Reading about Palestine 🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸
It’s harder than ever to look away from Palestine, and that's a good thing. The Internet has been crucial in sharing Palestinian perspectives. Caitlin Johnstone explains in her Substack:
There are a lot of factors contributing to the growing awareness of Israel's brutality, but I think the main reason is very simple: there are only so many viral videos of unconscionable acts that can be dismissed with "Actually this is way more complicated than it looks." It is not more complicated than it looks. Clearly. It looks bad because it is bad.
Johnstone’s newsletter lays out how the Internet has helped people in Palestine take control of the international narrative. To me, that’s why it’s so important to share footage and testimonies from people who are actually living there.
It’s also important to cut through the noise. There are many Instagram explainers floating around but I’m not sure that all of them are worth reading. I’m uncomfortable with professionalised social media activists parachuting into every crisis with homemade decks. The Internet is great for by-the-minute updates on current affairs but history is a different discipline. The books I read this week weren’t chosen for any particular reason, they were just already on my bookshelf. I’ve linked several reading lists at the end of this newsletter in case you want to be more intentional in your selection.
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi
Written by the historian and Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University Rashid Khalidi, this book is a great introduction to the history of Palestine. It’s split into 6 chapters, each dedicated to a different “Declaration of War”, or “turning point in the struggle over Palestine” as Khalidi terms them in the introduction. He starts the book in 1917 with the Balfour Declaration, not the 1948 Nakba (mass expulsion of Palestinians). For Khalidi, the Zionist movement became a real threat to Palestine when the then British secretary of state for foreign affairs (Balfour) pledged support for Zionist aims to statehood and sovereignty on Palestinian land. At every turn, Khalidi demonstrates just how international consensus and support turned away from Palestine, in favour of the illegal Israeli settlements. This is a political and military history. It is a history of war. However, there are glimpses of how the Khalidi family has fared throughout this chapter in Palestinian history and they are very compelling.
Our daughters, Lamya, who was five and a half, and Dima, then almost three, were at kindergarten and nursery school in different places. With the screeching roar of supersonic warplanes diving to attack in the backgrounds (one of the most terrifying sounds on earth), I rushed to my car to pick the girls up from their schools. Everyone on the road that day drove with the heedless abandon they always displayed when the fighting started up again in Beirut – that is, they drove only slightly more recklessly than usual.
The Khalidi family’s history is interwoven with Palestine’s. Rashid Khalidi’s great-great-great uncle, Yusuf Diya al-Din Pasha al-Khalidi, was the mayor of Jerusalem under Ottoman rule and was in direct correspondence with Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism. Many other members of Khalidi’s family feature in the book in their capacities as officials or academics. A naive reader might be tempted to cry bias, since the Khalidi family is clearly on the “side” of the Palestinians. The author acknowledges the “tensions” inherent in his approach but stands by his decision. I think the book is richer because of this. There is no such thing as unbiased history (as you will soon see), and all the better to read a Palestinian historian’s account of Palestinian history. It is, in Khalidi’s words, “a perspective that is missing from the way the story of Palestine has been told in most of the literature”.
Twilight of History by Shlomo Sand
I’d initially planned on picking up Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People, which the Guardian has described as “a radical dismantling of a national myth”. Sand is a Jewish Israeli historian who has written extensively about Zionist historiography and I wanted to learn more about the ideology. I think the book was out of stock when I was doing my big Verso purchase so I got Twilight of History instead. It is, admittedly, a strange choice for me. Twilight of History is an intellectual history of the discipline of history. Sand, who is a historian at the University of Tel Aviv, interrogates how we study history and what we have uncritically taken as fact. He does this by diving into the bibliographies of noted historians and the ideologies that govern their approaches to the discipline.
This book gets really technical at points – the first chapter dwells a lot on “techno-material chronology” – so I would not recommend this for a casual reader. However, reading this after Khalidi’s history of Palestine was very instructive. For Sand, there is no such thing as historical neutrality; history is not merely a way to answer the question “what happened?”.
The partitioning and division of time always display a certain artificiality. The historian’s intelligence requires him to be conscious, to wear away and undermine the conventional periodisation in order to struggle against the general somniferous effect of today’s scholarly “establishment” and its sworn guardians of the past.
Historians are guided by their own geographical, cultural, and temporal space as well as their personal sociopolitical convictions. Ultimately, Sand argues that history has been used pedagogically to write super-narratives that “enrol the past in order to build and stabilise a national present”.
Sand punctuates the end of each chapter, with notes on how the discipline of history has been wielded as a tool to shape Zionist ideology. Writing about the contradiction inherent in two Israeli laws – one that prohibits the denial of the Shoah (Holocaust) and one that bans the referral to the Nakba anniversary as a day of mourning, Sand says “certain things, it seems, are fated from the start to be thrown into the dustbin of history; and these are always components of the painful memory of other people”.
