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Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of Palestine Before the Nakba

June 19, 2024 at 4:41 pm

Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of Palestine Before the Nakba
  • Book Author(s): Teresa Aranguren, Sandra Barrilaro
  • Book Editor(s): Mohammed El-Kurd (Foreword)
  • Published Date: February 2024
  • Publisher: Haymarket Books
  • Hardback: 240 pages
  • ISBN-13: 978-1642599800

Leafing through this book upon receiving it, the discrepancy between the thriving life in Palestine before the Nakba and the Zionist narrative of the barren land was striking. Reading and becoming familiar with the content, Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of Palestine Before the Nakba (Haymarket Books, 2024), is a vivid testimony that shatters all the myths of Zionism and puts to shame the UN’s role in aiding the European colonial ideology to devastate Palestine to the ultimate genocide being experienced now by Palestinians in Gaza.

Mohammed El-Kurd’s foreword impacts immediately with the difference in language. The book is a bilingual English-Arabic edition and El-Kurd notes, “In English, there is a need to riddle the page with facts and figures detailing the essential cruelties of an atrocity that should be – and should have long been – internationally recognised.” In Arabic, he continues, “there is no need for such contextualisation” since the Nakba is ongoing and permeates across generations, geography and exile. Zionism, El-Kurd writes, “invisibilised us” since the early colonial process.

This book is on the shortlist for the Palestine Book Awards 2024, please click here to read the full review on the Palestine Book Awards site.