Update + Summer/Fall 2025 Reading Group Announcement

Update

Critics and Theorists,

We’re writing to you to announce our Summer/Fall 2025 reading group ‘Views from Palestine’ and give you some updates on new and ongoing work. Our first update is that our podcast, Critique of the Podcast Form, officially debuted last month with Episode 1: Introducing Racket Theory! Episode 2, which provides a broad introduction to the political background of the Frankfurt School, was delayed due to a series of minor brain injuries afflicting the hosts, but it is now available as well. Secondly, a number of installments in our dossier Racketology: Fragments of a Critical Theory of Domination are now up on our website and the dossier as a whole will be completed soon. Along with this, a new translation of an excerpt from K. A. Wittfogel’s “Natural Factors in Economic History” by J. E. Morain, with an accompanying transcription of his presentation from the Spring reading group is now up on the blog, and a piece on Boris Hessen’s philosophy of science by Anatarah bin AlKaf is coming soon. Finally, if you were unable to attend the Spring 2025 reading group session, worry not! You can find edited audio sessions available for free on our Patreon here.

If you have a piece you’d like to submit to the blog, our submission guidelines are here and you can email us at crittheoryworkgroup@gmail.com. We are also starting work on Margin Notes Volume 2, so if you have a longer-form piece or proposal for one that you’d like to submit, please get in contact with us.

Summer/Fall Reading Group: Views from Palestine

We want to not just read about Palestine, but read material by Palestinian theoreticians and scholars. We hope to engage with these thinkers and learn the ways that they have developed the broad tradition of critical thought in pursuit of liberation.

The reading group will last six weeks. We will start with Ghassan Kanafani’s seminal book On Zionist Literature, followed by two very recent publications: the suppressed text on the “Nakba as a Legal Concept” by Rabea Eghbariah, and, to conclude, the recently published Resisting Erasure by Adam Hanieh, Robert Knox, and Rafeef Ziadah. (Supplementary readings will be available through our Discord server and emailed to participants in advance of the meetings.)

Alongside the reading group, we are promoting a social fundraiser for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF) with an initial goal of $500. We strongly encourage participants in the reading group and anyone else who has appreciated our work to donate to the PCRF and other campaigns raising funds for life-saving aid in Gaza.

August 23 — On Zionist Literature by Ghassan Kanafani (presented by James Crane)

Description: Ghassan Kanafani’s 1967 On Zionist Literature takes as its point of departure the total weaponization of literature by the Zionist movement and models a criticism comprehensive enough to disarm it. The book follows the historic task as articulated by the Palestinian revolution: “Know your enemy!” which the author applies as a lens to investigate how the Occupation understood and reproduced itself artistically. Kanafani’s historical account of the interplay of literary and political Zionism shows the essential role of literature in the prefiguration and justification of the ongoing colonization of Palestine, from the 19th century entrenching of the Occupation in literature to the Nobel-Prize-winning racist fiction of Zionist authors in the late 1960s. If, as Kanafani concludes, the uncritical praise of Zionist literature by his contemporaries “legitimizes the deception of humanity’s collective conscience through incessant Zionist propaganda, the drumbeats of which have been reverberating worldwide for over half a century,” our goal in these first two sessions is to reconstruct and discuss Kanafani’s critical model over half a century since he wrote these words with the conviction that there cannot be another half century still for the world that cannot hear them.

Primary Reading:

Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, Intro - Ch. 4 (pp. 1-56; 56 pages—prefaces etc. are optional)

August 30 — On Zionist Literature by Ghassan Kanafani (continued) (presented by Sebastian Kokesch)

Primary Reading:

Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, Chs. 5-8 (pp. 57-119; 63 pages)

September 6 — “Toward the Nakba as a Legal Concept” by Rabea Eghbariah (presented by Esther Planas Balduz and Morgan Lily)

Description: Rabea Eghbariah’s “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept” is an essay that has, in a way, performed itself. Originally solicited, edited, and approved by the Harvard Law Review, its publication was subsequently vetoed by the leadership of the journal. Displaced, the article was taken in by the Columbia Law Review. But here too it found itself ultimately unwelcome, as upon publication the entire Columbia Law Review website was shut down by the Review’s board in a vain attempt at suppression. The simple, forceful, and comprehensively put argument that warranted such suppression is this: the law and legal theory lack the language to speak the reality of the Palestinian condition and therefore leave it unable to properly recognise both the existence of the Palestinian people and the crimes committed against them by the so-called state of Israel. This condition, Eghbariah argues, is best captured through the concept of Nakba (Catastrophe) and its ideological counterpart—Zionism.

Primary Reading:

Eghbariah, “Toward the Nakba as a Legal Concept;” Introduction, Sections I-II (pp. 888-955; 67 pages)

September 13 — “Toward the Nakba as a Legal Concept” by Rabea Eghbariah (continued) (presented by J. E. Morain)

Primary Reading:

Eghbariah, “Toward the Nakba as a Legal Concept;” Section III, Conclusion (pp. 956-991; 35 pages)

September 20 — Resisting Erasure by Adam Hanieh, Robert Knox, and Rafeef Ziadah (Presented by Anatarah bin AlKaf)

Description: Anti-imperialists often call Palestine a “litmus test,” but what exactly does it test? Resisting Erasure is a compact political pamphlet that guides readers through Palestine’s position under global capitalism. It tackles Israeli settler-colonialism and the Nakba; the political economy of the MENA region and the petroleum-security nexus; and how international law and racialization mediate these interlocking systems. Resisting Erasure reframes Palestine as both a crystallization of imperial contradictions and a beacon for anti-colonial resistance, illustrating with clarity why Palestine remains the defining test for any serious materialist analysis. We are hoping via engaging with this work, we sharpen our analysis to meet what this moment demands of us.

Primary Reading:

Hanieh, Knox, and Ziadah, Resisting Erasure: Capital, Imperialism and Race in Palestine; Introduction, Chs. 1-2 (pp. 1-62; 62 pages)

September 27 — Resisting Erasure by Adam Hanieh, Robert Knox, and Rafeef Ziadah (continued) (Presented by Mac Parker)

Primary Reading:

Hanieh, Knox, and Ziadah, Resisting Erasure: Capital, Imperialism and Race in Palestine; Chs. 3-4 (pp. 63-98; 35 pages)