Boycott Divestment Sanctions by Omar Barghouti
In his blurb for the book, the author and art critic John Berger describes it as an “engineer’s report”. This is a startlingly accurate way to describe it. The book is a systematic look at the cases for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against the Israeli state and covers ethical, legal, and historical arguments. Its 16 chapters aren’t so much narrative progressions as they are versions of each other. Some chapters are interviews or open letters, the appendixes contain BDS Calls and PACBI Guidelines. The arguments are repetitive but are set in different contexts. That feels important, rather than superfluous, given that Barghouti’s aim is to equip the reader with the skills to make a case for BDS as a strategy for ending the occupation of Palestine. Barghouti himself is a founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and writes with both conviction and expertise. I’ve always known about BDS in broad strokes but was never too sure about its specificities. I found Chapter 7, Reflecting on The Cultural Boycott, especially useful for clarifying when and how to apply its principles.
We have never targeted individual artists or academics – not because they tend to be more progressive or opposed to injustice than the rest of society, as is often mistakenly assumed, but because we are opposed on principle to political testing and blacklisting. ... [PACBI] does not subscribe to drawing up lists to decide who is a good Israeli and who is not based on some arbitrary political criteria.
This book was written in 2011, so a few of its case studies are outdated. And it’s hard to read some of the more hopeful declarations of the political tide shifting in light of what’s happening now in 2021. I still think it’s worth the read, even as a book-length FAQ for BDS.
Free books and things
Verso Books (they published Twilight of History) is giving away two free ebooks:
Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappe
Pappe is an Israeli historian and activist whose work centres on the creation of the Israeli state in 1948 and the forced displacement of Palestinians from their land. He used to teach at the University of Haifa but left due to harassment over his political views. He has publicly endorsed BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) against the Israeli state as a means of ending the occupation.
An Army Like No Other by Haim Bresheeth-Zabner
There isn’t a lot of information about Bresheeth-Zabner online beyond his professional bio (film studies scholar affiliated with SOAS, author of several books and articles). The book is about the history and centrality of the Israel Defence Forces to everyday life in Israel. Bresheeth-Zabner fought on the Israeli side in the 1967 War, you can read an excerpt from the book about that time here.Verso has also published a Palestinian Solidarity reading list here.
Haymarket Books, who published Boycott Divestment Sanctions, has made their ebook Palestine: A Socialist Introduction available for free. It’s an edited volume that “makes an impassioned and informed case for the central place of Palestine in socialist organizing and of socialism in the struggle to free Palestine.” They also have a reading list that you can check out here.
All the books on the Pluto Press reading list are 50% off until 24 May.
Another reading list from OR Books here. Some chapters from their book Assuming Boycott have been uploaded for free by the Vera List Center at the New School.
The reading lists I’ve linked to so far are from publishers so they all contain books from specific presses. For a list that cuts across publishers, check out this Twitter thread by Dr Yara Asi.
Last reading list for now and it’s from the Palestine Festival of Literature. This is the most expansive reading list I’ve seen. It encompasses politics and history but also fiction, poetry, and cookbooks.
You can watch the entire filmography of Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman for free and on demand thanks to The Arab American National Museum, Arab Film and Media Institute, and ArteEast, in partnership with Doha Film Institute. These films are only available to viewers within the United States but I’m sure a VPN could get around the region block.
Another Gaze, which is a fantastic feminist film journal that I cannot recommend enough, has an online screening programme for films by Palestinian women up now. They’ll be adding to the programme continuously so keep checking back. Subtitles (in multiple languages! bless them!) are available for all the films. There’s also an option to donate to aid efforts and Palestinian film initiatives through their page.
Donate
There are tons of fundraisers for relief efforts – like the Urgent Gaza Relief Fund organised by the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.
Because this is a book newsletter, I’d like to draw your attention to this GoFundMe that was created to raise funds for a destroyed bookstore. The Samir Mansour bookstore was Gaza’s largest bookstore and was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike just a few days ago. This wasn’t the only bookstore destroyed during the airstrikes. Another GoFundMe has been going around for a different bookstore but it seems to have met its fundraising target.
If you’re in Singapore, the Rahmatan Lil Alamin Foundation is hosting a fundraiser for Gaza until May 30th.
Last words
I’ve spoken to many people over the last week who claim that they don’t know enough about the situation but they’re sure there must be more nuance. To cry complexity is revelatory of one’s personal beliefs – that there must be a reasonable explanation to all things, that injustice cannot truly exist, that the system must work. I implore you to do the readings. There are many many resources that I could not fit into this newsletter. Please email me if you need help accessing them.
Finally, the watermelon shares its colours with the Palestinian flag and has become a symbol of resistance in times of crackdown against displays of nationalism. And so, I leave you with this:
