February 28, 2020 |
Ramona Wadi "It is particularly in Darwish's poetical progression that Palestine endured and became metaphor." This observation in the introduction to Palestine as Metaphor (Olive Branch Press, 2019) resonates throughout the...
February 6, 2020 |
Ramona Wadi What the news reports eliminate, Ramzy Baroud's new book, These Chains Will be Broken: Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons (Clarity Press, 2019), pushes to the fore....
January 28, 2020 |
Anjuman Rahman "Oh, you're Israeli." "No, I'm not Israeli! I'm Palestinian!" He stared at me for a few seconds in silence and then continued, in the same neutral tone; "Listen, I...
January 27, 2020 |
Ala Abbas In this ethnographic study, French-Iraqi sociologist Zahra Ali embarks on a unique journey, capturing the voices of Iraqi women of all ages, religions and political persuasions to get a...
December 27, 2019 |
Ramona Wadi The ostracisation of Palestine by the international community to facilitate its exploitation by colonial Israel is portrayed excellently in Palestine Past and Present (Nova Publishers, 2019). This collection of...
December 26, 2019 |
Usman Butt Events in the Arab world and beyond over the past decade have ignited an intense debate about Islam, Muslims and political engagement. A common theme of western historical research...
Normalising Israel as a Jewish state absents "Palestinian experience, history and identity claims". Yasmeen Abu Laban and Abigail Bakan, Palestinian and Jewish authors of "Israel, Palestine and the Politics...
November 11, 2019 |
Usman Butt For the past few weeks, Lebanon has been rocked by anti-government protests calling for a change in the ruling system and an end to corruption, economic decay and political...
November 8, 2019 |
Ramona Wadi "The rain was not in a docile mood." Huzama Habayeb's opening sentence of her novel Velvet (Hoopoe Fiction, 2019), beckons the reader to delve into intertwining worlds: the extravagance...
November 2, 2019 |
Nasim Ahmed One would be at stretch to find another place on earth where the mining of history evokes as much controversy as Palestine. You would struggle even further to name...
October 28, 2019 |
Maha Salah It is currently olive harvest season in Palestine, which makes it the perfect time to talk about Yasmin Khan’s book Zaitoun, which translates to 'olive' in Arabic
October 21, 2019 |
Ramona Wadi For decades, Palestine has been framed by international law. This convenient perspective, rendered mainstream by the international community and the Palestinian Authority, has made international law a weapon to...
October 14, 2019 |
Amelia Smith From the late sixties up until the early eighties Palestinians formed a resistance movement to liberate their homeland and ensure the return of their refugees. A vital part of...
October 3, 2019 |
Ramona Wadi Gardner Thompson's book, Legacy of Empire: Britain, Zionism and the Creation of Israel (Saqi Books, 2019) opens with a brief observation that contradicts all mainstream propaganda which spouts the...
September 30, 2019 |
Muhammad Hussein When discussing the Palestinian cause from the Nakba to the Great March of Return, many things spring to mind: the phenomenon of Zionism and its gradual takeover of Palestine;...
September 23, 2019 |
Rebecca Stead "Baris." He sighed. "It is where my life is." So Faruq Al-Azmeh, the "one other Arab on board the ship to Marseille", told an impressionable Midhat Kamal as he...
September 13, 2019 |
Ramona Wadi Literature about Palestine by Palestinian authors is like a deluge of insights into what is missing from what we proclaim to know. Our knowledge is dominated by news reports...
September 3, 2019 |
Usman Butt The Sacking of Fallujah: A People's History by Ross Caputi, Richard Hil and Donna Mulhearn makes for chilling reading as it takes us inside the three sieges that the...
August 7, 2019 |
Ramona Wadi The colonisation of Palestinian landscape and minds, author Greg Burris argues, is imbued with spaces in what he terms "the radical imagination" that breaks through Israeli impositions. Film and...
July 20, 2019 |
Ramona Wadi Palestinian memory has become synonymous with the 1948 Nakba and Palestinian resistance. Yet there are other strands of memory which are overlooked. Farah Aboubakr's treatise "The Folktales of Palestine"...
July 15, 2019 |
Ramona Wadi Nakba-themed anthologies dispel the concept of linear time and chronology. The brutal and abrupt halting of pre-1948 Palestinian life remains a reference point in Palestinian history, memory and literature,...
July 5, 2019 |
Andy Simons In these times of a growing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement regarding the apartheid state of Israel, public opinion is finally changing, even if those in the large...
June 12, 2019 |
Ramona Wadi In The Book of Disappearance, Palestinian novelist Ibtisam Azem has crafted a masterpiece which immediately leads the reader to ponder the historical foundations of the 1948 Nakba, as well...
June 6, 2019 |
Ramona Wadi No matter how prevalent refugee stories have become in the media, the dissociation between the terminology and the people keeps growing. Jehan Bseiso and Becky Thompson address this absence...
May 30, 2019 |
Usman Butt It is not usual to begin a book review with a quote from elsewhere, but, "Bad men need nothing more to compress their ends, than that good men should...
May 24, 2019 |
Andy Simons Those familiar with the ever-twisting gyrations of the Zionist project know that it was not just one of bully-boy bigotry but of employment leverage and advantage. Early on, the...
May 23, 2019 |
Ramona Wadi The international community, through the Oslo Accords, has created an intricate web of terminology that points towards a permanently stalled state-building process. In their book, The Palestinian Authority in...
May 8, 2019 |
Ramona Wadi An unfulfilled desire has no sanctuary other than remembrance. Radwa Ashour's novel, The Woman from Tantoura (Hoopoe Fiction, 2019), explores the ramifications of memory and how its story is...
April 18, 2019 |
Ramona Wadi Mats Svensson, a former Swedish diplomat whose personal experience of Palestine opened up the possibility of rethinking through Palestinian narratives, clarifies the role of diplomacy in the preface to...
April 16, 2019 |
Asa Winstanley Some years ago, I met a landlord briefly who was an Iraqi. After volunteering to tell me his land of origin, he began to explain his theory that ISIS...
April 2, 2019 |
Suja Sawafta As voices continue to emerge within the tradition of Anglo-Arab fictions, one constant within these narratives is the conversation surrounding the negotiation of identities between one's traditional culture vis-à-vis...
April 2, 2019 |
Andy Simons In today's twisted, double-speak in political accusation, some principles stay upheld. Ronit Lentin, the Trinity College Dublin sociologist, has long specialised in race relations and this book excavates Israel's...