Son[i]a #449
Fadya Salfiti
Fadya Salfiti (Kuwait, 1959) is a Palestinian cultural organiser and activist. She grew up listening to her father’s stories of a vibrant and resilient Palestine, made of gardens, voices and sounds, customs and traditions, and domestic scenes, rather than an inventory of oppression and dispossession. That landscape became an affective compass that, over the years, guided her own path back. After migrating with her family to the USA and studying at a catholic university while engaging with grassroots solidarity networks, she decided in the early 1990s to move to Palestine and “practice the right of return” firsthand.
Since then, her work has inhabited the intersections of culture and community: she has accompanied and directed Palestinian organisations, serves as the chair of the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah and the Rawa Fund for Palestinian Community Initiatives. She also participates in spaces dedicated to health, art, feminism, and community organising. Since October 7, 2023, she has also been a co-founder of Owneh Initiative, which brings together 30 Palestinian and grassroots organisations, committed to operating outside funding structures tied to colonial frameworks and complicit in the genocide in Gaza –what can be described as toxic philanthropy. For Fadya, Palestine is not merely a territory but a fabric embodied in the body, the language, and the everyday relations of care and resistance.
In this podcast, Fadya Salfiti unfolds the layers of her trajectory –from Kuwait to the United States and then to Jerusalem– to reflect on what it means to go back, to take root, and to struggle in an occupied land. From her situated experience, she dismantles the “humanitarian” and “developmentalist” façade of international aid: how colonial philanthropy depoliticises struggles, fragments the territory, gathers data, monitors, imposes external priorities, and generates dependency. Against this, she proposes other ways of sustaining life and collective projects: networking, self-organising, solidarity among organisations, and the creation of projects such as Owneh Initiative and Rawa Fund, which seek to liberate resources, language, political discourse and imagination. Here, memory acts as insubordination, return as a daily practice, and community organising as a radical wager on Palestine’s future.
With the support
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
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