It is impossible for an Israeli historian who doesn’t reject Zionism to understand Galilee resistance leader Tawfiq Zayyad, whose life shows, Mere Palestinian existence is undesirable in the eyes of the average Jewish Israeli, writes Hatim Kanaaneh.

Anan Ameri’s memoir “The Wandering Palestinian” is beautifully written in the tradition of Arab story telling. Its humorous and poignant chapters travel a reader to Beirut, Detroit, Washington, and Jerusalem, interweaving the forty-year personal narrative of a free spirited Arab woman who arrives in the USA in 1974, with the larger issues of migration, racism, sexism, and institution building.

We’re excited to introduce the Mondoweiss Book Club. It’s a six-month, go at your own pace program, featuring works of fiction by Palestinian and Arab authors.

Today the idea of a hopeful, humane Zionism is obsolete. For more than 100 years Jews wrestled with Zionism’s darkness. Daphna Levit profiles those thinkers, who range from enshrined heavyweights like Buber, Albert Einstein, and Hannah Arendt, through more specialized contemporary scholars, journalists, activists, and lawyers. All of them once believed in a hopeful Zionism; all resisted its darkness; not all of them went all the way to renounce it completely.

This holiday season come shop with Mondoweiss — we’ve done the digging so you don’t have to! Here are our staff picks from gorgeous ethically sourced clothes, to Palestinian handicrafts, to hand-dipped Hanukkah candles, to books and Zoom cooking classes with one of our favorite chefs.

Palestine Writes Literature Festival was an exhilarating relief from the pandemic. Writers including Naomi Shihab Nye, Ibtisam Barakat and Ghada Karmi spoke of indigeneity, dispossession, erasure, settler colonialism, oral history, collective memory, the right of return, Palestinian queerness, radical feminism, and the burning need to explore and document all of this in art, film, and writing.

In a letter that was smuggled out of Israel’s Damon prison to be shared at the Palestine Writes festival, political prisoner Khalida Jarrar shares the essential role literature plays for Palestinian prisoners struggling the retain their humanity and remain connected to the outside world. “Our struggle for liberation inside prisons starts with protecting resistance literature,” Khalida writes.

Phil Weiss interviews Susan Abulhawa about her new novel Against the Loveless World. “My exile and the destruction of my family and the destruction of everything, of our whole world, has defined my whole life in so many ways and in very personal ways,” says Abulhawa.

Bari Weiss’s rage over Peter Beinart’s role in a panel on antisemitism with Rashida Tlaib and Marc Lamont Hill next month shows that Weiss is in a battle with Beinart about who will represent American Jews. Weiss represents a tribal perspective of sacred victimhood; and Beinart’s universalism and openness to the Palestinian story is a threat to her.

Palestinians today find themselves in an analogous position to the condition of stateless Jews Hannah Arendt originally wrote about in the 1950s in the aftermath of World War II.