From the PalFest Bookshelf

Palestine Is Everywhere

The latest installment of the PalFest Bookshelf includes Palestine Is Everywhere, an anthology of new writing assembled and edited by Skye Arundhati Thomas and Edwin Nasr.

Vital dispatches from Gaza, essays, poems, protest chronicles, images and letters from prison reflect upon resistance, solidarity and the right to self-determination. Amid a world-historical moment marked by unknowability and loss, this collection offers essential reading for those interested in Palestinian liberation.

Below, you can read the foreword to Palestine Is Everywhere, written by Rosa Ferré and Markus Reymann, co-directors of TBA21, which co-published the book with Silver Press and the87Press. And you can find out more about the book, including the other perks of becoming a Bookshelf subscriber, here.

“We suffer from an incurable malady: hope.”

– Mahmoud Darwish

There are moments when silence becomes complicity—when to look away is to become part of the machinery of erasure.

Palestine is everywhere emerges at one such moment. The withholding of aid, the denial of dignity, the orchestration of suffering, and the repetition of spectacular violence have all become disturbingly routine. Culture cannot avert its gaze. It must offer not only a space to make records, but also to reckon with why. It is with this conviction that we began this project, and with an urgency to center voices from Gaza. Voices that are being deliberately drowned out and misrepresented. Here, we insist on a slower, deeper kind of attention: one that makes room for contradiction, reflection, and care.

This collection does not explain or excuse. It does not trade in neutrality. Instead, it articulates the realities of living and creating under siege, dispossession, and threat. Inside Gaza’s scarred and besieged landscapes, life is relentlessly squeezed by bombardment and the denial of the most basic needs. These pages gather poems, essays, and testimonies that are acts of survival and dignity.

They compel us to ask: at what point does inaction become madness?

The urgency here is not abstract. Humanitarian corridors have become hunting grounds, and as the world debates definitions, people are perishing. This book demands that art and language do more than witness—they must indict. They must call out systems of military power, political indifference, and the legal fictions that sanction death and suffering in the name of order.

This book is also an invitation: an appeal to those of us who hold the privilege to speak and curate. Let us move beyond words. Solidarity is not sentiment—it is responsibility. TBA21 is committed to cultural production that unsettles dominant narratives and uplifts those on the frontlines of ecological and political crises. This publication is part of that commitment. It is a refusal to let injustice pass unchallenged.

The voices in this book remind us that to grieve is not to surrender. That to speak is to resist annihilation. And that art, at its most vital, can be both witness and warning—an offering of truth in a time of distortion, a call to conscience in an era of acquiescence.

These texts ask that we commit—unflinchingly—to listening. They remind us that testimony is the fiercest form of hope: anchored in reality, alive to justice.

New York: Networks of Value, 22 October

In October 2024, around 1,000 writers and book workers signed an open letter boycotting Israeli literary and cultural institutions that are complicit in violating Palestinian rights, and/or have not recognized those rights publicly. Within a week, more than 5,500 more writers and book workers joined them in taking this position.

Similar letters refusing complicity have emerged across cultural industries, signaling the clarity with which people see the material and psychological connections between art and politics. But little has been done to further organize this refusal, as we approach the third year of genocide in Palestine. We want to focus on the literary industry and materially map its complicity with genocide. We want to get down to the granular: the material workings of refusal, its contradictions, and the new possibilities, directions, and direct actions that might emerge by working through—and against—those contradictions.

At this event, organized in collaboration with The Poetry Project, we’ll hear from a number of writers and book workers including Aria Aber, Hannah Black, Benjamin Krusling, Abdeljawad Omar, and more.

New York: Fire in Every Direction, 26 October

Join PalFest at Middle Church NYC on October 26 for the launch of Fire in Every Direction: A Memoir, Tareq Baconi’s singular coming-of-age story about queer and political awakening from within the Palestinian diaspora. Baconi will be joined by Ta-Nehisi Coates in a conversation about personal and political memoir.  

