Reading List & Films on the Palestinian experience and struggle for liberation

Bookshop and items from Disarming Design at Framer Framed

Reading List & Films on the Palestinian experience and struggle for liberation

The following is a growing list of recommended books, films and documentaries for seeking a deeper understanding of the Palestinian experience and struggle for liberation. In light of the current events in Palestine, a large number of filmmakers have made their films about Palestine available online for free. Below, we are sharing links to books and films that you can read and watch and share to spread the message to the world.

Books

Subjective Atlas of Palestine

In the Subjective Atlas of Palestine, artists, photographers and designers have mapped their country as they see it through drawings, poetry, cuisine, architecture and landscapes. This publication maps individual human experiences of Palestinians beyond their circumstances of oppression and occupation.

Published by NAi Publishers
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Available at Framer Framed

Greater than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine

by Nada Elia

In this bold book, Palestinian activist Nada Elia unpacks Zionism, from its hypermilitarism to incarceration, its environmental devastation and gendered violence. She insists that Palestine’s fate is linked through bonds of solidarity to other communities crossing racial and gender lines, weaving an intersectional feminist understanding of Israeli apartheid throughout her analysis.

Published by Pluto Press
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Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment

by Mazin B. Qumsiyeh

Armed resistance, suicide bombings, and rocket attacks, populate the Western media’s depiction of Palestinian resistance. Synthesising data from hundreds of original sources, Dr Mazin Qumsiyeh provides the most comprehensive study of the always creative, often peaceful, civil resistance in Palestine.

Published by Pluto Press
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Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

by Noura Erakat

Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine is both a book about Palestine and a meditation on the risks and benefits of international law for national liberation movements in pursuit of decolonization and emancipation. The book briskly covers an enormous expanse of Palestinian history, as refracted through the international law framings that have facilitated Palestinian dispossession.

Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom

by Rebecca Ruth Gould

Erasing Palestine focuses on internal politics in Britain that have encouraged a focus on words over substance. It tells a history of free speech and antisemitism which is inclusive of the continuous erasure of violence against the Palestinian people and why it matters to Palestinian freedom.

Published by Verso
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Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism

by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

Potential History is an urgent call to recognise the imperial structures of knowledge that underlie the institutions that constitute our world. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay argues that we can and should refuse the imperial violence that dispossessed Palestinians in 1948 its reverberations felt today.

Published by Verso
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The Least of All Possible Evils: A Short History of Humanitarian Violence

by Eyal Weizman

In the book The Least of All Possible Evils, Eyal Weizman explores the philosophy of ‘the lesser evil’ in humanitarian intervention, using the separation wall in Israel-Palestine as one example of transformation and humanitarian violence.

Published by Verso
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Palestinian Art: From 1850 to the Present

by Kamal Boullata

This analysis by Kamal Boullata presents insights into the development of Palestinian art before and after the cataclysmic events of 1948 during which Palestinian society was uprooted and dispersed.

Published by Saqi Books
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Origins Of Palestinian Art

by Bashir Makhoul and Gordon Hon

Origins of Palestinian Art provides the most comprehensive survey of contemporary Palestinian art to date, while exploring in depth the relationship between art and nationalism in the context of colonialism and conflict.

Published by Liverpool University Press
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Palestine: A Socialist Introduction

Edited by Sumaya Awad and Brian Bean

Palestine: A Socialist Introduction systematically tackles a number of important aspects of the Palestinian struggle for liberation, contextualizing it in an increasingly polarized world and offering a socialist perspective on how full liberation can be won.

Published by Haymarket Books
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Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History

by Nur Masalha

Starting with the earliest references in Egyptian and Assyrian texts, Nur Masalha explores how Palestine and its Palestinian identity have evolved over thousands of years, from the Bronze Age to the present day. Drawing on a rich body of sources and the latest archaeological evidence, Masalha shows how Palestine’s multicultural past has been distorted and mythologised by Biblical lore and the Israel–Palestinian conflict.

De honderdjarige oorlog tegen Palestina

by Rashid Khalidi

The 100-year war against Palestine is not a story of victimisation, nor does it attempt to deny the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or the rise of nationalist movements on both sides. But by clearly mapping history from the Palestinian perspective, this book provides a fresh perspective on a crisis that continues to this day.

Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question

Conceived by the Institute for Palestine Studies as part of a joint project with the Palestinian Museum, the Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question traces the history of modern Palestine, from the end of the Ottoman era to the present.

Conceived by the Institute for Palestine Studies as part of a joint project with the Palestinian Museum
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The Trinity of Fundamentals

by Wisam Rafeedie

The Trinity of Fundamentals follows the story of 22-year-old Kan’an during his nine years of hiding from the occupation between 1982 and 1991. Driven by an unshakable commitment to the Palestinian cause, Kan’an takes the reader through his compelling journey filled with sacrifice and struggle, love and pain, isolation and liberation. All the while, major political and historical transformations unfold across international, regional and local contexts, including the First Intifada. Throughout all this, Kan’an maintains a spirit of revolutionary optimism so strong that the reader is bound to be transformed. It is all the more moving to know that Kan’an’s story is inspired by the real life experience of Rafeedie as he organized and struggled against the Zionist oppression of his people. Love, revolution, and life – these are the ‘Trinity of Fundamentals‘ that pave Kan’an’s path of struggle. Although the novel is set in the past, it holds many lessons that resonate with our current political moment, mobilizing us into collective action.