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Where’s the Gaza Gay Parade? Liberals want to know.
A Column for the Queers.
Part of the work of decolonizing is busting myths and propaganda. There might not be a Gay Pride Parade in Gaza because of Israel’s punishing siege and occupation, but make no mistake, there is a lot of queerness there. One tactic the Occupation uses to dehumanize Palestinians is to convince the world that queer Palestinians do not exist, in Gaza particularly. To paint Gaza as savage and backwards and hostile, where modern liberal freedoms like a Pride parade couldn’t possibly exist. While in many cases, queer people in Gaza have had incredibly challenging lives because of the circumstances, it is misleading to believe that Palestinians are inherently more homophobic than their occupiers. In fact, Gaza is just as queer and problematic as the rest of the world. Our EIP journalist talks to “Adam,” a 20-something queer Gazan who lived in the enclave his whole life before getting evacuated to escape the genocide earlier this year. Adam is using a pseudonym to protect his identity. His story is not meant to represent every queer story in Gaza. But we do want to create a space in “Everything is Political” dedicated to documenting as many queer stories from the region as we can. It is our personal Pride Parade.
ADAM: I was lucky that my dad, while really religious, is really open-minded and cultured. He treats me differently than any other family member or son of his because he knows how different I am. He knows. And my family raised me knowing that I’m different.
EIP: When you use the word “different” — that your dad knew you were different – what does different mean? And then what do you mean “they knew”? Did you talk to them about that differentness?
ADAM: No, it’s not something you talk about because it’s not something that you can feel with your hand. It’s something that you can see and notice, you can know about this and you just let it happen, it’s simple if you want it to be. You either support it or just leave it. And I was lucky to have a really different family than religious Middle Eastern families. They were super supportive– it’s really uncommon in a religious community, in any religion.
EIP: Can you tell me a bit about your family?
ADAM: Sure. My family used to live on the border between Egypt and Gaza. Like the checkpoint on the border before they removed everything and just made up a border back in the day! And part of my family is in Egypt and part of the other part is in Gaza. I’m the youngest in the family. My grandma’s side of the family is Lebanese, from Tyre, South Lebanon. The other part of my dad’s family is from Tulkarim and I have family in Jenin, West Bank. So imagine being me dealing with what’s happening in Gaza, dealing with my family in Jenin, and dealing with my other side of the family in Lebanon. It is like the ultimate situation.
EIP: So are you stressed out?
ADAM: I was raised religious so I don’t really worry. Thanks to religion and being raised Muslim, I do not worry about anything because I believe anything that happens in the world is happening for a reason. One way or another, it will turn out good for you if you let things take its flow and believe it happened for a reason. So I think if anything may happen to any of my family members anywhere in the world, I would get emotional of course, I would be sad for a few days. But then I would move on quickly.
EIP: You’d say you’re still pretty religious?
ADAM: I was born and raised religious. I memorized the whole Qur’an at 12. And then at 13 I hit puberty, and had new thoughts. And I looked for answers to my questions and found peace quickly. All religions are carrying the same message in a different text and I appreciate all of them but I believe I don’t need to be under a specific religion to be more Human.
LOVE
ADAM: I was always aware of my preferences, and I was vocal about it my whole life, teaching myself and others that love is love. At 13, I started experiencing life as a queer person at school. There was a lot of making out and a lot of cuddling but at the same time a lot of harassing — Like, when I’d be walking home, and some boys would be like “you’re such a sexy bitch come do this and that to me oh my god I wanna do this and that to you” even though they are pretty much straight – as they describe themselves but I highly doubt it – and they would sometimes spank me or just do weird shit I didn’t like.
EIP: Can you remember one of your first gay experiences in Gaza?
‘We were kids, he wasn’t Hamas back then, he became Hamas after they bombed his house.’ —Adam
ADAM: There was a friend I went to kindergarten with. He was from a family who were our neighbors and our friends. I met him and he was one year older than me. He was super nice. And we just found ourselves … kissing and things developed from there obviously. And he became someone who I hooked up with all the time. I’m talking about having sex every day for three months at some point. We were teenagers. I think I used all [my] fun back then.
EIP: How gay could you be in Gaza?
ADAM: In schools, being gay is like completely there – you can see it and teachers can see it. If you know, you know. I’ve seen people hugging, kissing and cuddling in class. I’ve done it myself in the class, outside of the class, everywhere. And I was the nice, respectful kid, by the way. I was the teacher’s pet and I had high grades mostly.
EIP: That’s interesting and pretty relatable. What was it like being religious and gay for you then?
ADAM: Well, it’s my whole perspective. I was religious until I was 12 and I remember at 13, everything changed because I figured out that there’s a part of religion that people are too scared to say: the more religious you get, the weirder you get. I got touched by people who were teaching me Qur’an, I got touched in the mosque — I understood that this is not the religion (Islam), it’s the people. But, it also opened something in my head that made me say: “okay, so if this is something that people really want, even religious people want, why is it illegal in my religion?” So trust me, religious people, and even people from Hamas, some fighters actually, some of them are gay, and in the new generations it’s way more common than what you would think. One of them was trying to link up with me. He actually got martyred years ago. I didn’t know he was a fighter until he got martyred.
EIP: Can you tell me a story about one of your relationships in Gaza?
ADAM: There was this one dude who I grew up with, our families are similar, we came from a similar mindset. But we were so different from others, and he knew he was different. And I knew I was different. But we kept it to ourselves. One day, we’re playing football and that day nobody was there except for me and him, and I was just sitting and he was just sitting next to me near the street. The streets were empty by the way. There weren’t many people in their cars, especially in the afternoon because people in Gaza nap. He was so sweet, so respectful, so nice. And he moved a little closer to me and just put his hand on my thigh and just left it there. And I look at him and he looks at me. We both were attracted to each other. I always like to tell gay jokes or sexual jokes. It makes it easier to recognize gay people. It’s just natural. And our love– with this dude– me and him, was natural too. So he starts touching me and I just, I hold his hand– we hold hands and I touch him back. In public! Then I told him, “hey, we’re in the street. Do you want to go inside or something? I don’t want you to get caught.” I was more worried about him than I was for myself.
