“Who Will Write the History of the Moss?”: 1948, 1971, 1982, 2002, 2008, 2014 M. Darwish This question posed by Mahmoud Darwish in Thakira lil nisyan/ Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut 1982, his memoir of the Israeli siege of Beirut, is in direct communication with Jean Genet’s account of the same event in Un Captif amoureux/Prisoner of Love, like Darwish’s text, a memoir and an act of cosmopolitan witnessing and solidarity. With simplicity, Darwish’s question digs out an image, one that embodies the division of affirmation from witnessing that circumscribes the problématique of solidarity, which our panel locates in the global extension of a cosmopolitan Palestine, one woven into the weft of social justice movements from Ferguson to Capetown, Okinawa to Bangladesh. That summer Israel laid siege to the city for 88 days, cutting off water, supplies, movement and subjecting the population to constant bombardment, including the use by the IDF of vacuum bombs, prohibited by the Geneva Convention. In a testimony to the inhabitants of Shatila and Sabra, massacred by the Phalangists, aided and abetted by Isreali troops, Genet affirms a materialization at the heart of “adherence”, his preferred term, to the Palestinian revolution over and against the international politics of the image which captures it. Today living within the circuit of this mediatic economy and its politics, artists in Gaza circulate images that cite traditions of renaissance painting and vernacular vocabularies of militancy. In the call and answer of international solidarities, Darwish’s question from Genet’s text still resounds.