Ceasefire Now: A Zine About Action for Palestine

Abstract

This zine emerged as a creative output of my Australian Research Council Future Fellowship project investigating and archiving Arab-Australian intersectional, decolonial, transnational, solidarity activism as a constitutive dimension of Australian political culture and social movement participation. I was inspired to create this zine through my immersion in a network of activists and academics responding to Israel’s current war on Gaza. The zine captures the period of activism between 7 October and December 2023. I was drawn to the medium of the zine to capture, recognise, and bear witness to the frenzy of knowledge production, in-the-moment theorising, cultural work, collective protest and solidarity practices between Palestinians, Bla(c)k/Indigenous and diaspora communities, anti-Zionist Jews and white allies in this particular moment. This zine will advance knowledge of a neglected but significant dimension of Australian social movement participation, offering insights into how scholar-activists and grassroots campaigners working together in concrete struggle theorise and strategise outside the formal circuits of scholarly production and institutional spaces. This zine is a work in progress because genocide is in process and so the record of labour, collective action and practices of solidarity documented in these pages are offered as a generative site for circulating ideas and cultural interventions in the present.