Tareq Baconi is a Palestinian writer, scholar, and activist. He is the grandson of refugees from Jerusalem and Haifa and grew up between Amman and Beirut. His work has appeared in, among others, The Washington Post and The Baffler, and he contributes essays to The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. He has also written for film; his award-winning BFI short One Like Him, a queer love story set in Jordan, screened in over thirty festivals. He is previously the author of Hamas Contained: A History of Palestinian Resistance, which was shortlisted for the Palestine Book Award.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is an award-winning author and journalist. His books include The Water Dancer and The Message. He is currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the Sterling Brown Endowed Chair in the English department at Howard University.

More Upcoming PalFest Events

We’re keeping busy over the next few weeks, with multiple events coming up in London and New York. Check out the full list of events below:

• London, October 18: Book launch, Gaza: The Story of A Genocide, with Ahmed Alnaouq, Tareq Baconi, Ahmed Masoud, Fatima Bhutto, and Sonia Faleiro.

• New York, October 22: Networks of Value: On Refusing Complicity, with Aria Aber, Hannah Black, Benjamin Krusling, Abdeljawad Omar, and more.

• New York, October 26: Book launch, Fire in Every Direction: A Memoir, with Tareq Baconi and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

• London, October 29: Book launch, Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry, with George Abraham, Zena Agha, and Sarona Abuaker.

• New York, October 31: Palestinian Knowledge Practices, with Basel Abbas, Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Alia Al-Sabi, Lama Suleiman, Adam HajYahia, Nadia Abu El-Haj, and Mahdi Sabbagh.

• London, November 1: On Palestine & Kashmir, with Isabella Hammad and Mirza Waheed.

We hope you’ll consider joining us for some of these events, and stay tuned for more to come.

London: Recognition Politics in Settler Colonial States, Book Launch, 23 October

Join the Institute for Advanced Study and the Middle East Research Centre at University College London for the launch of Emile Badarin’s new book, Recognition Politics in Settler Colonial States: Normalizing Dispossession and Elimination in Palestine.

Using Palestine as a case study, Recognition Politics in Settler Colonial States shows how recognition politics operate to legitimize long-standing colonial power structures. In existing scholarship, recognition has been seen as an asset coveted by indigenous communities. This book forwards a new, theoretically ground-breaking perspective. The book provides in-depth critical analysis of liberal recognition politics and shows how recognition can be a tool for elimination. In colonial contexts, settlers use recognition to legitimize and normalize the dispossession and elimination of Indigenous people. More than this, settler colonial states themselves actively pursue recognition, employing it as a means to further the elimination of the indigenous societies they seek to replace.

In making the case, the book critically examines the Euromodern categories of race, racism and racial hierarchies and draws new conclusions about the interplay between colonialism, racism and Zionism. Central to this analysis is how anti-Zionism has been strategically equated with anti-Semitism, and effectively used as a tool for the advancement of both settler colonialism in Palestine and Israel’s recognition politics on the international stage. The book delves into indigenous normative resistance against colonial recognition politics through the lens of the Palestinian practice of ṣumūd (steadfastness), extracting its philosophy of liberation as a pathway towards a decolonial future for all in Palestine and beyond. 

This event is free with registration. Find more details and register here.

Book of the Week

To accompany Mai Serhan across the times and spaces of injury and dispossession, to bear the pain of limbs and land lost, to weather the impossibility of return, to excavate the depths of all that we have and all that we have lost, is a salve on the open wound of what it means to be Palestinian. This brave and beautiful book is a gift and an invitation, to remember, to create, to persist, and most of all to love.

– Sherene Seikaly

A young woman’s search for connection with her estranged father, her family’s past, and the Palestinian homeland she can never visit.

Mai Serhan lives in Cairo and has never been to Palestine, the country from which her family was expelled in 1948. She is twenty-four years old when one morning she receives a phone call from her estranged father. His health is failing and he might not have long to live, so he asks her to join him in China where he runs a business empire about which Mai knows nothing. Mai agrees to go in the hopes that they will become close, but this strange new country is as unknowable to her as her father. There, the ghosts of the Nakba come to haunt them both. With this grief comes violence, and a tragic death brings a whole new meaning to the word erasure.

