Save the date for upcoming PalFest events in the UK

We’re pleased to announce the dates for two upcoming events in London this October.

Join us on October 18 for the launch of Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, an urgent collection of personal testimonies, poetry, photography, art, and frontline reportage. Omar El Akkad praised the book as “an absolutely vital compendium of intellectual and emotional scholarship about not only the ongoing grotesquerie of crimes committed against the Palestinian people, but the very nature of colonialism and apartheid.” Ahmed Alnaouq, Tareq Baconi, and Ahmed Masoud will join the book’s co-editor, Fatima Bhutto in conversation.

And then, on October 29, join us for the UK launch of Heaven Looks Like Us, a landmark anthology of Palestinian poetry described by Randa Jarrar as “urgent, unflinching, and gloriously alive… these poems remind us that to be Palestinian is to be a revolution.” The collection’s co-editor George Abraham will be joined by contributors Zena Agha and Sarona Abuaker.

Both events will be held at Ibraaz, a new cultural center in Fitzrovia. Sign up here to get notified when tickets go on sale.

New York: Gaza Biennale, opening 10 September

The Gaza Biennale – a one of its kind, global exhibition shaped by Palestinian artists creating throughout the war in Gaza – announces its first New York pavilion exhibition will be on view at Brooklyn’s Recess September 10-14, 2025. Following this limited engagement, an abbreviated version of the show will be on display at Recess for three months running from September 18-December 20, 2025.

Launched in Gaza in 2024, the Gaza Biennale is a decentralized exhibition taking place in cities around the world, bringing together a vast array of artworks that defy conditions of constraint. The featured works encompass a wide range of styles and mediums – ranging from painting to video, from digital works to conceptual installations. The work is unified by an urgent and uncompromising vision, messages from Gaza to the World.

The New York pavilion follows critically acclaimed international presentations in Athens, Istanbul, London, Padua, Valencia, Mont Blanc mountain and elsewhere. Rather than a fixed traveling show, each exhibition is curated separately, offering viewers a unique and evolving opportunity to engage with work in a more immediate and timely manner, and within each local context, instead of waiting for larger arts institutions to respond to the call. With its decentralized format and emphasis on local adaptation, the Biennale invites viewers to engage with art’s capacity to reckon with today’s world. The Biennale is borne out of art’s greatest responsibility – to stand up for a people’s freedom against the forces that seek its destruction. The works presented in the New York Pavilion offer a glimpse into the projects of 22 artists.

Recess will be hosting the Opening Reception on Thursday, September 11, 6–9pm, and a hybrid Artist Talk on Saturday, September 13, 12–2pm. Full programming details and participating artists will be announced in the coming weeks. You can find more information here.

London: Understanding Palestine with Hazem Jamjoum, 27 August

Palestine House is partnering with Palestinian historian and educator Hazem Jamjoum to offer a series of one-off workshops on the history of the struggle against Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine. These workshops are designed to provide participants with an in-depth overview of Palestine’s history from the late 19th century to the present, while also creating a safe space for open questions and discussions. The first workshop will be held on August 27.

Hazem Jamjoum is a Palestinian cultural historian and educator based in London. He is the lead editor at the recently established publishing house Safarjal Press. His translation of Ghassan Kanafani’s The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine was published by 1804 Books and won the 2024 Palestine Book Award. His translation of Maya Abu al-Hayyat’s novel No One Knows Their Blood Type was published by the CSU Poetry Center in 2024. Additionally, his translation of Jawad Al-Aqqad’s poetry collection I Lead the Songbirds from the Slaughter (edited by Lisa Minerva Luxx) is forthcoming from Safarjal Press.

You can find more information and reserve your tickets here.

Call for Documentaries-in-Progress, deadline September 1

Despite the ongoing genocide on the Palestinian people, the relentless attacks on Gaza, and the escalating threats to the Palestinian narrative, the Palestine Film Institute (PFI) reaffirms the vital role of cinema as a tool of resistance, and remains committed to the urgent necessity of supporting Palestinian documentary films in international forums.

PFI, in partnership with International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), is honoured to present the 5th annual Palestine Showcase at IDFA’s market (November 15-20, 2025). This event has become an important event for supporting Palestinian filmmakers and ensuring their stories reach international audiences, funders, and decision makers.

PFI invites Palestinian documentary filmmakers and producers from all around the world, as well as film projects centered on Palestine, to submit your in-progress feature documentary projects for consideration. Selected projects will have the opportunity to pitch in front of a curated audience of industry leaders, festival programmers, and potential financiers.

An international jury will choose up to four projects to be presented at the Palestine Showcase at IDFA, which will receive:

• Strategic coaching from PFI industry experts.

• Accreditation, accommodation, and logistical support to attend the IDFA 2025 between November 15-20, 2025.

Applications are due September 1. You can find more information and application instructions here.

Book of the Week

The revitalization of this critical anthology reintroduces readers to powerful voices that have shaped Palestinian resistance literature. Rooted in defiance, refusal, and the pursuit of liberation in the face of ongoing occupation, these poems are essential reading for anyone seeking to engage with the global struggle for justice and the rights of oppressed peoples everywhere.”

—Noor Hindi

A collection of Palestinian poetry originally published in 1970 that resonates with liberation and civil rights struggles around the world.

This updated edition of Enemy of the Sun features new poems translated by Edmund Ghareeb, an internationally recognized Lebanese American scholar, and a new foreword by Dr. Greg Thomas.

