Review – Books

Refugee narratives beyond those which reach the mainstream media are fraught with complexities, while humanitarian aid remains insufficient. Ilana Feldman's treatise "Life Lived in Relief — Humanitarian Predicaments and...

We live in turbulent times, with international pendulums made up of states, organisations and major NGOs swinging in close proximity; near misses, blocks and crashes are inevitable. Turkey's relations...

Review Rating: 5/5 There is always a time between the concepts of the present and forever which is inscribed in our remembrance. It is the beauty of memory which...

With accusations of antisemitism hitting the headlines on a regular basis involving high-profile figures such as Ken Livingstone or Britain's former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who can be unaware...

Miko Peled's book Injustice: The Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five is about a grave and cruel injustice carried out by both the US and Israel. Paradoxically, the...

Israel's prolonged colonisation and military occupation of Palestine has given rise to a consistent form of resistance that is implemented in everyday life, yet rarely recognised. This form of...

Imagine that you were a state in which the unruly masses of an ethnic minority rebelled in one of your provinces. Would you crush it with your own security...

Reja-e Busailah has lost two dear parts of himself over the course of his lifetime: his sight and his homeland. In his autobiography, "In the land of my birth:...

Offering an insightful account of a period often neglected by historians, Salim Tamari's book The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine provides a window into the lost world...

Balfour in the Dock is a contemporary work looking at a 750-page magnum opus on Palestine by outstanding British journalist J M N Jeffries (1880-1960). His book Palestine: The...

Nur Masalha's latest book, "Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History" (Zed Books, 2018) presents an accurate distinction between the Palestinian return to history and the purported Zionist reclamation –...

Gary Fields' Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror is a unique exploration of the development of the Israeli culture of land grabs and the historical legal framework and...

Unlike the alphabet books which currently saturate the children's book market in the UK, where A is for apple and B is for ball, "P is for Palestine" offers...

Intricately weaving past and present, humour and pain, love and loss, "Jerusalem Stands Alone" is a beautiful homage to a living, breathing city so often reduced to nothing more than...

For those who research and discuss the Palestine-Israel conflict they will find that even the most detailed topics have been researched well. Nevertheless, such topics as the two-state solution,...

"The Palestinian Table" is a fitting title for a cookbook which captures the essence of Palestinian culinary heritage, culture and reality. It is what ties all Palestinians together in...

The year is 1959. The place? The Seventh World Festival of Youth and Students in Vienna. Seventeen thousand left-leaning activists gathered to discuss "brotherhood and peace", among them Rashid...

The introduction to Nabil Anani: Palestine, Land and People (Saqi Books, 2018) sets the pace for delving into the art collection in this book which weaves an intricate trail...

As the Gaza Strip hurtles towards becoming one of the world's worst humanitarian crises, with the image of ruling party Hamas wholly demonised in the West, Tareq Baconi's book,...

Michael Berdine's succinct analysis of his subject Sykes's political involvement in the Middle East is also a reflection that can be extended to the present-day turmoil in the region....

Memory and metaphor intertwine in Ghassan Zaqtan's "Where the Bird Disappeared" (Seagull Books, 2018), to the point that, at times, seeking to distinguish one from the other is akin...

When a last request turns into a journey, Palestine becomes tangible. Rabai Al-Madhoun's novel, Fractured Destinies (Hoopoe Fiction, 2018), weaves narrations of love, exile and loss, while edging continuously...

"If the breath and heart remain steady as the eye slips from "centenary" to "half-century" to "decade," this is because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has endured so long that it...

The erasure of Palestinian memory is often wrongly associated with the past. When combined with narratives that exclude Palestinians from their ongoing displacement, it is imperative to challenge both...

When British colonial forces took down the Union Flag and sailed out of Haifa port in 1948, they not only left Israel behind them but also colonial practices and...

If this book had to be described succinctly, it is a perfect example of the different components that construct an implosion. Marcello Di Cintio's "Pay No Heed to the...

"The stories told about Palestine-Israel are as notable for what they exclude as they are for what they include." This is an apt introduction to the three main narratives...

What we are accustomed to reading as structured news items or analysis about Palestine quickly dissipate in Richard Hardigan's book "The Other Side of the Wall: an eyewitness account...

Israel's colonial violence against Palestinians has produced several trajectories encroaching upon the indigenous population and their geophysical space. As a result, Palestinian resilience and resistance has been diverse, a...

Dima Al-Samman is a contemporary Palestinian-Jerusalemite novelist. She was born and raised in occupied Jerusalem and earned her bachelor's degree in linguistics from Birzeit University. Further studies saw her...

"On the first day of their journey, they walked for twenty long hours. On the second, they walked from eight in the morning until three the next morning. No...

To impart narratives of displacement, it is important to listen to the echoes of such trajectories. Ramzy Baroud's latest book, The Last Earth: a Palestinian story, propels this dimension...