A People’s Literature in Palestine/IsraelAn Anthology of Anticolonial and Socialist Writing

Recovers a buried archive of Palestinian–Jewish literary co-resistance against Israel’s colonial occupation

‘The people’s literature won't be halted by the military government, and its spread can’t be stopped by force or by the restriction of movement. Literature is the only infiltrator whose breath cannot be frozen by the shot of a gun!’
– Hana Naqara, al-Jadid (1953)

• Features short stories, solidarity poems and essays by authors including Emile Habiby, Sami Michael, Tawfiq Zayyad, Shimon Ballas, Hana Ibrahim, Jabra Nicola, David Semah and Muhammad Naffa
• Includes chronicles from Palestinian poetry festivals and examples of solidarity poetry
• Personal accounts of partition, the ethnic cleansing and expulsion of village communities, and the colonial policies that shaped daily life in the transit camps reflect an early alternative history to Zionism
• Stories of border murders, strikes, covert action, organising and solidarity link local struggles to global anticolonial and socialist movements, from Egypt to Vietnam

In the years following the Nakba, a small group of Palestinian and Arab Jewish intellectuals in Palestine/Israel joined together to emphatically reject the racist and colonial conflict paradigm presented by official Israeli discourse of ‘the Arabs’ against ‘the Jews’. At the heart of the movement was Adab al-Shaʿb (‘The People’s Literature’), popular writing-from-below published in the Israeli Communist Party’s Arabic-language cultural magazine al-Jadid and its newspaper al-Ittihad. These powerful literary works reflected the economic struggles of the working class, shared legacies of colonialism, and the potential for co-resistance.

For the first time in English translation, A People’s Literature of Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial and Socialist Writing brings together these stories, poems and essays of everyday life under occupation and displacement. Located in prisons, border villages, transit camps and Palestinian areas under military rule, these works capture the linked struggles of Palestinians, Arab Jews and Left organisers during the 1950s and early 1960s. Through these writings, the al-Jadid literary circle laid the groundwork for future generations of writers who used literature to push for freedom.

Find out more

To find out more about the history, context and impact of the works collected in A People’s Literature of Palestine/Israel, read Hana Morgenstern’s monograph published alongside the collection: Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial Literature and Radical Print.