In a narrative made rich by its layers of fragmentation, as befitting the splintered and disordered existence of exile over generations, I Can Imagine It for Us spans Egypt, Lebanon, Dubai, China and, of course, Palestine. It is filled with bitter tragedy and loss and woven through with an understated humor and much grace.

I Can Imagine It for Us is out tomorrow from AUC Press. You can order your copy from our Bookshop (US / UK).

Media Roundup

A City Beyond History – A new poem by Doha Kahlout, translated into English by Alaa Alqaisi: “A city beyond history. / Advance, O city of splendor, toward eternity— / not in history, / not in breaking news, / not within borders.”

Israel Killed Our Storytellers, But It Can’t Kill Our Stories – In this excerpt from the new book Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, Huda Fakhreddine writes about the journalists, writers and poets of Palestine who “are destined to account for a Nakba, remember a Nakba, and continue to predict Nakbas to come.”

The End of Palestine in English – Rawad Z. Wehbe writes of the shallow representationalism and tokenization that have marked the orientation of leading Western media spaces towards Palestinian poetry.

On Restlessness – Yasmin El-Rifae reflects on the complex social histories linking Egypt and Palestine, suggesting that “there is a plane and a language in which the pain and transformation we witness resonates, a plane that has to do with our personal and political histories.”

The Stream Runs Through Me – Three poems by Omar Berrada, in dialogue with artwork by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abourahme: “Red on red / The song is history / moving through the present.”

Two Years of Genocide: Gaza and the Unraveling World Order – Tariq Kenney-Shawa speaks to Leila Farsakh and Abdaljawad Omar about the past two years of genocide in Gaza, characterizing it as a rupture on par with the 1948 Nakba and discussing prospects for what comes next in Gaza, Palestine, and the region at large.

Chutzpah! Observations On Trump’s Peace Plan – Amal Ghandour appraises the so-called Gaza peace plan, arguing that although it affords Israel “the leeway it needs to sabotage the agreement,” it fails to secure an Israeli victory over the Palestinian cause.

The West Bank: Why Does Israel Want to Annex Land It Already Occupies? – In this 2024 essay newly translated into English by Shadi Hamada, Sari Orabi examines how Israel’s government is using the notion of “imposing sovereignty” to legitimize Zionist claims over the West Bank, and how the Palestinian Authority has allowed de facto annexation to take place on the ground.

I Believed I Had Seen the Worst Humanity Could Inflict—Until Gaza – Zaher Sahloul documents the systematic carnage that Israel has wrought in Gaza during his four medical missions there, as well as the hunger and exhaustion experienced by Gaza’s healthcare workers and the near-total collapse of the healthcare system.

Let's Ensure Gaza Ceasefire Brings Reckoning for Israel's Crimes – Ahmed Alnaouq suggests that the absence of accountability measures in the so-called peace plan necessitates the continued global push to break the siege, end Israeli impunity, and dismantle the occupation.

The Burden of Metaphor in Gaza – Samer Badawi comments upon the comparisons made in western media — “Gaza was Stalingrad. Gaza was Dresden. Gaza was the Warsaw Ghetto.” — strips Palestinians of the language that they use to represent themselves.

Thousands of Palestinians Return to Gaza City to Find a Wasteland of Rubble – Abdel Qader Sabbah and Sharif Abdel Kouddous report on the long journey north that many displaced Gazans have taken back to Gaza City since the ceasefire came into effect, only to find everything “systematically obliterated.”

The Race to Save a Medieval Palestinian Library – Ryan Byrnes reports on a recent settler assault on the Khalidi Library in Jerusalem, a centuries-old waqf that contains many rare manuscripts, and the ongoing legal battles that the library has to wage in order to remain Palestinian.

Suture Fragmentations—A Note on Return – A hybrid poem-essay by Sarona Abuaker, newly republished by Mizna: “Fugitivity is a rhythm soft in the under salve palliates the proliferations we do not need to be assuaged we need to set fire.”

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