EIP: Because he was in Hamas?
ADAM: We were kids, he wasn’t Hamas back then, he became Hamas after they bombed his house, but he was very religious. So, anyways, we just go inside, and we’re just walking there, we start making out. An hour and a half of making out. So we went inside, we just started moving forward and kissing and making out and stripping each other and just cuddling with each other. I was eating him out and then Al Maghreb prayer just started and he was like “Can you stop?” and I was like “What?” and he was like “I have to go to pray at the mosque.” His family is dead now and I think he’s gone too now, himself. We were in our early teens in love at the time. Making out with him was something that until this very day I don’t think I will ever have something like that because it was genuine and true, true, true, true, true authentic love before anything and it came from someone I know, he was an honest and a respectful young man.
EIP: Wow. Everybody kind of imagines Gaza as extremely conservative only.
ADAM: It is conservative, what’s the issue with that? But these things are natural. These things you don’t hear of because you don’t need to hear of them.
EIP: Ya, queer life finds a way no matter what.
ADAM: We were together for two months and he stopped seeing me because he’s super religious and he started feeling bad about himself. You have no idea how brave that was from him to take this decision to make out with me to to do all of this with me. It takes a very brave and genuine man to do such a thing, especially when you’re from a conservative family and you’re super religious.
EIP: Do you believe you can be gay and Muslim?
ADAM: You can combine religion and sexuality. Yes, you can. Yes, yes. In General; People will tell you you can’t. It’s just the people who have less understanding of life, very zoomed in and biased towards a specific idea.
‘So trust me, religious people, and even people from Hamas, some fighters actually, some of them are gay, and in the new generations it’s way more common than what you would think. One of them was trying to link up with me. He actually got martyred years ago. I didn’t know he was a fighter until he got martyred.’ —Adam
THE GENOCIDE
In October 2023, Adam was studying. He was also working on his dream on the side, his own clothing line and the start of him getting into fashion. He had been making money from the line while studying at a university in Deir al Balah. At the time, Adam was getting ready to start an apprenticeship in culinary arts in Gaza.
ADAM: That was the 5th of October. Then the 7th of October happened. And everything is gone. The restaurants, the whole square in Gaza, Hay al Rimal. If you know Hay al Rimal in Gaza, it is one of the most beautiful neighborhoods in Gaza. It’s gone completely.
In fact, I know a family of 25 that got completely, like, they vanished, the family vanished, and this family fucking hated Hamas, they were literally Athiests, and weren’t huge fan of religion even, but they got bombed. That’s how you know it’s not about Hamas, it’s about the land and whoever is on top of it.
EIP: Can you explain your experience during the last year?
ADAM: We moved to my sister’s house three days in, and I couldn’t really stand it. My oldest brother, who lives with us, went back to our house. And then my dad followed him and I followed my dad. That’s like three days after it started, so we just stayed at home for a while. Later on, I spent a month in Khan Younis because I just wasn’t comfortable in my area anymore. I felt like I’m gonna die any second because death was literally around me everywhere. Like it was too much. So I just went to Khan Younis because my uncle’s area was safe. It’s a bunch of potheads and a bunch of hippies who don’t care about anything. So that was like a nice place. I went there, I spent a month there, went back to Rafah and I stayed there. The third month people started getting displaced from the north to our neighborhood. And everyone was like, oh, this is “the safest spot in Gaza now.” Well, it wasn’t by the way. Imagine waking up every day to an airstrike in your neighborhood and this is “the safest spot in Gaza.” That’s how wild, how insane the amount of airstrikes there were. Every day from 10 at night to 5 in the morning, there were airstrikes everywhere, and you could hear it. And our house was in the middle of it, and I heard what’s happening everywhere, north, south, west, east, all of it. So it was really hard for me. I would fall asleep and I was looking at the ceiling and waiting for the rocket and thinking of how the rocket is gonna penetrate the ceiling. I was thinking, okay I’m gonna get sucked into the other room, I’m gonna be under this wall, maybe buried underground by all these walls blah, blah, blah. Or an explosive, I’m gonna be thrown somewhere else.
EIP: Were you guys in a high rise, or what was your living situation?
ADAM: We were on the second floor, and it was in Rafah. That’s why we were able to hear everything. I covered most of this from my window, but I was so scared to post anything or talk about anything until the third month of the genocide, actually, because they [Israelis] can and will kill you if you do this. So the third month of the genocide, people got displaced from the north. Our neighborhood was 5000 people at first, maybe 10,000 people. It became 50,000 people all of a sudden. And it’s a bunch of people who seem really privileged. But by the time they came…they didn’t have money to get a haircut. They barely had food. They didn’t have clothes. Nobody was supporting them. And there was way too many of them to a point where they opened governmental schools for them.
I said to my dad – we are really close by the way– “okay, listen, what do you think we could help them with?” He said, “they lack basics first, water, they don’t have water, they don’t have food, they have nothing.” I was like, okay, listen, “how much money do you have?” I told him that I still had all the money from my clothing brand. We started helping them with what we could until people from the neighborhood shared what they could with them. Later on, we started cooking for them from our own pocket money, from the profits I made from my clothing brand. Meat was really expensive. It was 100 shekels I remember. Now, it’s even way more, but yeah, those people hadn’t had protein in two months, and it was so sad, so fucking sad, and we were in the same boat, us and them. So me and my family were like, you may die any second, so let’s just spend all our money, fuck it. Like, let’s be good. We spent like a high percentage of our money on cooking for them. I think the second week I started cooking, I started posting stories for the first time, and I had really bad social anxiety– insane. I’m diagnosed with general anxiety disorder, and my anxiety was really bad.
