Collective Study in Times of Emergency. A Roundtable

Collective Study in Times of Emergency brings together nineteen contributions published by L’Internationale Online since November 2023 under the strand ‘Towards Collective Study in Times of Emergency’. Unlike previous publications assembled and edited by L’Internationale Online, the publication was not preconceived as a book. As the first editorial from November 2023 articulates, the impulse, urgency and necessity for this work was to try to understand the implications of the genocide unfolding in Gaza for the cultural sphere, from the places in which L’Internationale’s partners operate.

Working with members of our editorial board, we invited contributions as a means to engage with what Fred Moten describes as ‘collective study’ – what he and Stefano Harney have expanded on as a form of ‘study without an end’ – as both a means to work beyond the limitations and pitfalls of the ‘statement’, the single utterance, and to come into relation with practitioners, communities and contexts affected by the genocide.11.On 25 October 2023, Moten gave a talk in which he described the need to study together in the wake of the onset of the genocide and to go beyond the pervasive dissemination of statements. See ‘Fred Moten on Palestine and the Nation-State of Israel’, youtube.com. The wider exploration of study is central to Moten and Harney’s long-term collaborative work. See Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Brooklyn, NY: Minor Compositions, 2013.  The commissions have come out of long-term relationships, friendships and new encounters: from within the confederation, through the programmes of some of our partners, and most importantly, with peers and allies within the Palestinian cultural ecosystem.

In this light, we are incredibly grateful to the many conversations that have resulted in the writing, music and broadcasts you will find here: to Waad and the Learning Palestine Group; to the people and projects we encountered, including Rana Anani, The Institute for Palestine Studies and the 24 hrs/Palestine project, during a trip to the West Bank in July 2024 hosted by the A. M. Qattan Foundation; to the artists, performers and activists who have taken part in programmes in our institutions including ‘Song for Many Movements’ (MACBA), ‘Critical Thinking Gatherings – International Solidarity with Palestine’ (Museo Reina Sofía), and ‘Gathering into the Maelstrom’ and ‘Red, Green, Black and White’ (both Institute of Radical Imagination, the latter in collaboration with the Free Palestine Initiative Croatia at MSU Zagreb); to the individual academics and practitioners working without institutional support, like Rana Issa, Sanabel Abdelrahman and Françoise Vergès, for their powerful articulations during moments of intense personal and collective trauma; to L’Internationale colleagues Bojana Piškur, Ovidiu Țichindeleanu and Mick Wilson for their precise contributions; to the members of the wider editorial board for their valuable input; and to all those who must remain anonymous but whose vital work across organizing, research and practice has been so crucial for Collective Study. Thank you.

We, members of L’Internationale Online editorial board, feel this is one of the most transversal publications we have worked on – one that, we hope, has the capacity to connect with a broad set of audiences and publics, across student, activist, artistic and institutional communities. Our intention in putting these contributions together in a publication is for it to circulate and be used within and beyond the circuits of the arts and academia.

Rather than offer a formal introduction, the following roundtable, which took place in October this year, forms a group reflection by the editors on the motivations for and process of Collective Study. Like the other contributions, it came into being at a specific moment through specific subjectivities. It is partial and inconclusive but nonetheless a beginning, a way in, for what we will hope will be a valuable resource for those invested in the process of study during times of emergency.

Nick Aikens: We are speaking a year on from 7 October 2023. Since then, as our former colleague curator Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez reported in the recent ‘Climate Forum’ seminar, following an Instagram post by Palestinian writer Susan Abulhawa, Israel has dropped the equivalent of six times more bombs per square kilometre than the weight of the atomic bomb dropped by the US on Hiroshima in World 22.Susan Abulhawa’s Instagram post of 6 July 2023 (instagram.com) follows – and, given the many months of bombing between, exceeds – statistics in an early report by the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, ‘Israel hits Gaza Strip with the equivalent of two nuclear bombs’, 2 November 2023, euromedmonitor.org. Gaza is 40 percent the size of Hiroshima; 14.4 tonnes of bombs per square kilometre of Hiroshima versus 219 tonnes per square kilometre in Gaza.33.For more on this comparison, see the statement by Toshiyuki Mimaki, who survived the Hiroshima atomic bombing and represents the organization of survivors Nihon Hidankyō: ‘Nobel winning Hiroshima survivor’s Gaza comparison angers Israel’, Middle East Eye, 14 October 2024, middleeasteye.net. The scale and intensity of Israel’s violence is unprecedented, compared to anything in my lifetime. And we are seeing it almost on livestream. It is overwhelming.

Sara Buraya Boned: We are witnessing it every day.

NA: We just published Martin’s essay ‘Forget “never again”, it’s always already war’ on the platform, which, among many things, outlines the performative emptiness and selective nature of the phrase ‘never again’, which, today, seems clearer than ever. Would anyone like to begin by reflecting on this time, after one year of genocidal war on Palestine?

Charles Esche: It’s important to hold another narrative in which 7 October is part of a sequence of events. The attacks by Hamas on Israeli soldiers and citizens, however awful, were the result of keeping Palestinian people in an open prison for decades, of Israel’s blockades on the Gaza Strip with increasing severity since the early 1990s, of even earlier events. You can say this began in 1948, with the founding of Israel and the Nakba. Or you can say this began in the Holocaust. Or, with the British Mandate of Palestine following World War I and the colonial inheritance it passed to Zionism. Many of these histories are touched on in the two twelve-hour listening sessions by the Learning Palestine Group that we published on the platform early on in the process. There are longer trajectories still, going back to the nineteenth century, back to the roots of religious modernity. 7 October is part of a narrative of hitting back or breaking out after decades of oppression. History does not begin on a day of people’s choosing.

Martin Pogačar: Any event in the present should be looked at from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. I realize this is a difficult task. ‘Looking back’ alone is destined never to come to the initial root of the problem, given the palimpsests of history layered and skipped and interwoven over any historical process and its narrative. At the same time, and as became viscerally clear after 7 October, the imposition of a think-order that hinges on a very recent, and in this case atrocious, event, is also unproductive.

For meaningful understanding, there needs to be a balance between a historical view and observing the unfolding of events in the present. This balance helps to prevent obscuring historical complexities and delegitimizing prior and recent atrocities and trauma. Anno zero narratives are guilty of these things; they discredit the individual suffering of one group or person on account of the individual suffering of another group or person, and ‘pedestal’ one event above another, which only reinforces the binarism of ‘good’ or ‘evil’. Nationalist mythologies feed on such binarisms, perpetuating polarization, but they do not reflect the entanglements of real life. What the post–7 October events – the war and the genocide, as well as the discrediting of debate and diplomacy – did contribute in this sense was the final trashing of binary mechanisms (also East/West, democratic/authoritarian, liberal/illiberal), revealing their ultimate inability either to describe or analyse social and political conflict or to conceive any meaningful approach towards outlining solutions.

Ovidiu Țichindeleanu: One thing we can observe is a sort of internal transformation taking place within the European reception of and reaction to the events. Yes, the repressive tendency I wrote about has worsened; there is more militarization, a proliferation of wars; the scale of violence is indeed exploding. But what is happening also exceeds the censorship and narrowing of possibilities for free expression. We’ve entered into a regime of acceptance: accepted lies and accepted violence. This already goes beyond the normalization of dehumanizing violence or the interpellation of dominant narratives. The lies and violences are taken in as downright necessary, temporarily justified, or as a de facto reality.

The push for acceptance often takes the form of snapping or desperate gestures. A hit here, a reaction there. And I would say that within this one-year frame, we are seeing a radicalization of eurocentrism in all its drunken righteousness, where many prominent figures seem to like to believe that finally Europe is on the right side of history, in the way it is acting in relation to the war in Ukraine, and even in its support of Israel’s government.

