A Few Books That'll Help You Get Informed About What's Happening In Palestine
Context and history matter. Empower yourself with knowledge to understand how we got here. In solidarity 🇵🇸 This blog is inspired by the great reading list that MAKTABA book shop put together. It’s intended as a growing resource, so if you have a recommendation to add send it our way at blog@afikra.com.
The Question of Palestine, Edward Said
“The first book to make Palestine the subject of a serious debate.” 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.
On Palestine, Noam Chomsky & Ilan Pappé
Pappé and Chomsky —both leading voices in the struggle to liberate Palestine — on the future facing Palestinians and how the international community can pressure Israel to end its human rights abuses against the people of Palestine. This is the sequel to their book Gaza in Crisis.
Via Haymarket Books
Rifqa, Mohammed El-Kurd
El-Kurd’s debut poetry collection, so titled in homage to his grandmother, Rifqa, who was older than Israel itself and an icon of Palestinian resilience. With razor-sharp wit and glistening moral clarity, his poetry maps Rifqa’s exile from Haifa through to his family’s current reality in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem, exposing the brutality of Israeli settler colonialism.
Via Poetry Books
Nakba edited by Ahmad Sa’di & Lila Abu-Lughod
These essays highlight the lived experience of Palestinians today and the ways in which the events of 1948 were experienced and are now retained in memory. In exploring the power of the past, the authors show the urgency of the question of memory for understanding the contested history of the present.
Homeland, Hannah Moushabeck (illustrated by Reem Madooh)
A compelling autobiographical picture book follows a Palestinian family that celebrates stories of their homeland each night before they go to bed. A love letter to home, to family, and to the persisting hope of people that transcends borders.
Via MAKTABA
Violence, Nonviolence & The Palestinian National Movement, Wendy Pearlman
An examination of the nature of national movements: why some use violence and others choose non-violence. Pearlman tracks back over 100 years in the Palestinian national movement to offer fresh insight into he dynamics of conflict and mobilization.
The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development, Sara Roy
Now in its third edition, this book shaped the concept of “de-development” which refers to Israeli efforts to suppress any attempt by the Gaza Strip and its residents to become fully autonomous. Roy builds on her decades of research to reflect further on the economic, social and political realities endured by Gazans everyday.
Israel’s Occupation, Neve Gordon
A complete history of the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip that gives a clear and broad view of the past four decades. Gordon covers a lot of ground — water and electricity supply, healthcare, education, surveillance and torture — and interrogates the very structure of the occupation.
Gaza in Crisis, Noam Chomsky & Ilan Pappé
Chomsky and Pappé situate Israel’s conduct in Gaza within the broader historic context. Published in 2013, this is the prequel to their later publication On Palestine.
Via Haymarket Books
Freedom is a Constant Struggle, Angela Y Davis
A collection of essays, interviews and speeches in which activist and scholar Angela Davis examines the concept of attaining freedom in light of our current world conflicts and illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world.
via Penguin Books
Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, Noura Erakat
Human rights attorney Noura Erakat examines the Palestinian struggle through the prism of power and control of international law. She focusses on key junctures — from the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to present-day wars in Gaza— showing how the strategic deployment of law has shaped current conditions.
The Battle for Justice in Palestine, Ali Abunimah
This is a comprehensive look at the shifting tides of the politics of Palestine and the Israelis in a neoliberal world and compelling and surprising case for why the Palestine solidarity movement just might win.
Via Haymarket Books
I Saw Ramallah, Mourid Barghouti
Winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, this novel is a “fierce and moving work and an unparalleled rendering of the human aspects of the Palestinian predicament.” Having lived 30 years in exile, Mourid Barghouti returns home for the first time since the Israeli occupation. A tour de force of memory and reflection, lamentation and resilience, I Saw Ramallah is a deeply humane book, essential to any balanced understanding of today’s Middle East.
Via Penguin Books
Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians 1876-1948, Walid Khalidi
A visual journey into Palestine before 1948. Through 500 photographs sourced from private and public collections from around the world, this book brings Palestinian society through history to life.
Mornings in Jenin, Susan Abulhawa
This is a deeply human 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. Amidst the loss and fear, hatred and pain, as their tents are replaced by more forebodingly permanent cinderblock huts, there is always the waiting to return to a lost home.
Watch our interview with Susan Abulhawa from 2021.
