Groundwork Zine

06/06/2024

If you’re Covid-cautious, you should be anti-capitalist. Check out the Covid Special Issue here:

Created with the Heyzine flipbook maker

20/05/2024

My childhood obsession with the film Free W***y suddenly makes a lot more sense.

09/05/2024

05/05/2024

"The goal of disinformation isn't to get you to believe something that isn't true.

"It's to confuse you and overwhelm you until you doubt the very concept of truth itself."

—Thinking Is Power

20/03/2024

Only name I recognized on that list was Eli Roth 🥸

04/12/2023

02/12/2023

Join Rabbis for Ceasefire for the first night of Chanukah, Columbus Circle. Gather at 5pm, candle lighting at 5:30. B.Y.O. menorah!

https://www.instagram.com/rabbis4ceasefire/

01/12/2023

Israel is not only killing Palestinian children at astonishing rates, but killing the childhood of those who survive. We first published this visual as "Four Wars Old" in May 2021, and with today's update, it highlights SIX Israeli military assaults on Gaza in sixteen years. Disgraceful.

No child should grow up like this. Stay loud, keep the pressure on. Head to the link in our bio for action tools. bit.ly/take-action-gaza

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Moments of crisis are the most critical time to seed narrative shifts. We are primarily community-funded. Can you become a member (recurring contribution) or make a one-time donation to ensure we can keep going in this moment and beyond?

BECOME A MEMBER: https://visualizingpalestine.org/membership
DONATE: https://visualizingpalestine.org/contribute

29/11/2023

Hisham Awartani in his own words. Hisham was one of the Palestinian students who was shot two days ago in a targeted hate crime in Burlington, Vermont. The message was posted by SJP at Brown University, where Hisham is a student. Hisham, who was shot along with his two other friends for the simple act of wearing their kuffieyehs and speaking in Arabic, may never walk again. His powerful message calls for the world to see this hate crime as part of the larger story of the Palestinian struggle. We stand with Hisham and his loved ones at this difficult time, and we ask our community to join us in wishing him a full and speedy recovery.

27/10/2023

Repost from
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Flood Brooklyn For Gaza • Saturday October 28th • 3:00 pm • Brooklyn Museum • 200 Eastern Parkway — The more they try and silence us the louder we will be. From across the city and around the world, across communities and national liberation struggles, united in defense of Gaza and all of Palestine, until liberation and return within our lifetime. Bring flags, signs, keffiyehs, and help spread the word by sharing widely.🇵🇸

12/07/2023

On this day, 12 July 1979, Olive Morris, feminist, squatter and activist in the Brixton Black Panthers, died aged just 27. Born in Jamaica, Morris moved to the UK aged 9 to be with her forklift operator father and factory shop steward mother.
One of her earliest political actions was at 17 when she intervened when police in Brixton, south London, were arresting a Black man for an alleged parking offence. She was racially abused and physically attacked by officers, then arrested, fined and given a three month suspended sentence for two years.
In her short life Morris played a leading role in radical movements in Britain, getting involved with and helping found numerous groups and projects like the Black Women's Mutual Aid Group. She also was critical of the white left and union movement, which spouted rhetoric about "unity". But in reality, at employers like Standard Telephones and Cables, they defended practices like lower pay for Black workers, and scabbed on Black workers' strikes.
About single issue anti-fascist groups, Morris said: “Not a single problem associated with racialism, unemployment, police violence and homelessness can be settled by ‘rocking’ against the fascists, the police or the army… The fight against racism and fascism is completely bound up with the fight to overthrow capitalism, the system that breeds both.” In 1978, she became unwell, and was then diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. She succumbed the following year.
You can learn more about racism in the British workers' movement, and how it was fought against and radically altered by the Grunwick strike in our podcast episodes 67-68: https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/grunwick-strike-1976/

16/05/2023

"THIS PHOTOGRAPH IS OF MY MOTHER NINA, on the left. Her given name was Therese Yousef Saad, but her family called her Theresina because she was tiny and adorable—and she remained that way until her death in 2017. She is standing next to her cousin Leila on the balcony of her family’s home in Jerusalem. It is 1947, and she is engaged to my father Issa. (They would not marry until 1963. But that’s another story.) The photo conveys a deep intimacy: my mother’s easy grip on Leila’s hand; their closeness; the depth and warmth of my mom’s almond eyes. She is looking right at you, and at me. She is letting us in.