Even Kant in his time protested against ‘a recently prominent tone of superiority in philosophy’, just before writing a piece that pleaded for ‘perpetual peace’.44.Immanuel Kant, ‘On a recently prominent superior tone in philosophy’ and ‘Proclamation of the imminent conclusion of a treaty of perpetual peace in philosophy’ [both 1796] in Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 425–446 and pp. 451–460. Specifically, he was protesting against an appropriation of his philosophy into a crude mixture of Christian elitism and Enlightenment values by a retired administrator with too much time and wealth on his hands. Today, a version of that particular mix is rehearsed as ‘European values’ by other administrators with dubious critical reason. A tone of superiority sweeps through this new-found righteousness, for which others are paying the price.

Against the simultaneous radicalization of liberal eurocentrism, settler-colonial narratives and right-wing narratives of autochthony, the project of Collective Study is an attempt to claim an altogether different European public sphere. What we are proposing is a secession, in a sense – a secession from the current European public sphere, from its tendencies of repression and superior posturing; yes, from the vantage point of post–7 October, but moreover, by keeping a long and diachronic perspective. Either we claim and build another European public sphere, or, very soon, we will succumb to the pressure of acceptance and will repeat grave mistakes.

SBB: I try not to crumble under complaints but I feel that, one year on, it’s now much harder to make room for speech, to find the energy and drive to speak up. It’s easy to become stuck in the grip of sadness, unable to find one’s voice. The original proposal of Collective Study was a move to counter all this and to make space for voices that might help us understand the present and be able to imagine possible futures, futures where ‘one day, freedom will be’ as Françoise Vergés so poignantly phrased it. But it has been difficult for me to contemplate this conversation at this moment. Not that I want to give in to despair, but I have to acknowledge the difference in how I feel today, compared with the impulse we had to initiate this project a year ago.

Spanish journalist Olga Rodríguez has been covering Palestine all her career. In the last weeks, full of rage and sadness, she has been repeating a phrase from her writing, ‘Nadie podrá decir en el futuro que no lo sabía’ (‘No one will be able to say in the future that they did not know’).55.‘Nadie podrá decir en el futuro que no lo sabía’ is the title of Rodríguez’s prologue to Mahmoud Mushtaha’s Sobrevivir al genocidio en Gaza (Surviving Genocide in Gaza), ctxt.es, 2024.  None of us will be able to say that we did not or could not see this genocide, when future generations ask. In the Spanish context, there is strong support for the Palestinian cause and now for Lebanon. Stronger, at least, than in most countries in Europe. Last weekend tens of thousands demonstrated all over the country. At the same time, like in other European countries, there is now a space for violence to be expressed against those who are asking for peace. The far right, the extra-neoliberal subject, has been allowed to be the protagonist of the public sphere. Yesterday was the first time I was harassed for wearing a keffiyeh in the street. Although this was one incident, it speaks to the connections between various levels of violence. All these thanato-politics that the far right embrace, with no regrets and no embarrassment.

A day after the demonstrations, the state of Israel called this ‘a glorification of terrorism’, saying that Spain is allowing a public ‘apology for terrorism’.66.See ‘El Gobierno de Israel acusa a España de haberse convertido “en un paraíso para sembrar el odio”’, elDiario.es, 6 October 2024. If wanting ‘peace’ now means supporting ‘terrorism’, we need to rethink our common vocabularies for the future. In these respects it feels important to keep a record of what has been going on over the past year in the cultural ecosystem we share. This publication allows us to track it.

NA: Yes, we have kept the original publication date of the articles so that readers can understand in what moment a certain piece was commissioned or came out.

I am glad you re-emphasize the question of language, Sara. This was important to some of the early contributions in November and December 2023, and to the fundamental question of how to speak as L’Internationale confederation – to the very articulation of statements. It’s one focus of Ovidiu’s piece ‘The Repressive Tendency Within the European Public Sphere’, which identifies a failure to use the words ‘genocide’, ‘apartheid’ and ‘occupation’, as well as of Mick Wilson’s essay ‘Body Counts, Balancing Acts and the Performativity of Statements’, where he gives a close analysis of how language is deployed to varied rhetorical and political ends.

