Books To Learn About Palestine: A Reading List
A Reading List.
Everyone is talking about how complex it is. How the situation is complicated.
While I do believe genocide is not a complicated issue - there are 78 years of occupation and thousands of years of history to learn about if you want to educate yourself further.
If you're like me and your favourite way to do that is stories, here are four books to learn about Palestine and the Israeli occupation. All literature serves a purpose, so there is an option here for every kind of reader.
1. Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine
Gaza Writes Back is a short story collection written by Palestinian youth in Gaza.
Edited by Refaat Alareer and published in 2014, the stories in this collection hold power to challenge the dehumanization of youth (& all) in Gaza that is ongoing today.
They write about the violence, inevitably. They also write about the beauty, their culture, their land, and community. If you like reading short stories, this is one to pick up.
2. Rifqa by Mohammed El-Kurd
Rifqa is a poetry collection by Palestinian journalist Mohammed El-Kurd. Named after his grandmother, this poetry collection explores the history and ongoing realtiy of Israeli occupation in the context of his own family history, community, and lived experience.
3. Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa
his book is heartbreakingly gorgeous.
It is rooted in the occupation of Palestine as a core theme, while exploring ideas of resistance, of strength, of law enforcement, of family, of land, of love, and of freedom.
Reading Susan Abulhawa’s Against the Loveless World has made it so uncomfortable to see the contradictions and inconsistency in what we praise as resistance and what we diminish as terrorism. What behaviors we sometimes see as strength and other times as danger.
The protagonist is forced to flee as a refugee more than once, as was her family before her. She is cornered into making impossible decisions, and then judged for making them. She is a revolutionary in a world that did not give her much choice. But the novel also enforces that fact: we always have a choice.
This novel is a beautiful read about colonization, resistance, family, land and green colonialism, and ultimately love.
4. Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics by Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick
This is a non-fiction book that has been highly recommended to me. I'm sure you've seen it posted all over your booktok and bookstagram feeds lately. I have not yet finished it but I am trusting the recommendations and it is my current read in order to educate myself further. If you've read it, i'd love to hear your thoughts! This one is for the non-fiction readers who want facts and analysis and to make political connections.
Whatever you enjoy reading, and however you choose to learn, we can't turn a blind eye just because we currently live in safety. It's also important to make the connections between Israeli occupation and the history of Indigenous relations in our own home countries.