One year later, the Nakba ended her life in Palestine. I know that my mom and her family fled on a truck to As-Salt, Jordan, in May of 1948, and for a year and a half the six of them—she and her mother Lily, her father Yousef, her sisters Diana and Irma, and her baby brother Mattia—lived together in one room, over a barn. I know that on their first night they cried as they ate their dinner on the floor. And that the walls shook every time a horse kicked below them. I know that my mother prayed for their return to Jerusalem, until the day that she climbed the tallest hill in As-Salt to witness the waves of Palestinian refugees walking toward her with their belongings on their backs.

I will never know the full extent of what happened to my mother in the Nakba, but I can tell you that during the 47 years that I knew her, I never once saw this look in her eyes. The photo captures a time before the trauma of the Nakba, when Zionist militias drove more than 750,000 Palestinians out of their homes and off their land in order to establish the State of Israel as a Jewish-majority country. For me and many other Palestinians, images like this one are gold. Zionist devastation of our lives and suppression of our histories renders our photographs proof of life, crucial evidence of our existence in all its rich complexity and beauty. Such images are passed down along with our family stories as a vital record of a world that was taken from us, abruptly ended—a collective death. (Palestinians die many times before dying.) When I founded Project48, an initiative to tell the story of the Nakba by centering Palestinian voices, I knew that our precious photos would play a profound role in telling our stories. These images cut to the quick, making clear exactly what we mean by the Nakba, our catastrophe.

To mark the 75th anniversary of the Nakba, Jewish Currents—in partnership with Project48 and the Institute for Middle East Understanding—invited Palestinians to submit photographs that speak to their family’s experience of the Nakba, along with brief reflections on the images. We received many kinds of images, historical and contemporary. Some, like the photo of my mother and her cousin, offer a glimpse of life in Palestine before the first mass expulsion in 1948; others depict beloved objects carried into exile or stolen homes visited by descendents who cannot return to reclaim them; still others speak to the continued process of dispossession, 75 years on. As this archive makes clear, the Nakba is not a discrete event, but an ongoing process of dispossession whose meanings cannot be captured by any single narrative. By asserting our Palestinian histories, we are manifesting a future rooted in justice, charting the way for our return.

- Nadia Saah, 52, Brooklyn, New York

Read the rest of the photo essay here:

https://jewishcurrents.org/newsletter/our-catastrophe


14/04/2023

On this day, 14 April 1816, an uprising of enslaved people known as Bussa’s rebellion, named after its leader, broke out on Easter Sunday night in Barbados. It was to be the island's largest rebellion of enslaved Africans.
Enslaved people took advantage of the temporary freedom from work and the cover of permitted gathering for Easter festivities to organise themselves. They chose a leader on each sugarcane plantation, and were assisted by three free Black men who travelled around meeting with rebels.
The revolt began with the burning of cane fields in St Philip, and soon around 400 men and women working on over 70 other estates had joined in.
British colonial authorities declared martial law the following day, and soon suppressed the uprising. While only two whites were reported killed, 120 enslaved people were killed during the repression, with 144 executed and 132 deported in the aftermath.
Bussa is today remembered in Barbados as a national hero.
Pictured is the Barbados Emancipation Statue, which is popularly known as Bussa, despite it not technically depicting him personally.
More information, sources and map:https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/8535/bussa%E2%80%99s-rebellion

16/03/2023

Adbaraya Toya is celebrated as one of the bravest women in Haitian history for her great influence on the many that fought in the Haitian Revolution. Popularly known as Victoria Montou in Haiti, a name she is believed to have been given after arriving in Haiti from Africa to work as a slave like the...

23/02/2023