5 literary works by Palestinian authors that capture different points in the Israel Palestine conflict

(Top) Books on Palestine; (below) file photos of Palestine Flag at Parliament House and Palestinian graffiti art West Bank barrier wall separating Palestine from Israel. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

“Israel is under attack.” That’s how the world is seeing what’s unfolding in the Gaza Strip, overlooking the fact that Israel displaced Palestinians to declare itself a nation in 1948.

In his scholarly work, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance (Hachette, 2020), Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi outlines how it happened, uncovering every facet of Palestinian struggle right from the beginning of the Zionist movement, whose founder was Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl.

In 1896, Herzl published a book Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), which was first translated into English by Sylvie d’Avigdor. His philosophy, which informed Israel’s move to erase Palestine from the world map and replace it with a Jewish state, is reflected in one of the diary entries Khalidi shares in the book: “We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”

The circumstances facing Palestinians now, however, are more daunting than ever before, Khalidi concludes. And there’s no other work that highlights it as passionately from the queer-feminist lens as Nada Elia, a diaspora Palestinian writer, does in Greater than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine (Pluto Press, 2023).

She summarises the “ruthless violence of racist settler colonialism” in one chilling sentence, almost foreseeing the events unfolded less than a week ago: “It is a sad warped world indeed where anyone looking at a dispossessed child standing up to the invading occupier’s assault tank views the child rather than the soldier driving the tank as a terrorist.” An unabashed critique of Israel’s multifaceted violence, this book bemoans those who feel that queer people are “placing ‘the gay agenda’ above the national struggle” as if they “do not want liberation”.

Chapter after chapter, Elia demonstrates how Palestinians are stripped of their identity — from land to food to plants. She borrows from influential activists like James Baldwin, Angela Davis, and Jasbir K Puar and holds the West, the US particularly, accountable for its complicity in the gross violation of human rights in Palestine, calling for a global intifada (translates to uprising, revolution) to free Palestine. Elia’s book, therefore, is an account which truly stands for what any freedom struggle should be — freedom for all.

While historical and academic books do offer what goes unreported, it’s fiction that offers immense possibilities to unpack the complicated truth behind unfathomable events and invites people’s participation to see them anew. Three such works are Minor Detail (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020) by Adania Shibli, translated from Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette), Susan Abulhawa’s Against the Loveless World (Bloomsbury, 2020), and The Dance of the Deep-Blue Scorpion (Seagull Books, 2021) by Akram Musallam, translated from Arabic by Sawad Hussain.

The first, Minor Detail, is a bone-chilling work of fiction. Divided into two parts, it offers atmospheric details of Israeli soldiers’ anxiety to control and demonstrate their masculinity, both of which are full on display as they rape and murder a Bedouin woman in August of 1949, one year after the Nakba (translates to catastrophe) — when Palestinians were displaced from their own land. The narrative then shifts to the perspective of a self-observed narrator in the second part. Born exactly on the day of the murder of the woman 25 years later, this man, who cannot fathom borders and remains fidgety throughout, fails to escape what’s destined for him, leaving readers absolutely devastated towards the end.

While Shibli’s prose is bare and minimal yet focuses on the minutest details, Abulhawa’s work stands out for giving space to desires alongside resistance. Principally targeting the machinery of shame and misogyny, it’s a story that Nahr (meaning river), an imprisoned woman is trying to tell, collecting all pieces of her identity while one is stamped on her by a “western woman” who pays a visit to the prison, enquiring how Nahr got involved in “terrorism”. Musallam’s The Dance of the Deep-Blue Scorpion is a standout work of fiction. It masters extended metaphor and motif as it tells this story from the viewpoint of a novelist trying to write a novel while sitting in a dedicated parking space, reminiscing on loss that seems to sway over Palestinian existence.