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Announcing the Recipients of the October '43 Travel Grant 2024

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We are excited to present the recipients of the 2024 Humanity in Action October ’43 Travel Grants: Maya Zoe Saadon, Zelma Feldman Lewerissa and Anders Redder.

We look forward to seeing their projects and fascinating trips unfold!

Love in Conflict: Contested Intimacy and Identity Among Palestinian-Israeli Couples in Berlin

By Zelma Feldman Lewerissa and Maya Zoe Saadon

Zelma Feldman Lewerissa and Maya Zoe Saadon

The October ’43 Travel Grant from Humanity in Action will enable Maya Zoe Saadon and Zelma Feldman Lewerissa to realize their anthropological fieldwork on Israeli-Palestinian couples living in Berlin. Together with their previous research in Israel and Palestine, the fieldwork in Berlin will form the empirical material for their book “Love in Conflict: Contested Intimacy and Identity among Palestinian-Israeli Couples”, which will be in Danish and meant for a Danish audience.

A central theme for many mixed couples in Israel and Palestine is navigating the significant power differential that exists between the parties. While one party often enjoys privileges such as freedom of movement, the other party is part of a minority that is treated as a second-class citizen in many respects. During Maya and Zelma’s previous anthropological fieldwork, Berlin was often mentioned as a place the informants imagined their love would be considered more “normal” than it was in Israel and Palestine.

The upcoming fieldwork in Berlin will explore how the imaginations of Berlin compare to the lived realities.

The book will explore questions such as: Does the power relationship change with migration? Are the parties becoming more equal? How is the new common status of “newcomer” received in an increasingly right-wing Europe? Does it lead to new and different challenges? And, importantly, how has the aftermath of October 7, 2023 and the subsequent humanitarian crisis in Gaza affected Berlin as a “refuge”?

Have the challenges from the homeland followed the couples to Berlin?  

The sometimes conflict-ridden, difficult and instructive work that the couples engage in, in relation to each other and in relation to their respective families, is valuable knowledge in the research on the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians, and in the efforts to create a future where both populations can live in just peace and freedom.

Fortress Europe

By Anders Redder

Anders Redder

In 2025, it will be ten years since the refugee crisis affected Europe.

Since then, the world has been turned upside down.

Today, Europe’s external borders are heavily guarded and covered by more than 2,000 kilometers of barbed wire and border walls, the vast majority built in recent years.

The border agency Frontex has become the EU’s largest agency. Pushbacks and violations of the rights of refugees and migrants are commonplace, while Brussels makes billion-dollar deals with regimes in North Africa to prevent people from reaching Europe’s shores and beaches.

Meanwhile, European countries are struggling to figure out how to tackle migration.

On a journey along the external borders, journalist Anders Redder will talk to the people who want to reach Europe – and those who want to keep them out.  

In Denmark, the former Social Democratic government unsuccessfully tried to set up a reception center in Rwanda. In Italy, Georgia Meloni has reached an agreement with Albania to send asylum seekers to camps in the small Balkan country. In the EU, a major new migration pact will be tested in the coming years, and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is already talking about new “innovative solutions” to tackle migrant and refugee flows.

Anders Redder’s journeys along the borders will form the foundation of an upcoming book which – in a nuanced and critical way – will try to get to the bottom of how we got a Fortress Europe.  

The book is produced in collaboration with Politikens Forlag.