I am a historian at University College London, where I examine Palestinian refugee history in both my writing and my teaching. I first visited a Palestinian refugee camp 15 years ago, and I’ve spent much of my life since then researching the subject’s history and politics. As I see it, this topic is really the key to understanding the political dynamics of Israel-Palestine today. While a huge amount has been written on Israel-Palestine, I have always found that the most striking and informative works focus on refugees’ own experiences – and that’s the common thread running through the books I’ve chosen here.
Refugees of the Revolution is an ethnographic study of Shatila refugee camp, which is notorious as the site of a 1982 massacre and has become central to Palestinian nationalist narratives.
In the early 21st century, Allan spent time living in Shatila, originally wanting to research the nationalist discourse there. Instead, she came away with a much more complex study of the refugees’ complex struggles, in both the political and the quotidian sense. In taking an unconventional approach, Allan has something in common with Sayigh, even though they were writing 40 years apart.
For these reasons Refugees of the Revolution is particularly interested to read as a follow-up to Sayigh’s The Palestinians, which is my first pick above.
Some sixty-five years after 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homeland, the popular conception of Palestinian refugees still emphasizes their fierce commitment to exercising their "right of return." Exile has come to seem a kind of historical amber, preserving refugees in a way of life that ended abruptly with "the catastrophe" of 1948 and their camps-inhabited now for four generations-as mere zones of waiting. While reducing refugees to symbols of steadfast single-mindedness has been politically expedient to both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict it comes at a tremendous cost for refugees themselves, overlooking their individual memories and aspirations…
My engagement in the topic has two distinct vectors, academic, and personal, or, if you wish, existential. My academic engagement began when Buber's son Raphael (1900-91), who served as the Executor of the Martin Buber Literary Estate, invited me to assemble and edit his father's writings on the "Arab Question." He explained that of all of his father's publications, his ramified writings promoting the political and human dignity of the Palestinian Arabs spoke most dearly and, as a citizen of the State of Israel, most immediately to him. I accepted Rafael's invitation with alacrity, for like Raphael I'm an Israeli by choice, having emigrated to the country in 1970.
Partition—the idea of separating Jews and Arabs along ethnic
or national lines—is a legacy at least as old as the Zionist-Palestinian
conflict. Challenging the widespread "separatist imagination" behind
partition, Gil Hochberg demonstrates the ways in which works of contemporary
Jewish and Arab literature reject simple notions of separatism and instead
display complex configurations of identity that emphasize the presence of
alterity within the self—the Jew within the Arab, and the Arab within the Jew. In
Spite of Partition examines Hebrew, Arabic, and French works that are
largely unknown to English readers to reveal how, far from being independent,
the signifiers "Jew" and "Arab" are inseparable.
Partition--the idea of separating Jews and Arabs along ethnic or national lines--is a legacy at least as old as the Zionist-Palestinian conflict. Challenging the widespread "separatist imagination" behind partition, Gil Hochberg demonstrates the ways in which works of contemporary Jewish and Arab literature reject simple notions of separatism and instead display complex configurations of identity that emphasize the presence of alterity within the self--the Jew within the Arab, and the Arab within the Jew. In Spite of Partition examines Hebrew, Arabic, and French works that are largely unknown to English readers to reveal how, far from being independent, the signifiers…
The year I spent in Palestine from 2011 to 2012 was the first time in my life that I encountered racism firsthand. Growing up in America, I was aware of my country’s racist history and I knew that my country’s history was indelibly marked by prejudice. But in Palestine I witnessed racism in action. It reminded me of segregation in the American South. Every aspect of daily life in Israel and in the territories it occupied is segregated: buses, roads, lines waiting to pass through checkpoints. After I witnessed a Palestinian man being refused entry into an Israeli tourist site simply because he was Palestinian, I knew this was a book I had to write.
Mahmoud Darwish is without a doubt the national Palestinian poet, who expresses the experience of millions of Palestinians across generations.
Whether he is writing about exile, love, or death, his poetic voice reverberates simultaneously in the soul, the intellect, and the body. Darwish speaks with the intimacy of someone who is not afraid to be vulnerable and the authority of a poet who believes that poetry can change the world.
This collection gathers together the best translations of his poems by American poet Carolyn Forché working in collaboration with Munir Akash, and includes commentary by the important Arabic writers Sinan Antoon, Fady Joudah, and Amira El-Zein.