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan Pappé
From Israel’s so-called “bravest historian”, this book decisively debunking the myth that the Palestinian population left of their own accord in the course of the 1947-49 war. Pappe offers impressive archival evidence to demonstrate that, from its very inception, a central plank in Israel’s founding ideology was the forcible removal of the indigenous population.
Hollow Land, Eyal Weizman
From Gaza’s tunnels to the militarized airspace of the Occupied Territories, Eyal Weizman unravels Israel’s mechanisms of control and its transformation of Palestinian towns, villages and roads into an artifice where all natural and built features serve military ends. Hollow Land lays bare the political system at the heart of this complex and terrifying project of late-modern colonial occupation.
Via Verso Books
They Called Me A Lioness, Ahed Tamimi & Dena Takruri
A gripping personal memoir that follows a Palestinian activist jailed at 16 after a confrontation with Israeli soldiers. This novel illuminates the daily struggles of life under occupation.
Minor Detail, Adania Shibli
The fictional novel begins during the summer of 1949 when Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims they capture a Palestinian teenager and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand. Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this particular rape and murder. Adania Shibli masterfully overlays these two translucent narratives of exactly the same length to evoke a present forever haunted by the past.
Via New Directions
The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon
This is Fanon’s seminal work on the trauma of colonization which made him the leading anti-colonialist thinker of the 20th century. With power and anger, Fanon makes clear the economic and psychological degradation inflicted by imperialism and how the fight for freedom must be combined with building a national culture. He shows the way ahead, through revolutionary violence, to socialism.
Via Penguin Books
Gate of the Sun, Elias khoury
From Shatila camp on the outskirts of Beirut, we enter a vast world of displacement, fear and tenuous hope. It’s 1948 and Khalil holds vigil at the bedside of his patient and spiritual father, a storied leader of the Palestinian resistance who has slipped into a coma. As Khalil attempts to revive Yunes, he begins a story, which branches into many. Gate of the Sun is a Palestinian Odyssey. Beautifully weaving together haunting stories of survival and loss, love and devastation, memory and dream, Khoury humanizes the complex Palestinian struggle as he brings to life the story of an entire people.
Mural, Mahmoud Darwish
One of the greatest poets of the last half-century, Darwish’s work evokes the loss of his homeland and is suffused with the pain of dispossession, exile and loss. Here, his close friends John Berger and Rema Hammami present a beautiful new translation of two of Darwish’s later works, his long masterpiece Mural, a contemplation of his life and work written following life-threatening surgery, and his last poem, “The Dice Player” which Darwish read in Ramallah a month before his death. Illustrated with original drawings by John Berger, this book is a testimony to one of the most important and powerful poets of our age.
Via The Mosaic Rooms
On Zionist Literature, Ghassan Kanafani
This book makes an incisive analysis of the body of literary fiction written in support of the Zionist colonization of Palestine. Interweaving his literary criticism of works by George Eliot, Arthur Koestler and many others with a historical materialist narrative, Kanafani identifies the political intent and ideology of Zionist literature, demonstrating how the myths used to justify the Zionist-imperialist domination of Palestine first emerged and were repeatedly propagated in popular literary works in order to generate support for Zionism and shape the Western public's understanding of it.
Via 1804 Books
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson
What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood became the rallying cry for anti-Imperialism as well as the abiding explanation for colonialism. Anderson explores how ideas are formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, and the way that they can make people do extraordinary things. In the 21st century, these debates on the nature of the nation state are even more urgent.
Via Verso Books
The Fateful Triangle: the United States, Israel, and the Palestinians, Noam Chomsky
This is one of Chomsky's most important and renowned works. It’s a devastating indictment of American and Israeli foreign policy which covers a sustained period of Middle East history from the formation of the State of Israel to the Oslo Peace Accords. With a foreword by the late Edward Said, this powerful book belongs in the hands of anyone who wants a deep understanding of Israel and its relationship to Western power.
Via Pluto Press
Men in the Sun & Other Palestinian Stories, Ghassan Kanafani
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. 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.
Via Watan
The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, Joseph Massad
In this series of essays, Massad asks and answers key questions, such as: What has been the main achievement of the Zionist movement? What accounts for the failure of the Palestinian National Movement to win its struggle against Israel? What do anti-Semitism, colonialism and racism have to do with the Palestinian/Israeli “conflict”. This book analyzes the failure of the “peace process” and proposes that a solution to the Palestinian Question will not be found unless settler-colonialism, racism and anti-Semitism are abandoned as the ideological framework for a resolution. Individual essays further explore the struggle over Jewish identity in Israel and the struggle among Palestinians over what constitutes the Palestinian Question today.
