LIT ALL OVER

Palestine and its people have been under some form of foreign rule since 1918, and the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been under Israeli military occupation since 1967. Many authors from the region, including those of a diaspora background, have been vocal in demanding Palestinian liberation, particularly in recent months as Gaza experiences relentless Israeli bombardment and the starvation conditions created by it. Below are some essays by Palestinian authors covering thoughts, perspectives, and history relating to Palestine and current events.

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“‘I Am Not There and I Am Not Here’: On Bearing Witness to Atrocity” by Hala Alyan for the Guardian

Palestinian American writer Hala Alyan’s debut novel Salt Houses (2017) follows a displaced Palestinian family through locations all over the world. She is also the author of The Arsonists’ City (2021), another global family story, and several poetry collections. In the above personal essay, Alyan describes the surreal experience of going about everyday activities in Brooklyn while being confronted with images of violence and devastation in Gaza. She addresses what it means to have the option of looking away from one’s land and people, and how this distance can produce a sense of illegitimacy that she ultimately rejects: “That is where my grandparents lived. Their grandparents. Their grandparents. You can destroy all the libraries and archives and villages in the world … you can blow up a university, refashion a history book, and it still won’t change that fact.”

Alyan has also written an op-ed for Teen Vogue that considers the role of narrative in resisting oppression, noting that dehumanized communities are often not regarded as reliable sources on their own suffering. She details witnessing allies (“Jewish solidarity groups, academic groups, celebrities”) not only engaging in direct action on behalf of Palestinians, but “the equally essential labor of sharing information, which helps unknot pervasive narratives.”

“In the Midst of Disaster: Isabella Hammad’s Novel of Art and Exile in Palestine” by Raja Shehadeh for The Nation 

Author Raja Shehadeh is also a lawyer and the founder of Al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights organization based in the West Bank. He is the author of several novels and the memoir We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I (2023), which examines his complex relationship with his father, who was also a lawyer and activist. “In the Midst of Disaster” looks at recent events through the lens of the novel Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad (also featured below), the story of a group of Palestinians attempting to stage a production of Hamlet in the West Bank.

This essay appears in The Nation, which allows readers a limited number of free articles per month. Another article by Shehadeh, which delves into how his views on the possibility of peace and humanitarian intervention for Palestinians have changed over the years, is available in the Guardian.

“On Finding Inspiration in the Lives of Ordinary Palestinians” by Susan Muaddi Darraj for Lit Hub

Susan Muaddi Darraj is the author of the Farah Rocks children’s book series and the short story collection A Curious Land. Her debut novel, Behind You Is the Sea, follows the struggle of working-class Palestinians in America, a subject she discusses in the essay above. She also describes the strangeness of being tasked with promoting her book during a genocide, as well as the silencing and discrimination she has faced as a Palestinian American author and witnessed happening to fellow authors during this period. Despite this, the piece is a hopeful one, framed by recollections of her family harvesting olives in the West Bank. “Erasure is a dangerous thing, but it’s why I have to believe that stories matter,” she writes.

“The Uses and Abuses of Language in Israel’s War on Palestine” by Isabella Hammad and Sahar Huneidi for The Nation 

British-Palestinian author Isabella Hammad, in addition to Enter Ghost, has written The Parisian (2019), a novel about a young Palestinian who travels to France to study medicine in 1914. This essay, penned with scholar Sahar Huneidi, offers a rigorous, wide-ranging look at language surrounding the occupation of Palestine, and will appeal to readers interested in how media trends and geopolitical interests affect the information they receive (or don’t) on the region.

Hammad and Huneidi break down terms with precision, noting, for example, that words like “colonial” and “colonization” were once freely used by Zionists and Europeans to describe the presence of Israel, whereas today Israel’s supporters often resist its description as a “settler colony” (a term the authors differentiate from other types of colonialism and occupancy), citing “complexity.” They also consider how Palestinian resistance came to be equated with “terrorism” (following 9/11) and antisemitism with antizionism, noting that many Jewish people reject this conflation and that the American Jewish Committee expressed opposition to American support for “Jewish statehood in Palestine” in the 1940s. Additionally, they examine the suppression of information in Israel and how this affects both Israelis and Palestinians within its borders.

“On Literary Empathy and the Performative Reading of Palestinian Authors” by Etaf Rum for Lit Hub

Palestinian American writer Etaf Rum is the author of A Woman Is No Man, a story of three generations of Palestinian American women, and the more recent Evil Eye, a family drama examining intergenerational trauma. In the above essay, Rum contemplates the discrepancy she has observed in readers loving and identifying with the Palestinian characters in her books but refusing to acknowledge the lived reality of Palestinian people. She recalls how she has received angry messages from readers “shocked and furious” to find that she supported the Palestinian cause, including one person who filmed herself throwing her copy of Evil Eye in the trash. Rum raises questions about the performative nature of empathy in the reading community, asking what it means to enjoy or profit from depictions of a culture or experience and then sink back into one’s unexamined biases when those biases feel threatened. 

In the spirit of this last essay by Rum, while I’ve chosen to share this particular round-up of information here because this is a book blog, the current moment demands far more than “awareness,” “education,” or only listening to certain Palestinians at certain times as a form of consumption. Empathy and personal beliefs are only worth what they produce in the form of action and real material support, and you don’t have to understand someone’s life to decide to help them live.

If you’re able, please donate to this fundraiser for a Palestinian family trying to escape the genocide in Gaza, and spread it to others in whatever way you can. You can also find a fundraiser to adopt on Gaza Funds, which spotlights a different campaign whenever you load the home page.