Julia Bacha’s two documentaries, Budrus (2009) and Naila and the Uprising (2017), represent important contributions to the cultural struggle against Israeli apartheid—though watching them at this historical juncture feels somewhat bittersweet.
Salman Abu Sitta was uprooted from his family lands near Beersheba during the Palestinian Nakba in 1948 and the trauma has informed his entire life as a refugee and scholar. “I looked back at the smoldering ruins, at the meadows of my childhood, golden with the still-unharvested wheat. What had we done to them? Who were these Jews anyway?”
Susan Abulhawa’s new novel, Against a Loveless World, “has given readers of Palestinian writing a beautiful new horizon within which to imagine freedom.”
Samir Naqqash is perhaps the most prolific modern Iraqi-Jewish writer, yet his work was ignored for decades by the Israeli academy. The recent Hebrew publication of his novel “Shlomo the Kurd, Me and the Time,” which was originally written in Arabic, will hopefully change that.
Hellbent on crafting an umbilical cord between itself and a biblical, mythical 2000-year old past, Israel has erased the ancient history of Palestinians. A review by Sam Bahour of Keith Whitelam’s “The Invention of Ancient Israel.”
Historian Susan Reverby’s riveting biography of Alan Berkman is a magnificent book. Berkman was imprisoned in the 60s, convicted for his political work in the underground as a leader of an offshoot of the Weather Underground. On regaining his freedom he devoted his life to public health and helping those the system abandoned.
Irish novelist Colum McCann says that he was “cracked wide open” when he met West Bank Palestinian Bassam Aramin and his Israeli Jewish colleague Rami Elhanan one evening in Bethlehem. But his novel “Apeirogon” that elevates the two runs the risk of normalizing the occupation by treating reconciliation as the answer to political oppression.
Hatim Kanaaneh reviews Rashid Khalidi’s latest work ‘The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine’: “Though I have read a good number of histories of Palestine, I hardly turned a page in Rashid Khalidi’s new book that didn’t surprise me with new and well-documented information about my own history.”
In his new book “The Hundred-Years’ War on Palestine,” historian Rashid Khalidi takes off the academic gloves and breaks the spell of the Zionist nationalist dream by relating his own legendary family’s long resistance to colonialism in Palestine.
The Peace and Justice Commission of the Assembly of Catholic Ordinaries of the Holy Land has written a brief but incredibly important book for all who are concerned about Christian Palestinians and justice in Palestine and Israel, especially in the light of President Trump’s peace initiative.