EIP: I cannot fathom what you were dealing with. How did you eventually get out?
ADAM: So yeah, later on, people started donating to me. And I had a GoFundMe. A GoFundMe for evacuating because my knee was really hurting. When I was cooking for three months, I was, like, feeling pain in my left knee. I put all the pressure on my right knee. Then both knees got fucked up. So I needed to heal. And I needed to evacuate to heal. There wasn’t much in Gaza. No medications even. No painkillers. I wasn’t able to sleep because of the pain. So I evacuated on my own [without my family]. It was a tough decision but I needed it and the pain was increasing. I feel the pain right now as I talk about it, it’s just muscle memory.
EIP: Around when did you get out?
ADAM: It was two weeks before the borders got closed. Like April.
EIP: Woah. You were pretty lucky to get out then. Do you feel lucky?
ADAM: I am very lucky to be alive, PTSD, trauma and all.
EIP: You’re in Egypt now. Do you feel hopeful about the future?
ADAM: Oh, I have nothing but positive thoughts about the future., I’m aiming for 1 million dollars this year from the clothing brand. Really, nobody else can help my family or build their destroyed houses other than me. They’re depending on me. So this year I will work very hard.
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{
"article":
{
"title" : "Where’s the Gaza Gay Parade? Liberals want to know.",
"author" : "Afeef Nessouli",
"category" : "interviews",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/wheres-the-gaza-gay-parade-liberals-want-to-know",
"date" : "2024-11-01 13:42:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/2012_12_EIP_18_GayParade_1.jpg",
"excerpt" : "A Column for the Queers.",
"content" : "A Column for the Queers.Part of the work of decolonizing is busting myths and propaganda. There might not be a Gay Pride Parade in Gaza because of Israel’s punishing siege and occupation, but make no mistake, there is a lot of queerness there. One tactic the Occupation uses to dehumanize Palestinians is to convince the world that queer Palestinians do not exist, in Gaza particularly. To paint Gaza as savage and backwards and hostile, where modern liberal freedoms like a Pride parade couldn’t possibly exist. While in many cases, queer people in Gaza have had incredibly challenging lives because of the circumstances, it is misleading to believe that Palestinians are inherently more homophobic than their occupiers. In fact, Gaza is just as queer and problematic as the rest of the world. Our EIP journalist talks to “Adam,” a 20-something queer Gazan who lived in the enclave his whole life before getting evacuated to escape the genocide earlier this year. Adam is using a pseudonym to protect his identity. His story is not meant to represent every queer story in Gaza. But we do want to create a space in “Everything is Political” dedicated to documenting as many queer stories from the region as we can. It is our personal Pride Parade.ADAM: I was lucky that my dad, while really religious, is really open-minded and cultured. He treats me differently than any other family member or son of his because he knows how different I am. He knows. And my family raised me knowing that I’m different.EIP: When you use the word “different” — that your dad knew you were different – what does different mean? And then what do you mean “they knew”? Did you talk to them about that differentness?ADAM: No, it’s not something you talk about because it’s not something that you can feel with your hand. It’s something that you can see and notice, you can know about this and you just let it happen, it’s simple if you want it to be. You either support it or just leave it. And I was lucky to have a really different family than religious Middle Eastern families. They were super supportive– it’s really uncommon in a religious community, in any religion.EIP: Can you tell me a bit about your family?ADAM: Sure. My family used to live on the border between Egypt and Gaza. Like the checkpoint on the border before they removed everything and just made up a border back in the day! And part of my family is in Egypt and part of the other part is in Gaza. I’m the youngest in the family. My grandma’s side of the family is Lebanese, from Tyre, South Lebanon. The other part of my dad’s family is from Tulkarim and I have family in Jenin, West Bank. So imagine being me dealing with what’s happening in Gaza, dealing with my family in Jenin, and dealing with my other side of the family in Lebanon. It is like the ultimate situation.EIP: So are you stressed out?ADAM: I was raised religious so I don’t really worry. Thanks to religion and being raised Muslim, I do not worry about anything because I believe anything that happens in the world is happening for a reason. One way or another, it will turn out good for you if you let things take its flow and believe it happened for a reason. So I think if anything may happen to any of my family members anywhere in the world, I would get emotional of course, I would be sad for a few days. But then I would move on quickly.EIP: You’d say you’re still pretty religious?ADAM: I was born and raised religious. I memorized the whole Qur’an at 12. And then at 13 I hit puberty, and had new thoughts. And I looked for answers to my questions and found peace quickly. All religions are carrying the same message in a different text and I appreciate all of them but I believe I don’t need to be under a specific religion to be more Human.LOVEADAM: I was always aware of my preferences, and I was vocal about it my whole life, teaching myself and others that love is love. At 13, I started experiencing life as a queer person at school. There was a lot of making out and a lot of cuddling but at the same time a lot of harassing — Like, when I’d be walking home, and some boys would be like “you’re such a sexy bitch come do this and that to me oh my god I wanna do this and that to you” even though they are pretty much straight – as they describe themselves but I highly doubt it – and they would sometimes spank me or just do weird shit I didn’t like.EIP: Can you remember one of your first gay experiences in Gaza?‘We were kids, he wasn’t Hamas back then, he became Hamas after they bombed his house.’ —AdamADAM: There was a friend I went to kindergarten with. He was from a family who were our neighbors and our friends. I met him and he was one year older than me. He was super nice. And we just found ourselves … kissing and things developed from there obviously. And he became someone who I hooked up with all the time. I’m talking about having sex every day for three months at some point. We were teenagers. I think I used all [my] fun back then.EIP: How gay could you be in Gaza?ADAM: In schools, being gay is like completely there – you can see it and teachers can see it. If you know, you know. I’ve seen people hugging, kissing and cuddling in class. I’ve done it myself in the class, outside of the class, everywhere. And I was the nice, respectful kid, by the way. I was the teacher’s pet and I had high grades mostly.EIP: That’s interesting and pretty relatable. What was it like being religious and gay for you then?ADAM: Well, it’s my whole perspective. I was religious until I was 12 and I remember at 13, everything changed because I figured out that there’s a part of religion that people are too scared to say: the more religious you get, the weirder you get. I got touched by people who were teaching me Qur’an, I got touched in the mosque — I understood that this is not the religion (Islam), it’s the people. But, it also opened something in my head that made me say: “okay, so if this is something that people really want, even religious people want, why is it illegal in my religion?” So trust me, religious people, and even people from Hamas, some fighters actually, some of them are gay, and in the new generations it’s way more common than what you would think. One of them was trying to link up with me. He actually got martyred years ago. I didn’t know he was a fighter until he got martyred.EIP: Can you tell me a story about one of your relationships in Gaza?ADAM: There was this one dude who I grew up with, our families are similar, we came from a similar mindset. But we were so different from others, and he knew he was different. And I knew I was different. But we kept it to ourselves. One day, we’re playing football and that day nobody was there except for me and him, and I was just sitting and he was just sitting next to me near the street. The streets were empty by the way. There weren’t many people in their cars, especially in the afternoon because people in Gaza nap. He was so sweet, so respectful, so nice. And he moved a little closer to me and just put his hand on my thigh and just left it there. And I look at him and he looks at me. We both were attracted to each other. I always like to tell gay jokes or sexual jokes. It makes it easier to recognize gay people. It’s just natural. And our love– with this dude– me and him, was natural too. So he starts touching me and I just, I hold his hand– we hold hands and I touch him back. In public! Then I told him, “hey, we’re in the street. Do you want to go inside or something? I don’t want you to get caught.” I was more worried about him than I was for myself.EIP: Because he was in Hamas?ADAM: We were kids, he wasn’t Hamas back then, he became Hamas after they bombed his house, but he was very religious. So, anyways, we just go inside, and we’re just walking there, we start making out. An hour and a half of making out. So we went inside, we just started moving forward and kissing and making out and stripping each other and just cuddling with each other. I was eating him out and then Al Maghreb prayer just started and he was like “Can you stop?” and I was like “What?” and he was like “I have to go to pray at the mosque.” His family is dead now and I think he’s gone too now, himself. We were in our early teens in love at the time. Making out with him was something that until this very day I don’t think I will ever have something like that because it was genuine and true, true, true, true, true authentic love before anything and it came from someone I know, he was an honest and a respectful young man.EIP: Wow. Everybody kind of imagines Gaza as extremely conservative only.ADAM: It is conservative, what’s the issue with that? But these things are natural. These things you don’t hear of because you don’t need to hear of them.EIP: Ya, queer life finds a way no matter what.ADAM: We were together for two months and he stopped seeing me because he’s super religious and he started feeling bad about himself. You have no idea how brave that was from him to take this decision to make out with me to to do all of this with me. It takes a very brave and genuine man to do such a thing, especially when you’re from a conservative family and you’re super religious.EIP: Do you believe you can be gay and Muslim?ADAM: You can combine religion and sexuality. Yes, you can. Yes, yes. In General; People will tell you you can’t. It’s just the people who have less understanding of life, very zoomed in and biased towards a specific idea.‘So trust me, religious people, and even people from Hamas, some fighters actually, some of them are gay, and in the new generations it’s way more common than what you would think. One of them was trying to link up with me. He actually got martyred years ago. I didn’t know he was a fighter until he got martyred.’ —AdamTHE GENOCIDEIn October 2023, Adam was studying. He was also working on his dream on the side, his own clothing line and the start of him getting into fashion. He had been making money from the line while studying at a university in Deir al Balah. At the time, Adam was getting ready to start an apprenticeship in culinary arts in Gaza.ADAM: That was the 5th of October. Then the 7th of October happened. And everything is gone. The restaurants, the whole square in Gaza, Hay al Rimal. If you know Hay al Rimal in Gaza, it is one of the most beautiful neighborhoods in Gaza. It’s gone completely.In fact, I know a family of 25 that got completely, like, they vanished, the family vanished, and this family fucking hated Hamas, they were literally Athiests, and weren’t huge fan of religion even, but they got bombed. That’s how you know it’s not about Hamas, it’s about the land and whoever is on top of it.EIP: Can you explain your experience during the last year?ADAM: We moved to my sister’s house three days in, and I couldn’t really stand it. My oldest brother, who lives with us, went back to our house. And then my dad followed him and I followed my dad. That’s like three days after it started, so we just stayed at home for a while. Later on, I spent a month in Khan Younis because I just wasn’t comfortable in my area anymore. I felt like I’m gonna die any second because death was literally around me everywhere. Like it was too much. So I just went to Khan Younis because my uncle’s area was safe. It’s a bunch of potheads and a bunch of hippies who don’t care about anything. So that was like a nice place. I went there, I spent a month there, went back to Rafah and I stayed there. The third month people started getting displaced from the north to our neighborhood. And everyone was like, oh, this is “the safest spot in Gaza now.” Well, it wasn’t by the way. Imagine waking up every day to an airstrike in your neighborhood and this is “the safest spot in Gaza.” That’s how wild, how insane the amount of airstrikes there were. Every day from 10 at night to 5 in the morning, there were airstrikes everywhere, and you could hear it. And our house was in the middle of it, and I heard what’s happening everywhere, north, south, west, east, all of it. So it was really hard for me. I would fall asleep and I was looking at the ceiling and waiting for the rocket and thinking of how the rocket is gonna penetrate the ceiling. I was thinking, okay I’m gonna get sucked into the other room, I’m gonna be under this wall, maybe buried underground by all these walls blah, blah, blah. Or an explosive, I’m gonna be thrown somewhere else.EIP: Were you guys in a high rise, or what was your living situation?ADAM: We were on the second floor, and it was in Rafah. That’s why we were able to hear everything. I covered most of this from my window, but I was so scared to post anything or talk about anything until the third month of the genocide, actually, because they [Israelis] can and will kill you if you do this. So