Mustafa al-Kurd left an indelible mark on Palestine’s genre of “committed singing,” contributing to the music of the First Intifada through his “Give Me the Plow and Sickle,” among other classics.

Muntaha Aqel grew up among “the children of the rocks” of the First Intifada, and lived her life in service of her people’s liberation.

The Rev. Don Wagner’s memoir of five decades as an activist leader celebrates how liberation theology led him to a deep connection with the Palestinian spirit of resistance.

“The first Intifada was a struggle to end Israeli occupation by establishing an independent Palestinian state in the occupied territories,” political scientist Ian Lustick writes. “I supported that struggle. Tragically, it failed. Three decades and half a million settlers later, that objective is no longer attainable. The BDS movement has effectively taken its place as a grassroots popular movement, based on an absolute commitment to nonviolence, a long-term strategy, a fundamental commitment to equality, and insistence on the realization of Palestinian rights, rather than calling for a specific kind of institutional arrangement.”

Palestinians disconnected from each other have struggled immensely to maintain a national project with clear objectives. Now, struggling together across the entire geography of historic Palestine, the disintegrated parts of our body are coming back together.

Bari Weiss says antisemites convinced Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to back out of a Rabin memorial. AOC actually was concerned with Rabin’s human rights record. But she and her supporters now join the “three-headed dragon of modern anti-Semitism” living in Bari Weiss’s imagination. And in Weiss’s perspective of sacred Jewish victimhood, defamation and dishonesty are no vice when fighting the enemies of the Jews.

Rashid Khalidi’s great great great uncle tried to tell Herzl not to colonize Palestine in 1899 but Herzl assured him that Zionists would bring Jewish acumen to the country and improve everyone’s lives. Yet after 100 years of settler colonialism, aided by superpowers, Palestinians remain undefeated. An interview with Khalidi about his new book.

The Gaza protests will mark their one-year anniversary in 2 weeks, with real political potential for the Palestinian struggle. Gaza has always been a crucible for political movements in part because its population has such a high percentage of refugees of the Nakba in 1948. Helena Cobban traces the history.

Palestinian activists of the First Intifada believed they would succeed in achieving their national rights. “Our leadership was aligned with our demands and suffered alongside us,” Nadia Naser-Najjab recalls. “There was no elite class benefiting from the colonial power.” She says Palestinian leadership must challenge colonialism, not cooperate with it.

Gaza-based writer Mohammed Saleem writes, “Skin tanned and hands calloused from working forty-two years under the sun, Emad Khalil, a sixty-one year old retired laborer, sits in front of me. For thirty of those years, he worked in Israel. His story documents a tremendous change in attitude and policy towards Palestinian freedom of movement, employment opportunities, healthcare, and relations between Palestinians and Israelis.”