17 Books About Palestine That You Must Read

Here is a list of 17 must-read books about Palestine, written by Palestinians. "In a land where hope is the most precious commodity passed down through the generations, these [books] provide a tangible platform for silenced voices to be heard and means towards gaining some dignity for a wounded nation. - Ramzy Baroud - Read the books to get to know Palestine closely. See what the Israeli occupation does not want you to know about Palestine and the Palestinian people.

The Battle for Justice in Palestine

Via electronicintifada.net

“[T]he struggle for Palestinian human rights must be closely linked to the struggle for human rights in the United States and around the world”

Mornings in Jenin

Via morningsinjenin.com

“We come from the land, give our love and labor to her, and she nurtures us in return. When we die, we return to the land. In a way, she owns us. Palestine owns us and we belong to her”

Gaza Writes Back

justworldbooks.com / Via justworldbooks.com

"Sometimes a homeland becomes a story. We love the story because it is about our homeland and we love our homeland even more because of the story."

Five years after Operation Cast Lead, these stories remind us that the pain lingers on and the people of Gaza will be forever scarred by the attack. Yet, the call for justice remains forceful and persistent, and these young Gazan writers refuse to let the world forget about them--their land, their people, and their story.

Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries

Via amazon.com

"You kick us out of Jaffa, then wonder how come we're born elsewhere?!"

***

“Fucker, I thought to myself. So irritated by a stare?

I wonder what your reaction would have been if you had lived under occupation for as many years as I had, or if your shopping rights, like all of your other rights, were violated day and night, or if the olive trees in your grandfather's orchards had been uprooted, or if your village had been bulldozed, or if your house had been demolished..

I saw Ramallah

Via amazon.com

“It is easy to blur the truth with a simple linguistic trick: start your story from "Secondly." Yes, this is what Rabin did. He simply neglected to speak of what happened first. Start your story with "Secondly," and the world will be turned upside-down. Start your story with "Secondly," and the arrows of the Red Indians are the original criminals and the guns of the white men are entirely the victims. It is enough to start with "Secondly," for the anger of the black man against the white to be barbarous. Start with "Secondly," and Gandhi becomes responsible for the tragedies of the British.”

In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story

Via amazon.com

“...We never set eyes on Fatima or our dog or the city we had known ever again. Like a body prematurely buried, unmourned withpot coffin or ceremony, our hasty untidy exit from Jerusalem was no way to have said goodbye to our home, our country and all that we knew and loved.”

Married to Another Man: Israel's Dilemma in Palestine

Via amazon.com

Two rabbis,visiting Palestine in 1897,observed that the land was like a bride,"beautiful,but married to another man". By which they meant that, if a place was to be found for Israel in Palestein,where would the people of Palestine go?

The Prisoners' Diaries: Palestinian Voices from the Israeli Gulag

Via amazon.com

Nael Barghouti: I hold the cell's bars and wonder, "Mother, will Allah give me long enough life so that I can see you again after this endless separation?"

Kahera Alsa'adi: "Was fate against us because of our love for our homeland?"

The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey

Via justworldbooks.com

Because food is the essence of the everyday. Beyond all the discourses, the positions and the polemics, there is the kitchen. And even in Gaza, that most tortured little strip of land, hundreds of thousands of women every day find ways to sustain their families and friends in body and spirit. They make the kitchen a stronghold against despair, and there craft necessity into pleasure and dignity.

Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions:

Via amazon.com

"The facade of democracy, not democracy itself, is what is truly collapsing Israel, as democracy has never existed in any true form — nor could have existed — in a settler colonial state like Israel.Apartheid South Africa was a “democracy” for whites, after all...

Nothing to Lose but Your Life

Via amazon.com

“Only then did I realise that for me, and many others, Israel was virtual. For Murad, Israel was 'home.' Israel was a reality; a harsh reality.”