In 1971, in the wake of George Jackson’s killing by San Quentin prison guards, a poem entitled “Enemy of the Sun” was found among ninety-nine books in the revolutionary’s cell. The handwritten poem came to be circulated in Black Panther newspapers under Jackson’s name, assumed to be a vestige of his more than a decade long incarceration. But Jackson never wrote the poem; it was authored by the Palestinian poet Sameeh Al-Qassem and had been included in an anthology of the same title a year before Jackson’s death.

Originally published by Drum & Spear, the publishing arm of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance links twelve poets working in a poetics of refusal and of hope. Bearing witness to decades of Zionist occupation, to a diaspora exiled in refugee camps and writers held captive in Israeli jails, the collection offers a means to an end: “as poetry, yes it sings—as bullets on a mission; it calls for change.”

In each poem is a whole life—joy, love, beauty, rage, sorrow, suffering—and in each life is a record of resistance: the traces of a people who refuse to leave their homeland, who time and again alchemize grief into principled struggle. In the intertwined histories of this book, and in the unyielding political edge of the poems themselves, is a long story of solidarity between oppressed peoples: from Palestine to South Africa to Algeria to Vietnam to the United States.

The new edition of Enemy of the Sun publishes in September in the US, and in October in the UK. Preorder your copy from our Bookshop (US / UK).

Media Roundup

The View From Gaza—As Seen Through WB Yeats’s Widening Gyre – Alaa Alqaisi offers a crushing meditation on hunger and survival in Gaza as read through WB Yeats’ The Second Coming: “Hunger now governs time. It becomes the unrelenting measure by which each hour is known. It rewires the body’s understanding of itself, distorting perception, dulling memory, blurring the boundary between emotion and need. When it arrives, it does not knock or whisper—it dismantles. Longing mutates into nausea. Anxiety folds into cramping silence. Hunger enters without permission and rearranges everything—how we think, how we feel, how we move through the hours.”

The Rest Is History – Mary Turfah reflects on the political function of photographs of mangled Palestinian bodies, arguing against the myth that photographs and images from Vietnam were what stopped the American war there, rather than the steadfast endurance of the Vietnamese resistance. Such photographs, rather, retrospectively vindicate the American consciousness about its own fundamental goodness. 

‘Oxygen is Not for the Dead’: The Life and Legacy of Hiba Abu Nada – Lama Obeid eulogizes the Gazan poet and writer Hiba Abu Nada, who was martyred in October 2023, and shares a translated excerpt of her novel Oxygen is Not for the Dead, which considers the lives of Palestinians under occupation against the backdrop of the Arab Spring. 

Guilty by Affiliation – Mohammed El-Kurd argues that the well-intentioned desire to refute claims that martyred journalist Anas al-Sharif was not a member of Hamas implicitly sanctions the colonial logic that makes certain Palestinians not worthy of living. 

Murdering the Witnesses: Israel’s Assassination Campaign Against Palestinian Journalists – Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Jeremy Scahill speak to the Al-Jazeera journalist Laila al-Arian about the complicity of western media and journalism in the targeted killing of Palestinian journalists in Gaza.

To Palestine’s Press Hero, Anas al-Sharif – Mohamed Duar eulogizes Anas al-Sharif, who refused to be treated as an exception and always framed his reporting as part of a collective effort to shed light on the genocide in Gaza.

Israel’s War on Journalists – Jennifer Zacharia argues that Anas al-Sharif, like other martyred journalists including Shireen Abu Akleh, was an intellectual in the tradition of Edward Said: somebody engaged in the work of representation, engaged in a form of public address involving “commitment and risk, boldness and vulnerability.”

The Western Media Is Complicit in Israel’s Murder of Palestinian Journalist Anas al-Sharif – Ahmad Ibsais notes the hypocrisy of western media when it comes to the assassination of Anas al-Sharif and other Palestinian journalists: “We have made Palestinians perform their own humanity for an audience that has already decided they deserve to die.” 

Palestinians’ Fight Against Scholasticide Fuels the Struggle for Freedom – Donna Murch, Ahmad Shokr, and Abdel Razzaq Takriti speak to Sundos Hammad, coordinator of the Right to Education Campaign at Birzeit University, about Israeli assaults on schools and universities as well as the role that education has played in imaginaries of Palestinian liberation,

The War on Jerusalem's Revolutionary Spirit – Raghad Zaeer argues, in this essay translated by Mohammad El-Abadsa, that Jerusalem, once the mobilizing core of Palestinian revolution, has been stripped of this essence by the occupation, in part by de-revolutionising prayer in Al-Aqsa Mosque.

The West Is Moving to Recognize Palestine: Does It Matter? – Lina Attalah weighs the pros and cons of Western recognition of a Palestinian state: on the one hand, it affords legitimacy and new avenues for international legal action; on the other, it will empower an already-embattled and widely-disliked Palestinian Authority.

Gaza's Last Call – Areej Almashharawi, a teacher in Gaza, describes how teaching has been a “last refuge” for her as she and her family deal with the immensity of starvation and bombardment.

Colonialization Through Dehydration in Palestine – Andrew Ross documents how Israel engineers water shortages in the West Bank and Gaza, through the conquest of aquifers and the destruction of wells and water treatment facilities, producing dire conditions of dehydration in Gaza. 

Prison in a Burning Tank – Aya Massri reflects, in this essay translated by Alaa Alqaisi, on the genre of prison literature, asking, “Is the literature that emerges from shelters, tents, or anywhere in Gaza—does it count as prison literature?”

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