the third month of the genocide, people got displaced from the north. Our neighborhood was 5000 people at first, maybe 10,000 people. It became 50,000 people all of a sudden. And it’s a bunch of people who seem really privileged. But by the time they came…they didn’t have money to get a haircut. They barely had food. They didn’t have clothes. Nobody was supporting them. And there was way too many of them to a point where they opened governmental schools for them.I said to my dad – we are really close by the way– “okay, listen, what do you think we could help them with?” He said, “they lack basics first, water, they don’t have water, they don’t have food, they have nothing.” I was like, okay, listen, “how much money do you have?” I told him that I still had all the money from my clothing brand. We started helping them with what we could until people from the neighborhood shared what they could with them. Later on, we started cooking for them from our own pocket money, from the profits I made from my clothing brand. Meat was really expensive. It was 100 shekels I remember. Now, it’s even way more, but yeah, those people hadn’t had protein in two months, and it was so sad, so fucking sad, and we were in the same boat, us and them. So me and my family were like, you may die any second, so let’s just spend all our money, fuck it. Like, let’s be good. We spent like a high percentage of our money on cooking for them. I think the second week I started cooking, I started posting stories for the first time, and I had really bad social anxiety– insane. I’m diagnosed with general anxiety disorder, and my anxiety was really bad.EIP: I cannot fathom what you were dealing with. How did you eventually get out?ADAM: So yeah, later on, people started donating to me. And I had a GoFundMe. A GoFundMe for evacuating because my knee was really hurting. When I was cooking for three months, I was, like, feeling pain in my left knee. I put all the pressure on my right knee. Then both knees got fucked up. So I needed to heal. And I needed to evacuate to heal. There wasn’t much in Gaza. No medications even. No painkillers. I wasn’t able to sleep because of the pain. So I evacuated on my own [without my family]. It was a tough decision but I needed it and the pain was increasing. I feel the pain right now as I talk about it, it’s just muscle memory.EIP: Around when did you get out?ADAM: It was two weeks before the borders got closed. Like April.EIP: Woah. You were pretty lucky to get out then. Do you feel lucky?ADAM: I am very lucky to be alive, PTSD, trauma and all.EIP: You’re in Egypt now. Do you feel hopeful about the future?ADAM: Oh, I have nothing but positive thoughts about the future., I’m aiming for 1 million dollars this year from the clothing brand. Really, nobody else can help my family or build their destroyed houses other than me. They’re depending on me. So this year I will work very hard."
}
,
"relatedposts": [
{
"title" : "Ziad Rahbani and the Art of Creative Rebellion",
"author" : "Céline Semaan",
"category" : "essays",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/ziad-rahbani-creative-rebellion",
"date" : "2025-07-28 07:01:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/2025_7_for-EIP-ziad-rahbani.jpg",
"excerpt" : "When I turned fourteen in Beirut, I came across Ziad Rahbani’s groundbreaking work. I immediately felt connected to him, his words, his perspective and his unflinching commitment to liberation for our people and for Palestine. My first love introduced me to his revolutionary plays, his unique contributions to Arab music and very soon I had listened to all of his plays and expanded my understanding of our own culture and history.",
"content" : "When I turned fourteen in Beirut, I came across Ziad Rahbani’s groundbreaking work. I immediately felt connected to him, his words, his perspective and his unflinching commitment to liberation for our people and for Palestine. My first love introduced me to his revolutionary plays, his unique contributions to Arab music and very soon I had listened to all of his plays and expanded my understanding of our own culture and history.Ziad Rahbani’s passing marks more than the end of a brilliant life—it marks the closing of a chapter in the cultural history of our region. His funeral wasn’t just a ceremony, it was a collective reckoning; crowds following his exit from the hospital to the cemetery. The streets knew what many governments tried to forget: that he gave voice to the people’s truths, to our frustrations, our absurdities, our grief, and our undying hope for justice. Yet he died as an unsung hero.Born into a family that shaped the musical soul of Lebanon, Ziad could have taken the easy path of replication. Instead, he shattered the mold. From his early plays like Sahriyye and Nazl el-Surour, he upended the elitism of classical Arabic theatre by placing the working class, the absurdity of war, and the contradictions of society at the center of his work. He spoke like the people spoke. He made art in the language of the taxi driver, the student, the mother waiting for news of her son.In his film work Film Ameriki Tawil, Ziad used satire not only as critique, but as rebellion. He exposed the rot of sectarian politics in Lebanon with surgical precision, never sparing anyone, including the leftist circles he moved in. He saw clearly: that political purity was a myth, and liberation required uncomfortable truths. His work, deeply rooted in class consciousness, refused to glorify any side of a war that tore his country apart.And yet, Ziad Rahbani never lost his clarity on Palestine. While others wavered, diluted their positions, or folded into diplomacy, Ziad remained steadfast. His support for the Palestinian struggle was not an aesthetic position—it was a political and ethical commitment. And he did so not as an outsider or savior, but as someone who understood that our futures are intertwined. That the liberation of Palestine is integral to the liberation of Lebanon. That anti-sectarianism and anti-Zionism are not contradictions, but extensions of each other.He brought jazz into Arabic music not as a novelty, but as a defiant act of cultural fusion—proof that our identities are not fixed, but fluid, diasporic, ever-evolving. He blurred the lines between Western musical forms and Arabic lyricism with intention, not mimicry. His collaborations with his mother, the legendary Fairuz, carried the weight of generational dialogue, but his own voice always broke through—wry, melancholic, grounded in the everyday.Ziad taught us that being a revolutionary doesn’t require a uniform or a slogan. It requires listening. It requires holding complexity, laughing in the face of despair, and making room for joy even when the world is on fire. He reminded us that culture is the deepest infrastructure of any resistance movement. He refused to be sanitized, censored, or simplified.As we mourn him, we also inherit his clarity. For artists, for organizers, for thinkers: Ziad Rahbani gave us a blueprint. Create without permission. Tell the truth. Fight for Palestine without compromising your own roots. And never forget that the people will always hear what is real.He was, and will always be, a compass for creative rebellion."
