practices of genocide, each and every genocide from 1492 on; it is the consent not to be a single being; it is grounded in the rubble of words, images, and the built environment; it is to see in the dark. Undefeated.
