Let’s read, deeply, about Palestine and its peoples. History and anthropology, and especially historical anthropology, are my preferred modes, so that’s the kind of list you can expect to find below.
- Under the Nakba Tree: Fragments of a Palestinian Family in Canada by Mowafa Said Househ (publisher link)
- marketed as weaving the settler-colonialism of Canada and the US into the narrative as well, which is crucial for understanding the popular support among Western colonial powers for Israeli settler-colonialism in the Levant.
- Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape by Raja Shehadeh (publisher link)
- Gaza in Lights: Writings Born of Fire, edited by Jehad Abusalim (publisher link)
- Rifqa by Mohammed El-Kurd (publisher link)
- Poetry that takes up a particularly Palestinian poetics.
- Actually I tore through this as soon as it came. What an extraordinary poet this man is!! The poems immortalize Rifqa El-Kurd, his 103-year-old grandmother. Their home was in Sheik Jarrah, the Israeli-occupied suburb of East Jerusalem, i.e. the capital of Palestine. As El-Kurd tells us, their house was literally divided by drywall through a ruling that allowed settlers to take up half of their house. His grandmother was a wonder of wit and resistance. She’s joined the ranks of women I’ve known or read who populate the snarkiest, chattiest, old-women-gossiping-est corner of my mind, which is also very consciously the corner in which I think about civic power, based on my hypothesis that women are the power behind the curtain.
- The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Oppression around the World by Antony Loewenstein (publisher link)
- Militarized police forces. CopCity. Fascistic policing. These are Israeli ‘contributions’ to the world. Loewenstein has been all over the podcasts, take your pick.
BONUS: Salman Rushdie hosts legendary Palestinian scholar Edward Saïd in 1986
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