}
,
{
"title" : "Saul Williams: Nothing is Just a Song",
"author" : "Saul Williams, Collis Browne",
"category" : "interviews",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/saul-williams-interview",
"date" : "2025-07-21 21:35:46 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/EIP_SaulWilliams_Shot_7_0218.jpg",
"excerpt" : "Saul Williams: Many artists would like to believe that there is some sort of sublime neutrality that art can deliver, that it is beyond or above the idea of politics. However, art is sometimes used as a tool of Empire, and if we are not careful, then our art is used as propaganda, and thus, it becomes essential for us to arm our art with our viewpoints, with our perspective, so that it cannot be misused. I have always operated from the position that all my work carries politics in it, that there are politics embedded in it. And I’ve never really understood, if you are aiming to be an artist, why you wouldn’t aim to speak directly to the times. Addressing the political doesn’t have to take away from the personal intimacy of your work.",
"content" : "Collis Browne: Is all music and art really political?Saul Williams: Many artists would like to believe that there is some sort of sublime neutrality that art can deliver, that it is beyond or above the idea of politics. However, art is sometimes used as a tool of Empire, and if we are not careful, then our art is used as propaganda, and thus, it becomes essential for us to arm our art with our viewpoints, with our perspective, so that it cannot be misused. I have always operated from the position that all my work carries politics in it, that there are politics embedded in it. And I’ve never really understood, if you are aiming to be an artist, why you wouldn’t aim to speak directly to the times. Addressing the political doesn’t have to take away from the personal intimacy of your work.Even now, we are reading the writings of Palestinian poets in Gaza and the West Bank, not to mention those who are part of the diaspora, who are charting their feelings and intimate experiences while living through a genocide. These works of art are all politically charged because they are charged with a reality that is fully suppressed by oppressive networks and powers that control them.Shakespeare’s work was always political. He found a way to speak about power to the face of power, knowing they would be in the audience. But also found a way to play with and talk to the “groundlings,” the common people who were in the audience as well.Collis Browne: Was there a moment when you realized that your music could be used as a tool of resistance?Saul Williams: Yeah, I was in third grade, about eight or nine years old. I had been cast in a play in my elementary school. I loved the process of not only performing, but of sitting around the table and breaking down what the language meant and what the objective and the psychology of the character was, and what that meant during the time it was written. I came home and told my parents that I wanted to be an actor when I grew up. My father had the typical response: “I’ll support you as an actor if you get a law degree.” My mother responded by saying, “You should do your next school report on Paul Robeson, he was an actor and a lawyer.”So I did my next school report on Paul Robeson. And what I discovered was that here was an African American man, born in 1898, who had come to an early realization as an actor that the messages of the films he was being cast in—and he was a huge star—went against his own beliefs, his own anti-colonial and anti-imperial beliefs. In the 1930s, he started talking about why we needed to invest in independent cinema. In 1949, during the McCarthy era, he had his passport taken from him so he could no longer travel outside of the US, because he refused to acknowledge that the enemies of the US were his enemies as well. He felt there was no reason Black people should be signing up to fight for the US Empire when they were going home and getting lynched.In 1951, he presented a mandate to the UN called “We Charge Genocide.” In it he charged the US Government with the genocide of African Americans because of the white mobs who were lynching Black Americans on a regular basis. [Editor’s note: the petition charges the US Government with genocide through the endorsement of both racism and “monopoly capitalism,” without which “the persistent, constant, widespread, institutionalized commission of the crime of genocide would be impossible.”] When Robeson met with President Truman, Truman said, “I’d like to respond, but there’s an election coming up, so I have to be careful.”Paul Robeson sang songs of working-class people, songs that trade unionists sang, songs that miners sang, songs that all types of workers sang across the world. He identified with the workers and with the working class, regardless of his fame. He was ridiculed by the American Government and even had his passport revoked for his activism. At that early age, I learned that you could sing songs that could get you labeled as an enemy of the state.I grew up in Newburgh, New York, which is about an hour upstate from New York City. One of my neighbors would often come sing at my father’s church. At the time, I did not understand why my dad would allow this white guy with his guitar or banjo to come sing at our church when we had an amazing gospel choir. I couldn’t understand why we were singing these school songs with this dude. When I finally asked my parents, they said, “You have to understand that Pete—they were talking about Pete Seeger—is responsible for popularizing some of the songs you sing in school.” He wrote songs like “If I Had a Hammer,” and he too was blacklisted by the US government because of the songs he chose to sing and the people he chose to sing them for, and the people he chose to sing them with. I learned at a very early age that music and art were full of politics. Enough politics to get you labeled as the enemy of the state. Enough politics to get your passport taken, or to be imprisoned.I was also learning about my parents’ peers, artists whom they loved and adored. Artists like Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and Nikki Giovanni, all from the Black Arts Movement. Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka made a statement when they started the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School in Harlem that said essentially that all art should serve a function, and that function should be to liberate Black minds.It is from that movement that hip-hop was born. I was lucky enough to witness the birth of hip-hop. At first, it was playful, it was fun, but by the mid to late 1980s, it began finding its voice with groups like Public Enemy, KRS-One, Queen Latifa, Rakim, and the Jungle Brothers. These are groups that started using and expressing Black Liberation politics in the music, which uplifted it, made it sound better, and made it hit harder. The first gangster rap was that… when it was gangster, when it was directly challenging the country it was being born in.As a teenager, I identified as a rapper and an actor. I would argue with school kids who insisted, “It’s not even music. They’re just talking.” I would have to defend hip-hop as music, sometimes even to my parents, who found the language crass. But when I played artists like KRS-One and Public Enemy for my parents, they said, “Oh, I see what they’re doing here.”When Public Enemy rapped, “Elvis was a hero to most, But he never meant shit to me you see, Straight up racist that sucker was, Simple and plain, Motherfuck him and John Wayne, ‘Cause I’m Black and I’m proud, I’m ready and hyped plus I’m amped, Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps,” my parents were like Amen. They understood. They understood why I needed to blast that music in my room 24/7. They understood.When the music spoke to me in that way, suddenly I could pull off moves on the dance floor like doing a flip that I couldn’t do before. That’s the power of music. That’s power embedded in music. That’s why Fela Kuti said that music is the weapon of the future. And, of course, there’s Nina Simone and Billie Holiday. What’s Billie Holiday’s most memorable song? “Strange Fruit.” That voice connected, was speaking directly to the times she was living in. It transcended the times, where to this day, when you hear this song and you understand that the “strange fruit” hanging from Southern trees are Black people who have been lynched, you understand how the power of the voice, when you connect it to something that is charged with the reality of the times, takes on a greater shape.Collis Browne: Public Enemy broke open so much. I grew up in Toronto, in a mostly white community, but I was into some of the bigger American hip-hop acts who were coming out. Public Enemy rose to a new level. Before them, we were only connecting with punk and hardcore music as the music of rebellion.Saul Williams: Public Enemy laid down the groundwork for what hip-hop is: “the voice of the voiceless.” It was only after Public Enemy that you saw the emergence of huge groups in France, Germany, Bulgaria, Egypt, and across the world. There were big acts before them. Run DMC, for instance, but when Public Enemy came out, marginalized groups heard their music and said, “That’s for us. Yes, that’s for us.” It was immediately understood as music of resistance.Collis Browne: What have you seen or listened to out in the world that has a clear political goal, but has been appropriated and watered down?Saul Williams: We can stay on Public Enemy for that. Under Secretary Blinken, Chuck D became a US Global Music Ambassador during the genocide in Gaza. There are photos of him standing beside Secretary Blinken, accepting that role, while understanding that the US has always used music as a cultural propaganda tool to express soft power. I remember learning about how the US uses this “soft power” when I was working in the mid-2000s with a Swiss composer, who has now passed, named Thomas Kessler. He wrote a symphony based on one of my books, Said the Shotgun to the Head, and we were performing it with the Cologne, Germany symphony orchestra, when I heard from the head of the orchestra that, in fact, their main financier was the US Government through the CIA.During the Cold War, it was crucial for the American Government to put money into the arts throughout Western Europe to try to express this idea of “freedom,” as opposed to what was happening in the Eastern (Communist) Bloc. So it was a long time between when the US Government started enlisting musicians and other artists in their propaganda campaigns and when I encountered this information.There’s a documentary called Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, which talks about how the US Government used (uses) music and musicians to co-opt movements and propagate the idea of American freedom and democracy outside the US in the hope of winning over the citizens of other countries without them even realizing that so much of that art is there to question the system itself, not to celebrate it. Unfortunately, there are situations in which an artist’s work is co-opted to be used as propaganda, and the artist buys into it. They become indoctrinated, and you realize that we’re all susceptible to the possibility of taking that bait."
