Reading List: Palestine: History and Culture, Indigenous and Diasporic

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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