I Was Born There, I Was Born Here

Via amazon.com

“If an Arab ruler wishes to arrest me, he will without doubt arrest me. If a policeman wants to kick me in the stomach and liver, he will without doubt kick me. If an esteemed ‘sovereign’ Arab sister-state wishes to exercise its ‘sovereignty’ against my thin body or my innocuous words in order to kick me out with its imported shoes, it will kick me out."

My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story

Via amazon.co.uk

Gaza is the frontline in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and rarely out of the news, this book explores the daily lives of the people in the region, giving us an insight into what is at risk in each round of violence.

I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey

Via amazon.ca

“Tragedy cannot be the end of our lives. We cannot allow it to control and defeat us.”

***

“How come a Palestinian child does not live like an Israeli child? Why do Palestinian children have to toil at any manner of hard jobs just to be able to go to school? How is it that when we are sick. we can't get the medical help the Israeli kids take for granted?”

***

“thundering, fulminating sound that penetrated my body as though it were coming from within me. I remember the sound. I remember the blinding flash. Suddenly it was pitch-dark, there was dust everywhere, something was sucking the air out of me, I was suffocating. Abdullah was still on my shoulders, Raffah came running screaming from the kitchen, Mohammed stood frozen at the front door. As the dust began to settle, I realized the explosion had come from my daughters’ bedroom. I put Abdullah down, and Bessan ran ahead of me from the kitchen—we wound up at the bedroom door at the same time. The sight in front of me was something I hope no other person ever has to witness. Bedroom furniture, school books, dolls, running shoes and pieces of wood were splintered in a heap, along with the body parts of my daughters and my niece. Shatha was the only one standing. Her eye was on her cheek, her body covered in bloody puncture wounds, her finger hanging by a thread of skin. I found Mayar’s body on the ground; she’d been decapitated. There was brain material on the ceiling, little girls’ hands and feet on the floor as if dropped there by someone who left too quickly. Blood spattered the entire room, and arms in familiar sweaters and legs in pants that belonged to my children leaned at crazed angles where they had blown off the torsos of my beloved daughters and niece. I ran to the front door for help but realized I couldn’t go”

The Book of Gaza: A City in Short Fiction (Reading the City)

Via amazon.co.uk

This anthology brings together some of the pioneers of the Gazan short story from that era, as well as younger exponents of the form, with ten stories that offer glimpses of life in the Strip that go beyond the global media headlines; stories of anxiety, oppression, and violence, but also of resilience and hope, of what it means to be a Palestinian, and how that identity is continually being reforged; stories of ordinary characters struggling to live with dignity in what many have called 'the largest prison in the world'.

Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape

Via amazon.co.uk

Six walks span a period of twenty-six years, in the hills around Ramallah, in the Jerusalem wilderness and through the ravines by the Dead Sea. Each walk takes place at a different stage of Palestinian history since 1982, the first in the empty pristine hills and the last amongst the settlements and the wall. The reader senses the changing political atmosphere as well as the physical transformation of the landscape.

Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

Via amazon.com

Tending one’s fields, visiting a relative, going to the hospital: for ordinary Palestinians, such activities require negotiating permits and passes, curfews and closures, “sterile roads” and “seam zones”—bureaucratic hurdles ultimately as deadly as outright military incursion.

Baddawi (Graphic Novel)

Via justworldbooks.com

And this is a bonus out of oven book.

Baddawi is the story of a young boy named Ahmad struggling to find his place in the world. Raised in a refugee camp called Baddawi in northern Lebanon, Ahmad is just one of the thousands of Palestinians who fled their homeland after the war in 1948 established the state of Israel.

In this visually arresting graphic novel, Leila Abdelrazaq explores her father’s childhood in the 1960s and '70s from a boy's eye view as he witnesses the world crumbling around him and attempts to carry on, forging his own path in the midst of terrible uncertainty.

- See more at: http://justworldbooks.com/baddawi/#sthash.1DZRLkwK.dpuf