}
,
{
"title" : "The Culture of Artificial Intelligence",
"author" : "Sinead Bovell, Céline Semaan",
"category" : "interviews",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/sinead-bovell-on-ai-artifial-intelligence",
"date" : "2025-07-20 21:35:46 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/sinead-bovell-headshot.jpg",
"excerpt" : "Céline Semaan: It is being reported that AI will make humans dumber than ever, that it is here to rule the world, and to subjugate us all by bringing on a climate apocalypse. Being an AI and tech expert, how can you help people better understand AI as a phenomenon that will impact us but that we shouldn’t necessarily fear?",
"content" : "Céline Semaan: It is being reported that AI will make humans dumber than ever, that it is here to rule the world, and to subjugate us all by bringing on a climate apocalypse. Being an AI and tech expert, how can you help people better understand AI as a phenomenon that will impact us but that we shouldn’t necessarily fear?Sinead Bovell: It depends on where you are… in the Global North, and particularly in the US, perspectives on artificial intelligence and advanced technologies are more broadly negative. When you look at regions in the Global South, when you look at regions in Asia, AI is seen in a much more positive light. Their societies tend to focus on the benefits new technology can bring and what it can do for their quality of life. The social media ecosystem thrives on negative content, but it really does depend on where you are in the world as to how negatively you’re going to view AI. When it comes to the actual fears and the threats themselves, most of them have some validity. Humans could become less intelligent over time if they’re overly reliant on artificial intelligence systems, and the data does show that AI can erode core cognitive capacities.For example, most of us can’t read maps anymore. If you are in the military and your satellite gets knocked down and you need to understand your coordinates, that might be a problem. But for the average person, not reading a map has allowed us to optimize our time; we can get from A to B much more quickly. What do we fill the time with that AI gives us back with? That’s a really important question.Another important question is: How do we purposely engineer cognitive friction into the learning and thinking environment so we don’t erode that core capability? That’s not something that is just going to happen. We are humans, we take the path of least resistance, like all evolutionary species do. If you look at the printing press, the chaotic abundance of information eventually led to the scientific method and the peer review. Educators, academics, scientists, and creators needed to figure out a way to sort through the valuable information and the nonsense, and that led to more cognitive friction. Those pathways haven’t been developed yet for AI. How we use and assimilate AI depends on the actions we take when it comes to the climate apocalypse, for instance. As of now, how AI uses water and energy is nothing short of a nightmare. However, it’s not really AI in isolation. It’s our social media habits in general. When you look at them in aggregate and globally, our digital habits and patterns aren’t good for the climate in general. And then AI just exacerbates all of that.AI is not a technology that you are going to tap into and tap out of. It’s not like Uber where maybe you don’t use the app because you would prefer to bike, and that’s the choice that you make. AI is a general-purpose technology, and it’s important that we get that distinction, because general-purpose technologies, over time, become infrastructure, like the steam engine, electricity, and the internet. We rebuild our societies on top of them, and it’s important that we see it that way, so people don’t just unsubscribe out of protest. That only impedes their ability to make sure they keep up with the technology, and give adequate feedback and critiques of the technology.Céline Semaan: I recently saw you on stage and heard your response to a question about whether AI and its ramifications could be written into an episode of the TV show Black Mirror. Would you be able to repeat the answer you gave?Sinead Bovell: The stories we see and read about AI are usually dystopian. Arguably, there are choices we continue to make over and over again that we know will lead to negative outcomes, yet we don’t make different choices. To me, that’s the real Black Mirror episode… can we rely on ourselves? In some circumstances, we continually pick the more harmful thing. Most of the big challenges we face are complicated but not unsolvable. Even with climate, a lot of the solutions exist, and actually most of them are grounded in technology. What isn’t happening is the choice to leverage them, or the choice to subsidize them so they become more accessible, or the choice to even believe in them. That scares me a lot more than a particular use case of technology. Most of the biggest challenges we face are down to human choices, and we’re not making the right choices.Céline Semaan: Are you afraid of AI taking over the world and rendering all of our jobs useless? How do you see that?Sinead Bovell: There’s AI taking over the world, and that’s AI having its own desire and randomly rising up out of the laptop or out of some robot. I’m not necessarily concerned about that. You can’t say anything is a 0% chance, right? We don’t know. There are so many things you can’t say with 100% certainty. I mean, are we alone the universe? It’s really hard to prove or disprove those types of things. Where I stand on that is… sure allocate research dollars to a select group of scientists who can work on that problem. However, I am quite concerned about the impact AI is going to have on the workforce. We can see the destruction of certain jobs coming. It’s going to happen quickly, and we’re not preparing for it properly. Every general-purpose technology has led to automation and reconfiguration of the shape of the workforce. Let’s look at the first industrial revolution which lasted from approximately 1760-1840. If we were to zoom in on people working in agriculture, by the end of the 19th Century, around 70-80% of those people were doing something different. That is an astounding change. People had jobs, they just looked very different from working on the farm. But what if that happens in seven years rather than 80 years? That’s what scares me. I think the transition will be quite chaotic because it’s going to be quite quick, but it doesn’t have to be. History isn’t a great predictor of the future, but it does give you a lot of examples of what you don’t need to do again.The reason the industrial revolution turned out to be a good thing in the end, in terms of the life we all live, is that, for instance, we have MRIs and don’t have to have our blood drained to see if we’re sick. But people were just left to fend for themselves. It was chaos, and it turned into this kind of every person for themselves. Kind of figure it out. Get to the city. Bring your family. Don’t bring your family. It was really chaotic. How are we going to not repeat that? I don’t know if we are putting the security measures in place to make sure people are protecting that transition.The most obvious one to me is health care in the United States. I don’t know the exact number, maybe it’s around 60% of people, but don’t quote me on that, are reliant on their job for health care. That’s where their insurance comes from. What is going to happen to their insurance if their job goes away or if they transition to being self-employed? How do we help people transition? People don’t even dare go down that road, but those are the types of conversations that need to happen.Céline Semaan: In 10 years from now, will we look at AI as just another super calculator. And we will be asking the same questions that we are asking today, meaning that the change we’re seeking is not necessarily technological, but philosophical and cultural. How do you see that?Sinead Bovell: AI will look like much more of a philosophical, cultural, and social transition than solely a technological one. This is true of a lot of general-purpose technologies.The inventions in technology lead to how we organize our societies and how we govern them. If you look at the printing press, it led to a secular movement and gave power to that engine. You get big social, philosophical, cultural changes, and revolutions in society when you experience this scale of technical disruption. I think we will look back on the AI inflection point as one of the most pivotal transitions in human history in the past couple 100 years. I would say it’s going to be as disruptive as the printing press and maybe steam engine combined. And we made it through both of those. There was a lot of turmoil and chaos, but we did make it through both of those.We are a much more vibrant, healthy society now. We live longer and, relatively speaking, we have much more equality. There is a path where it works out, but we have to be making the decisions to make that happen. However, it’s not practical that a subset of the population makes the decisions on behalf of everyone. And that’s why I think it’s so important for people to get in the game and not see AI as this really technical device or technology, but instead, as a big social, cultural and philosophical transition. Your lived experience qualifies you to participate in these conversations; there’s nobody who can carry the weight of this on their own."
}
]
}