Sara, what you seem to be saying is that we’re actually in a much worse place now than a year ago, in terms of how language is being misappropriated and reused. What does that mean for publishing and study, I wonder, when the words we use hold different meanings for different people, or cease to hold meaning. Where do we turn?

CE: Perhaps we can return to and build on Ovidiu’s idea of secession. My sense is that we have to form a different kind of relationship to the state and to Europe. It seems that the state in Western Europe is retreating from its post-war social role, where it acted with the broad intention of improving people’s lives. It is shifting to a disciplinary authoritarian role in which elite, super-rich control is made acceptable by dehumanizing minorities or outsiders and by staging nationalist or media distractions. This means that the cultural field – and civil society at large – has to find a new way to negotiate with it. That might be avoidance, camouflage or secession, depending on the time and place.

The privatization of media, extreme wealth and rising inequality, the isolation of individuals all play their part in this, and the actual contours of this emerging state are still not clear, at least to me. But secession would be from the public (and in our case cultural) sphere that seeks to negotiate with or influence the state while being financially dependent on it. And that secession feels also to be a secession from the language the state uses.

OT: It’s our responsibility to show this, to signal this, and to point out the potential of secession or, to bring in another way to describe this, of delinking, as being ethically motivated by our rejection of the ongoing movement towards a spectre of total war.

From my perspective, this has dragged me back to reflections on the thirty-five years of transition to capitalism. What did the dismantling of the East European socialist bloc bring with it, actually? What did this bring to the world, and what did the fall of socialism bring to Europe?

This signals the need to reclaim different standpoints within Europe and to form alliances with a common goal of transformation, against the monodirectional view that Eastern Europe is fighting against one empire and is allied with the other. We need to express internal pluralism and bring visibility to standpoints from southern Europe, marginal Europe, rebellious Europe, to build international alliances across differences and above disagreements.

CE: There’s a recent interview with Eyal Weizman in which he talks about how the German state is the main funder of culture, and therefore how culture is under almost complete control by the state.77.Maximilian Probst and Tobias Timm, ‘Eyal Weizman: "Wir sind nicht neutral"’, Zeit Online, 3 October 2024, zeit.de. There aren’t so many spaces to escape from the state, which do exist to an extent in the Anglo-Saxon sphere, ironically. Maybe the break I’m conceiving is a break with this close relationship to the state and its various arms. To try to ask: Is it possible for there to be a European civil society in parallel with that state apparatus?

NA: Going back to the beginning of Collective Study, the diverse cultural and geopolitical stakes of the partners of L’Internationale meant there was an initial inability or unwillingness to make a pronouncement in the immediate aftermath of the onset of the genocide being committed by Israel. The group of individuals on the editorial board was then tasked with publishing, commissioning, speaking, because the confederation as a whole was unable to. What became apparent in that early moment was the very different histories and circumstances of L’Internationale’s institutions and how this affected their relation to the question of Palestine, whether that was the extreme situation of our then partner Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, where the removal of funding and the cancellation and censorship of pro-Palestinian voices was (still is) endemic across the German cultural sphere, or of our partners in Ljubljana speaking from the Slovenian context and former Yugoslavia’s historical alignment with Palestinian liberation, as Bojana’s essay ‘Trouble with the East(s)’ elaborates.

MP: The contradiction that emerged in response to the two most foregrounded recent wars of ‘the West’ – between condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the silence or even approval of the Israeli assault on Gaza – illustrates, at best, the final end of the ‘post-war dream’, and at worst, the collapse of an international order and how we think about a global, planetary or earthly community. It was so clear that there are double standards, and this demonstrates quite clearly the limits, incapacity and unwillingness of western liberalism to act in the face of humanitarian crisis and a prospect of eternal war.

This also opens onto another more critical question: How far can you withdraw before you become a collaborator in resisting to speak? I understand there are some situations where you cannot put yourself out in the open. There’s the question of funding, the question of one’s job security.

