Susan Abulhawa reviews Mohammad el-Kurd’s stunning debut poetry collection, Rifqa: “Letting my eyes sweep over lines just once wasn’t nearly enough to take in the unbearable beauty of this book. The words that Mohammad assembles in his poems aren’t pulled from books or dictionaries. They are snatched from clouds, excised from his bones, excavated from Jerusalem’s fabled tales and the inscriptions on her storied stones, plucked from the creases in tank treads and history’s smoke.”
Kevin Hadduck had never met a Palestinian until five years ago when a student studying Latin walked into his office. This chance encounter led to Hadduck’s “Beloved Brother, Beloved Sister,” a book of poems from voices in Gaza.
New anthology shares the common experiences, and joint struggle, shared by Palestinian and Irish hunger strikers.
The only sustainable way forward is to engage in the “decolonization” of Greater Israel. What comes next remains an open question.
Marcelo Svirsky says Zionism is not a political ideology or movement in the narrow sense but a way of life that permeates all spheres of Jewish-Israeli culture and society. It can therefore be overcome only by means of a deep cultural transformation.
Shay Hazkani’s “Dear Palestine” is an incredibly valuable contribution that uses meticulous archival research to upend our understanding of the 1948 war.
Taha Muhammad Ali, a beloved poet from Nazareth who died in 2011, was a master of the ‘Palestinian Absurd’ and is remembered for his searing poems that mused on happiness and its limitations.
Hamid Dabashi’s new book on Edward Said shows how the Palestinian intellectual became “integral to the very alphabet of our moral and political imagination.”
Many progressives in the Democratic Party have been celebrating the “return to normalcy” in US foreign policy represented by President Biden’s electoral win. This ignores the robust bipartisan consensus under both Democratic and Republican predecessors that laid the foundation for Trump’s openly hostile policies toward the Palestinians. It is this contradiction that lies at the heart of Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick’s new book, “Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics”.
Jerome Slater’s new “Mythologies Without End” is an indispensable, compelling guide to the truths behind the myths in Israel, Palestine and the Mideast.