Last Friday afternoon, shortly after the Palestinian writer and researcher Salman Abu Sitta had said that ‘the voice of the victim is silenced, denied, condemned and vilified,’ the German police cut the power to the Palästina-Kongress in Berlin.
The situation is contradictory, even paradoxical: on the one hand, the machinery of justice is moving, however slowly, to prosecute Bolsonaro and members of his entourage, including army generals, for the events of 8 January, as well as the killers of Marielle Franco and those who organised and paid for her murder. Yet on the other, without an organised left proposing alternative public security policies, and convincing people of their viability and desirability, mafias and drug gangs are rapidly expanding their reach.
Gaza’s economy has been stifled since the time of the British Mandate, a process exacerbated by first Egypt’s and then Israel’s occupation. The nail in the coffin was the land, sea and air blockade that Israel imposed in 2007, placing Gaza under siege, severing its economic links with Israel and strong ties to the West Bank, turning it into an isolated enclave where the free movement of labour, material or expertise was impossible.
When armed Ecuadorian police gathered outside the Mexican embassy in Quito last Friday evening, a casual observer might have thought they were there to protect it. Instead, they launched an attack: brandishing assault rifles, police climbed the walls, entered the building by force and kidnapped Ecuador’s former vice-president, Jorge Glas, who had that day been granted political asylum by Mexico. Within ten minutes Glas was being driven away.
The Israeli army’s targeted hit on an aid convoy in Gaza that killed seven World Central Kitchen workers featured on the front page of every UK national newspaper (apart from the Daily Star) on 3 April. It was the first time that Gaza had dominated all the front pages since the weeks immediately following Hamas’s attack on 7 October, and it took the murder of mostly white people to focus the papers’ attention.
We are a small part of a shrinking thing, tail to a dwindling dog, or that thing that, in Yeats, is fastened to the dying animal. The heart; the soul. The dying animal is the English department, perhaps the humanities as a whole.
The interior of the cupola of the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus, Brazil. Photo © Rafael Zart
Between 1880 and 1900, the opera house in Manaus sprouted like a magical pink mushroom out of the rainforest.