SBB: One of the things we felt imperative to address, not only among the editorial board but across L’Internationale, was censorship in the art system. To be able to articulate the existence of censorship, how this was and is operating. The most vivid manifestation of this was our collective reading of ‘Everything will stay the same if we don’t speak up’, with over fifty colleagues in Venice in April this year, pronouncing the words aloud together, on the effects that censorship has on us as individuals, as a confederation as a whole, and as people who work in the art field. There was some personal comfort in that moment, but more importantly it was a collective voicing, on an international level.

In these times, I am more aware than ever of who can speak or which institutions can speak. One aspect of L’Internationale that has now become especially meaningful is this possibility to have a collective voice that goes beyond our individual institutions. Making the public programme at the Museo Reina Sofía that was initially titled ‘From the River to the Sea. International Solidarity with Palestine’, we experienced the pressure and tensions of discussing this theme.88.‘Critical Thinking Gatherings – International Solidarity with Palestine’, Museo Reina Sofía, 8 May – 30 September 2024, museoreinasofia.es. We were accused of putting Hebraic communities at risk in Spain because of the use of this phrase from the Palestinian struggle, which has been around since the sixties. We were able to keep the programme intact in terms of content but we decided to change the title, in order to stop the accusations and continue doing our job, which is to create spaces for critical thinking.

It is very important that the museum can be a space for critical discussions in urgent times. And we can no longer take this for granted. I feel that our words are not only our own anymore but may be shared by many other people who do not have a place or possibility to articulate them aloud.

CE: We shouldn’t forget that collectivity failed at a certain point. We were unable to make a collective statement as a confederation, certainly with the German context.

OT: Our initial failure meant the impossibility of becoming public witnesses. The failure of collectivity meant the impossibility of becoming witnesses to this genocide, to this absolute violence. Then, the consequence of this impossibility is letting things happen: oblivion, forgetfulness, perpetuating injustice – from complicity to worse. Learning from this failure is part of a process of becoming a witness, of becoming part of the struggle from the position we are in, while acknowledging the destruction elsewhere. This cannot happen when collectivities break.

Collective Study, as a publication, tries to reclaim a collective voice. The process of Collective Study is about getting into a slower process, to repoliticize ourselves in a nonreactive way, against the quick and desperate gestures of reaction. To send out a message with an alternative sense of politicization.

Ezgi Yurteri: I agree that the reclaiming of politics is crucial at this moment, which is what many initiatives, collectives and other forms of alliances in the cultural field are actively engaging in. On the one hand, there is a strong movement of protests around the world; on the other, there are even stronger tendencies of repression, violence, radicalization and criminalization. Just as social movements and grassroots organizations learn from each other, authoritarian regimes learn from one another how to legitimize or justify their actions, how to operate with impunity and how to marginalize dissident voices.

Perhaps there is no point in trying to find a common ground with that kind of populist politics as its language, upheld by mainstream media, only serves to assert its power. Not even for ‘manufacturing consent’ but for manufacturing an image of consent that seems to suffice to legitimize or normalize destruction, censorship, measures of control and states of exception.

So the question with reclaiming politics is about how to get beyond reactivity and create a transformative capacity on a wider scale. Reclaiming another kind of language is crucial in that sense, as we are currently working towards with Collective Study.

NA: Yes, and this is reflected in the forms of collective study we were keen to initiate. To understand the limits and pitfalls of language and rhetoric meant to study through Palestinian poetry and literature, as we did with the contributions of Rana Issa and Sanabel Abdelrahman. Through art, music and performance, too: we tapped into the extraordinary programme of ‘Song for Many Movements’ (MACBA), featuring the opening and closing performances. Not to try and snap back, to use Ovidiu’s term from earlier, but to use different registers and forms to resist the weaponizing of language. The trajectory of Collective Study, and of this past year more widely, has prompted a rethinking of what the L’Internationale confederation is or wants from itself.

