Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/IsraelAnticolonial Literature and Radical Print

Traces the early history and afterlives of Palestinian and Jewish co-resistant literature, translation and cultural activism under colonial rule

• Reframes co-resistance for literary and cultural studies: demonstrates how solidarity between coloniser and colonised shapes literature, translation and aesthetics, reshaping politics and culture
• Provides frameworks for reflection on anticolonial aesthetics with roots in the global Left: these include radical rehearsal, documentary writing and counter-hegemonic historiography, education, anticolonial translation, consciousness formation and public mobilisation
• Uncovers a buried archive: offers the first in-depth history of Palestinian and Arab Jewish literary collaboration in the 1950s and 60s, centred on al-Jadid magazine and its anticolonial and internationalist networks
• Reframes Palestinian literature: situates Palestinian writing within the wider frameworks of the Arab Left, Communist cultural production and global anticolonial literatures, while illuminating its early links with Arab Jewish literary culture
• Theorises the magazine form: shows how journals such as al-Jadid and al-Ittihad functioned as critical infrastructures and counter-institutions dedicated to cultural survival, continuity and innovation
• Links Mizrahi and Palestinian literatures: demonstrates how early Mizrahi Hebrew fiction was shaped by and in conversation with Palestinian and Arab Left literary cultures
• Traces evolving practices of anticolonial and radical translation: maps how Arabic–Hebrew translation became a terrain of cultural struggle across magazines, novels, protest poetry and translation collectives, fundamentally innovating approaches to translation.

In the years after the Palestinian Nakba and the establishment of the state of Israel, Palestinian and Arab Jewish writers created a cultural front of opposition to Zionism in the Communist magazine al-Jadid. Thinkers such as Hana Ibrahim, Tawfiq Zayyad, Sami Michael, Emile Habiby, Jabra Nicola and Shimon Ballas formed a new literary aesthetics; they drew on internationalist, anti-colonial and Arab left cultures to challenge the Zionist narrative with stories of their communities.

In Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial Literature and Radical Print, Hana Morgenstern brings this forgotten literary world and its radical commitments to collaboration to life for the first time, tracing its influences on decades of subversive writing, translation and print. She follows experiments in building cultures of solidarity under conditions of extreme inequality, illustrating a theory and practice of what she terms cultural co-resistance. Engaging in close historical and literary readings informed by a decade of archival and field work, the book demonstrates how co-resistance shapes and innovates oppositional literature and social imaginaries practised jointly by Palestinians and Israeli Jews in the region.

Published alongside this volume is the companion anthology A People’s Literature of Israel/Palestine: Anticolonial and Socialist Writing, which presents the Arabic-language fiction, essays and poetry of this early anticolonial circle in English translation for the first time. The two books together document and interpret cultural co-resistance, situating it within the wider traditions of internationalism, anti-Zionism, and anti-imperialism.