Mahmoud Darwish is a literary rarity: at once critically acclaimed as one of the most important poets in the Arabic language, and beloved as the voice of his people. A legend in Palestine, his lyrics are sung by fieldworkers and schoolchildren. He has assimilated some of the world's oldest literary traditions while simultaneously struggling to open new possibilities for poetry. This collection spans Darwish's entire career, nearly four decades, revealing an impressive range of expression and form. A splendid team of translators has collaborated with the poet on these new translations, which capture Darwish's distinctive voice and spirit. Fady Joudah's…
Ilan Pappé is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter. He was formerly a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa. He is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The Modern Middle East, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict.
This was the first book to bring in one place the Palestinian narrative after years of denying it and allowing only the Israeli/Zionist narrative to dominate both the public and the scholarly domains in the West. Said's elegant prose contributed made that history accessible to a large audience of readers.
This original and deeply provocative book was the first to make Palestine the subject of a serious debate--one that remains as critical as ever. With the rigorous scholarship he brought to his influential Orientalism and an exile's passion (he is Palestinian by birth), Edward W. Said traces the fatal collision between two peoples in the Middle East and its repercussions in the lives of both the occupier and the occupied--as well as in the conscience of the West. He has updated this landmark work to portray the changed status of Palestine and its people in light of such developments as…
My father is Palestinian, my mother English. I am a typical diaspora Palestinian, having moved many times. I’m intrigued by what this highly politicized nationality–being Palestinian–does to peoples’ emotions, their desire to be accepted and thrive, their sense of community, their ability to deal with the challenges and joys of political engagement as well as the difficulties of not being political if they choose not to be. Being Palestinian is an extreme case of what humans can be forced to endure as political and social animals. Living under military occupation gives rise to huge sacrifices and pure heroism in the most quotidian way. Acts that deserve recognition.
At a time of death and destruction in Gaza, this book is one of the only volumes that brings to the English language reader some of the voices from inside a small strip of land that has been under siege by land, sea, and air for sixteen years.
Although the quality of the writing is variable, I found that the rawness of the collection made the writers seem more intimate. With some gutsy writing by women and tender pieces by men, the anthology subverts assumptions and provides a wide heterogeneity of voices to the fore.
Under the Israeli occupation of the '70s and '80s, writers in Gaza had to go to considerable lengths to ever have a chance of seeing their work in print. Manuscripts were written out longhand, invariably under pseudonyms, and smuggled out of the Strip to Jerusalem, Cairo or Beirut, where they then had to be typed up. Consequently, fiction grew shorter, novels became novellas, and short stories flourished as the city's form of choice. Indeed, to Palestinians elsewhere, Gaza became known as 'the exporter of oranges and short stories'. This anthology brings together some of the pioneers of the Gazan short…
In the 1950s, my mother and father left the red dirt of Oklahoma for the forests of Idaho to escape their families’ poverty. Instead of sharecropping, my father became a logger, but my aunt and her husband, a drilling rig roughneck, moved to the deserts of Saudi Arabia to work for Aramco and live in the American compound of Abqaiq. I remember the gifts they brought me: camel hide purses, Aladdin slippers. The Saudis, too, were experiencing rapid modernization and expanding wealth. I became fascinated by the conflict inherent in the sudden enmeshing of cultures and meteoric shift in power and privilege.
A simple yet elegantly written memoir about growing up in mid-century as a Palestinian Arab Bedouin. Diqs’ focus is not on politics but on family, tribe, and tradition as he details his boyhood and his people’s dislocation and transition from nomads tending their sheep to an agrarian, village-based culture. Diqs’ written memories provided me with a profound and intimate awareness of the details of Bedouin life before the partitioning of Palestine and the petroleum industry’s impact on the Middle East.
Youth play such a significant role in the history of our struggles for justice–and yet most teenagers I meet in the classroom have limited access to these important stories. These stories are more relevant than ever as we see current youth-led activism for #BlackLivesMatter and Youth4Climate Marches. When I talk to youth about historical youth-led protests, their eyes light up–they make these connections lightning fast and say–why aren’t we being taught about things like this more in school?
An anthology written by Gazans (many teens), the essays and short pieces ring with sorrow, hope, and the relatable thoughts of young people who want what all youth want in their world. These stories, passages, and poems, everyday moments like handing in homework and falling in love, are brought in stark relief by the reality of living in Palestine.
Gaza Writes Back is a compelling anthology of short stories from fifteen young writers in Gaza, members of a generation that has suffered immensely under Israel's siege and blockade. Their experiences, especially during and following Israel's 2008-2009 offensive known as "Operation Cast Lead", have fundamentally impacted their lives and their writing. Their words take us into the homes and hearts of moms, dads, students, children, and elders striving to live lives of dignity, compassion, and meaning in one of the world's most embattled communities. Readers will be moved by the struggles big and small that emerge from the well-crafted writing…
I began studying the Israeli-Palestinian relationship as an idealistic Brandeis University student living in Jerusalem in 1969, when I directly encountered the Palestinian problem and the realities of the occupation. Trained at Berkeley to be a political scientist I devoted my life to finding a path to a two-state solution. In 2010 I reached the tragic conclusion that the “point of no return” toward Israeli absorption of the occupied territories had indeed been passed. Bored with the ideas that my old way of thinking was producing, I forced myself to think, as Hannah Arendt advised, “without a bannister.” Paradigm Lostis the result.