CE: The faith in an international order that has sustained certain situations, whether through the UN or through a certain capacity for the world to talk through its problems rather than resorting to violence, has fallen apart with Palestine, and largely with Ukraine. Remembering that this order has operated as a defence of the priorities of the Global North with economic oppressions of the global majority, the fact that there has not been a full-scale world war since 1945 is something that, I think, should be recognized and acknowledged as an achievement.

With Palestine, the hypocrisy of the white west is laid bare. If the West’s integrity was fairly ragged before, now its double standards has been completely exposed. The consequence for us as organizations that are funded by and complicit with the EU and with the various states that we work in – except maybe for Turkey – is that we are prompted to rethink these relationships and what it means to have funding. This climate might also make us more wary of speaking in public in certain ways, as Sara expressed, as state actors discourage voicing a diversity of opinions. Modernist artistic expression relied on the idea that an individual artist can be provocative and speak in the public sphere, that they could enter into that space. But when the public sphere becomes toxic and violent, even verbally so, you need to reassess things. The nature of the public sphere, including its economics and our relationship with the state – these are all things that this genocide, and the response from the US and the EU, has reframed.

EY: Within the cultural field, public funding was supposed to be a safer option than privately funded initiatives in terms of ensuring diversity, freedom of speech and accountability. But this kind of relationship with the state, and the nature of the public sphere, was already different in Europe than in many parts of the world. There has never been a stable relationship with the state in the so-called Middle East or other geographies. State funding has never been an option in the cultural field in Turkey, for example, and most cultural institutions are either privately funded or have relied on EU funding programmes. Given the totality of central state mechanisms of repression and censorship, this seemed the only viable option. Yet the EU funding structures implemented in the region have mostly prioritized maintaining the international status quo rather than addressing the necessities and urgencies on the ground, as Rana Anani discusses in ‘The Genocide War on Gaza: Palestinian Culture and the Existential Struggle’.

Intergovernmental organizations almost always existed to maintain a certain order in the West. Of course, such entities managed to prevent a number of conflicts post–World War II, but there have been several fragmented wars since 1945, with no resolution. We have repeatedly seen social democratic parties in Europe or the Democrats in the US following and normalizing nondemocratic foreign policies when it comes to certain conflict zones. What is laid bare now, perhaps, is that it’s not even about sustaining the sociopolitical order for a very small part of the world; it’s about maintaining power structures and maximizing profits with little or no accountability. This is most pronounced in the way that corporations increase profit as the genocide continues. Then we should ask how international organizations are funded and how that affects their decision-making processes and control mechanisms.

NA: I think you’re right, Ezgi. Martin touches on this in his essay, when he writes that the violence being adopted by state actors is the outcome of capitalist logic.

OT: It’s indirectly related to the perversion of state institutions behaving as private corporations. And to their growing impunity.

EY: I really don’t know what we can expect from international organizations or humanitarian law – the UN, the International Court of Justice – today. But we still need to figure out how to address our demands to these institutions.

As Martin wrote in his piece, a world without conflict is impossible, but as the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) showed us, it is possible to work towards a peaceful coexistence and to seek ways to resolve conflicts without war and violence. We seem to have lost that capacity in terms of the international political order, but the legacy of NAM’s ideals still exists in various social movements, or in transnational solidarity within the cultural field. It also manifests in the very existence of L’Internationale and a multitude of alliances formed within and through the confederation.

Turning back to the question of funding, there is also the issue of how the resources at hand are allocated. One of the crucial aspects we prioritize with Collective Study – and perhaps we should cultivate it even further – is the redistribution of resources, even on a micro level.

SBB: I feel we are living in a time in which institutionality is under attack and faces complete delegitimization. I actually think there is a direct relation between this negating of institutionality and the different levels of violence I mentioned before. Still, we need to be critical of these international institutions, we need to rethink them in order to give them new value, because they should be performing a significant role right now. If they are legally erased from the public sphere, we are lost.

