publication launch of The Unavowable Holocaust with Dabartis–Circulator of Autonomous Forms, Eman Abdelhadi, and Peter Makhlouf

"...fiercly chart[ing] what may be at stake in confronting the planetary scope of the Palestinian Nakba yesterday, today, and tomorrow."

As the genocide in Gaza enters its third year, only escalating in scope and cruelty, we must ask: what is avowed and what is disavowed in our recollection of October 7? Does the day symbolize an insurgency against a ruthless settler-colonial regime? Or, as the imperialist establishment continues to insist, the “greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust?”

On October 7, 2025, we gather in Chicago to avow these unavowed, actively erased histories; to refuse the disavowal of the myriad holocausts, of all the “sacrifices” the European political tradition has enacted; to commemorate those who, through various names, languages, cosmologies, and territories, have challenged the world-annihilating catastrophe that is European political modernity.

Just as there is not one single holocaust, there is not only one October 7 at stake here. Our avowals and disavowals of this date concern nothing less than the history of resistance to European colonialism, fascism, and nation-statist supremacy. We might recall that the General Jewish Labor Bund was established on October 7, 1897 in Vilne – an anti-Zionist socialist organization that would rapidly spread across the world. To avow this seemingly coincidental date as part of a trans-historical continuum of resistances is to explode the very frames in which the current discourse is thrown against us.

During the gathering we will circulate two Dabartis publications: The Unavowable Holocaust by the Anti-Denialist Coalition, and Kawkab Hassan On Liberating the Levant by Eman Abdelhadi & M.E. O’Brien. Both works offer guidance and resources for cultivating oppositional spaces of remembrance and action.

The gathering will be facilitated by members of Dabartis alongside the critical theorist Peter Makhlouf and Chicago based writer, organizer, and educator Eman Abdelhadi.