For the first eighteen years of Israel’s existence most Arabs in the country were ruled by a military administration. It was formally abolished only a year before the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 and the establishment of Israeli military rule in those territories. The story of that early military government is not well known, except by specialists. But with the publication of Shira Robinson’s book, based on declassified archival material, we now know the details of how Arab citizens of Israel were subordinated, exploited, and manipulated, under false rationales of security concerns, in order to bolster the political position of the dominant Labor Party, to advance Zionist goals of land acquisition and subsidization of Jewish settlement, and, as the title of the book suggests, to help present Israel as a “liberal” state while concealing its settler colonialist dynamics.
Following the 1948 war and the creation of the state of Israel, Palestinian Arabs comprised just fifteen percent of the population but held a much larger portion of its territory. Offered immediate suffrage rights and, in time, citizenship status, they nonetheless found their movement, employment, and civil rights restricted by a draconian military government put in place to facilitate the colonization of their lands. Citizen Strangers traces how Jewish leaders struggled to advance their historic settler project while forced by new international human rights norms to share political power with the very people they sought to uproot.
I am a novelist and journalist who has been writing about war and refugees for nearly two decades. In 2018, I went to the Greek island of Samos, which held one of the most inhumane refugee camps in Europe, to talk to people there about their lives and hopes. Out of this, I wrote several articles and later two books, including The Good Deed. My hope is to counteract the demonization of refugees, so rife in the world today, by bringing out all that we humans have in common, such as our need for shelter, food, family, safety, and love.
I listened to this book because I wanted to understand more about the history and people of Palestine as the 2023-24 war between Israel and Hamas was escalating to ever more deadly heights.
Abulhawa is a renowned Palestinian author, and this book was an international bestseller back in 2010, but I knew nothing of it at the time. I found the novel, a family saga stretching several generations from 1941 to 2022, so immediate, eye-opening, and moving that it was as if I were reading about the current war in real-time.
I loved it so much that I bought the actual book to keep forever.
A heart-wrenching, powerfully written novel that does for Palestine what The Kite Runner did for Afghanistan.
Mornings in Jenin is a multi-generational story about a Palestinian family. Forcibly removed from the olive-farming village of Ein Hod by the newly formed state of Israel in 1948, the Abulhejos are displaced to live in canvas tents in the Jenin refugee camp. We follow the Abulhejo family as they live through a half century of violent history. Amidst the loss and fear, hatred and pain, as their tents are replaced by more forebodingly permanent cinderblock huts, there is always the waiting, waiting to…
The year I spent in Palestine from 2011 to 2012 was the first time in my life that I encountered racism firsthand. Growing up in America, I was aware of my country’s racist history and I knew that my country’s history was indelibly marked by prejudice. But in Palestine I witnessed racism in action. It reminded me of segregation in the American South. Every aspect of daily life in Israel and in the territories it occupied is segregated: buses, roads, lines waiting to pass through checkpoints. After I witnessed a Palestinian man being refused entry into an Israeli tourist site simply because he was Palestinian, I knew this was a book I had to write.
There is no better place to start learning about Palestine than with the stories of Ghassan Kanafani, a writer and militant activist who was assassinated by Mossad, the Israeli Secret Service, in 1972.
Kanafani combined activism with a powerful ability to recreate the Palestinian experience of displacement and forced migration. In one of his most moving and disturbing stories, Men in the Sun, Kanafani tells of three Palestinian migrant workers who travel from the refugee camps of Iraq to Kuwait in the hopes of finding work.
The story was made into a film called The Dupes by Egyptian director Tawfiq Saleh in 1973.
This collection of important stories by novelist, journalist, teacher, and Palestinian activist Ghassan Kanafani includes the stunning novella Men in the Sun (1962), the basis of the film The Deceived. Also in the volume are "The Land of Sad Oranges" (1958), "If You Were a Horse . . ." (1961), "A Hand in the Grave" (1962), "The Falcon" (1961), "Letter from Gaza" (1956), and an extract from Umm Saad (1969). In the unsparing clarity of his writing, Kanafani offers the reader a gritty look at the agonized world of Palestine and the adjoining Middle East.