CE: The consequences of this discussion for how the institutions of L’Internationale perceive themselves, ourselves, and the space for action in light of this, are crucial. Palestine has clear consequences for how we think about and act under the current terms, from our particular places and positions. It could be simply understanding that what we’re doing is much more compromised than we realized. Then, how do you live with that compromise and/or how do you create spaces where it is possible to feel and be less compromised, while still maintaining the possibility for action?

OT: In preparing for this conversation I found my notebook from Edward Said’s lecture in Berlin in 2001 at the Renaissance-Theater. Said was fifty-five years old and was already dying, and he was aware that it was perhaps his last visit to Germany. In the packed theatre hall, the day after some neo-Nazi demonstrations in Berlin, Said reminded the audience that Europe holds responsibility for the origins of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and argued that the Israeli state represents the debt of European anti-Semitism. He asked the German public: Why are the Palestinians paying your bill? It was possible for Said to state this in Berlin in 2001, in a public lecture sponsored by a major German private media company. This would be impossible today.

One thing that struck me in my notes from his speech was how he said that what worried him at that time – more than two decades ago – was not just the situation of the Palestinians who will be hurt but will resist, but the fact that the Israelis are learning to live as if the Palestinians do not exist. And he asked simply: What will happen when they are forced to open their eyes?

Maybe today we are seeing this opening. Many are opening their eyes. But in this process, some are choosing the path of violence, or of trying to push away the disturbing truth, while there are others who choose other paths. Through practices like Collective Study we might open up more space for the latter. Collective Study and other practices of solidarity are a direct effort to refuse to live as if the Palestinians do not exist.

NA: I was speaking to artist Yazan Khalili in Brussels recently. He was talking about the need for him to focus on very specific, manageable micro achievements, small victories or tasks – like helping a single family in Gaza, or publishing something through Learning Palestine – in order to have goals to get through the day, the week, all the while working towards the wider project of Palestinian liberation, or in his words, ‘changing the world’.

I think there has been a vast shift in focus over the past year. I remember, for example, reading Françoise Vergès’s first piece for Collective Study, ‘Right now, today, we must say that Palestine is the centre of the world’, where she highlights that what’s at stake in confronting the settler colonialism of Israel is the very logic of western imperialism. And I remember thinking that if this crumbles, which it must because the violence and impunity is so viscerally transparent, then so much will crumble with it. In that sense it felt like a tipping point with far-reaching consequences. But now, alongside thinking in these macro terms, one has to think pragmatically about what to do day-to-day from one’s own location and position. What does one do in one’s own institution, in one’s network?

CE: That makes a lot of sense. It also relates to the readers of Collective Study, and what to do with or make from this publication. I’m thinking in terms of teaching: If you’re teaching a new generation and you say the institutions that we built up and that we tried to maintain are actually no longer adequate tools, as educators we have a responsibility to say how we try to negotiate this issue for ourselves. Does one try to rescue them? What does abandoning them mean? These are the questions we should address in pedagogy, together with students. I think other generations have faced such questions at other times and places, but we haven’t had to ask them in Western Europe for a while. And we need to find at least some provisional answers.

SBB: That makes me think of the piece ‘Diary of a Crossing’, about all the violent micropolitics the two [pseudonymous] authors encountered at every step of their journey from Amsterdam to Ramallah. Through everyday gestures and raw instances we come to understand the apartheid imposed by Israel and how the reality in Gaza has become an apocalypse – their narrative has so many layers of meaning. The piece is an example of how to place attention on the details of life and death in Gaza as a way of being in some kind of solidarity with those experiences. How it is these details that transmit the reality of survival.

CE: I agree: the difficulty in navigating that text is part of the difficult experience of reading its content.

NA: Yes. As an editorial group, we have tried to think through different voices, different registers, trying to respond or react as best we could to the shifting conjuncture. The publication at hand is a kind of mid–punctuation point – it presents the process of the Collective Study strand so far, rather than being a full stop or an ending. The times of emergency are ongoing and so too is this work.