Via Routledge
The Palestine Laboratory, Antony Loewenstein
Exposing the “architecture of control”, Loewenstein shows how Israel's military industrial complex uses the occupied Palestinian territories as a testing ground for weaponry and surveillance technology that they then export around the world to despots and democracies. This book shows in depth and for the first time how Palestine has become the perfect laboratory for the Israeli military-techno complex: surveillance, home demolitions, indefinite incarceration and brutality to the hi-tech tools that drive the “Start-up Nation”.
Via Verso Books
A Death in bed no. 12, Ghassan Kanafani
Kanafani’s first published collection of stories, A Death in Bed No. 12 explores feelings of exile — portrayed through unilateral detachment from the past. Divided into three parts, each section’s stories revolve around Palestine, as well as questions of reality and existentialism.
Via Rimal Books & Wikipedia
Narrating Conflict in the Middle East, Dina Matar & Zahera Harb
The contributors to this innovate book set out to explore alternative ways in which the long-term conflicts in Palestine and Lebanon have been and are narrated, imagined and remembered in diverse spaces, including that of the media. They examine discourses and representations of the conflicts as well as practices of memory and performance in narratives of suffering and conflict, all of which suggest an embodied investment in narrating or communicating conflict.
Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique, Sa’ed Atshan
From Ramallah to New York, Tel Aviv to Porto Alegre, people around the world celebrate a formidable, transnational Palestinian LGBTQ social movement. Solidarity with Palestinians has become a salient domain of global queer politics. With this book, Sa’ed Atshan asks how transnational progressive social movements can balance struggles for liberation along more than one axis. He explores critical junctures in the history of Palestinian LGBTQ activism, revealing the queer Palestinian spirit of agency, defiance and creativity, in the face of daunting pressures and forces working to constrict it.
Via The Mosaic Rooms
Palestinian Identity, Rashid Khalidi
This is an exploration of the multiple factors that explain the context for the emergence and consolidation of Palestinian national identity. Now with a new introduction by the author himself reflecting on the significance of his work over the past decade and its relationship to the struggle for Palestinian nationhood. Khalidi also casts an eye to the future, noting the strength of Palestinian identity and social solidarity yet wondering whether current trends will lead to Palestinian statehood and independence.
Via Waterstones and Palestine Studies
Palestinian Resistance Literature Under Occupation, 1948 - 1968, Ghassan Kanafani
An appraisal of the works of poetry and drama of Palestinian Arabs living as citizens in Israel in the two decades following the establishment of the Jewish state.
You can find more resources and books here: https://decolonizepalestine.com/reading-list/
Background artwork titles and artist names:
(1) Untitled, Sophie Halaby (2) Olive Groves #7, Nabil Anani (3) Jumana Al-Husseini (4) Battir, Nabil Anani (5) Impossible Dream, Laila Al Shawa (6) Untitled, Sophie Halaby (7) Silwad, Nabil Anani (8) Olive Field, Sliman Mansour (9) From the River to the Sea 1 (من النهر الى البحر ١), Sliman Mansour (10) LAM ALIF, Kamal Boullata (11) The Spring of Palestine, Jumana El Husseini (12) I dream of Gaza, Laila Shawa (13) BILQIS 5, Kamal Boullata (14) The Gaza Beach Daffodil, Laila Shawa (15) Untitled, Nabil Anani, (16) Untitled, Jumana El Husseini, (17) Jerusalem Landscape, Nabil Anani (18) Untitled, Jumana El Husseini (19) We Are Olives, Malak Mattar (20) Rainbow Spirals, Samia Halaby (21) The Zar, Laila Shawa (22) The Land and I, Nabil Anani (23) Untitled, Jordan Nassar (24) Jerusalem, Sliman Mansour (25) Mother’s Day, Sliman Mansour (26) Heritage on a Crossroad, Yazan Abu Salameh (27) Gardenia, Samia Halaby (28) A Day As Single As a Cherry-Flower, Jordan Nassar (29) Untitled, Jumana Al-Husseini (30) Black Cross, Samia Halaby, (31) Untitled, Nabil Anani (32) Ras Karkar, Nabil Anani, (33) THERE IS NO I BUT I, Kamal Boullata
