On 10th October 2025, a ceasefire deal in Gaza was signed. However, the war, the devastation, and the immense loss of life did not stop at that moment, just as they did not start with the October 7 attacks in 2023. An Al Jazeera article reported a couple of days ago that, within the 30 days following the agreement, Israeli forces have violated the ceasefire terms 282 times. Therefore, resistance, protest, and solidarity cannot halt either. Though it is easy – convenient, even – to feel overwhelmed and look the other way, there are several ways to protest, including engagement with Palestinian literature.
The student-led team behind the Heart of a Protest mini-documentary held a screening in Oxford about a month ago. I had the privilege of an illuminating conversation with the team, emphasising the importance of listening to anecdotes, stories, and personal experiences from the region, coming from people who have to suffer the atrocities committed day by day. Admittedly, I have derived most of the following literature from a reading list compiled by Penguin and my English Language and Literature degree – a rather Eurocentric approach. Nevertheless, everyone needs an anchor, a starting point, a solid ground from which further points of engagement may branch out.
First on the list is a poetry collection published in 2024 authored by Mosab Abu Toha, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2025. I do not mean to suggest that The Forest of Noise is only worth reading due to its critical acclaim; I rather seek to highlight the importance of sustaining visibility, as well as remembering and honouring Palestinian voices.
my shadow that stayed / lonely and hid in the dark of the night”
Indeed, visibility and legacy form sources of continuous, inextinguishable anxiety throughout the poems. The second poem, ‘Obit’, highlights the personal dimension of the looming invisibility that the Palestinian people are cast under. The speaker reduces himself to a “shadow […] left alone” before crossing the border, “hid in the dark of the night.” He fears that his shadow, representative of the fragmented identity of exiled Palestinians, will remain unattended, “bleeding black blood / through its memory / now, and forever.” Toha draws us in with this sense of urgency, with the ethical imperative of tending to living voices as well as the shadows left behind, the shadows later destroyed.
One particularly chilling aspect of the collection is precisely the destruction of effable, evanescent, abstract memories of loved ones Toha had to bury. ‘A Blank Postcard’, subtitled ‘To my brother Hudayfah (2000-2016)’ mourns not only the premature and inexcusable murder of a boy, it expresses grieving outrage that the “cemetery [he was] buried in was razed by / Israeli bulldozers and tanks.” Though in ‘We Are Looking for Palestine’, he maintains that “cemeteries don’t mind our bodies”, later poems give testimonies of the opposite, the destruction of lives cast underground. Neither shadows, nor bones, nor memories seem to be safe in Palestine, not in 2016 and not in 2024 either. His intimate, familial trauma (like the loss of his grandfather’s orange trees in Jaffa) is explored with as much force and outrage as the 1948 Nakba and the massacre of the Bakr family in 2014.
Toha sustains a dual commitment to his craft and the Palestinian people, even as his faith in the force of poetry wavers. ‘My Library’ figures his penned annotations in books as “a ventilator / for a dozen patients” such as Haifa, oranges, Beirut and books; however, his optimism takes a dark turn in the final work, ‘This is Not a Poem.’ The elegiac tone in his final words transforms his collection into a “grave, not / beneath the soil of Homeland, / but above a flat, light white / rag of paper.” Substituting Palestine for “Homeland” at once reaffirms his connection and mourns the prospect of Palestine as a nameless state (or a stateless name?), as a region destined for conflict at the cost of Palestinian self-determination and the very ability of its people to survive Israeli occupation and offensives.
For some, poetry provides solace, while others may feel alienated in its abstractions and figurative language. Though Toha’s Forest of Noise works through historically and culturally precise moments of the occupation, it is still understandable that some readers may lean towards an even more personal account. Raja Shehadeh’s memoir, We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I (2022), is one such example.
Shehadeh’s structural achievement lies in the foregrounding of his father’s life. Following the assassination of Aziz Shehadeh, his son, Raja, set out to examine the copious volume of papers, newspaper articles, unpublished pieces of writing, and letters the father left behind. As an accomplished lawyer, Aziz’s life could not have been more closely tied to his Palestinian activism and politics, and to his commitment to a two-state solution. It is beyond my expertise to fully appreciate the details of Aziz’s unrelenting legal efforts to ensure the representation and protection of displaced Palestinians, as well as Palestinians living under Israeli rule post-1948. However, his commitment is palpable for readers of all backgrounds.
While Toha keeps our eyes on Gaza, Shehadeh brings us into the Occupied Territories and the injustices of Jordanian authorities. Palestinians were opposed and oppressed at literally every turn over the course of the later twentieth century – but Aziz never gave up his diplomatic efforts against any regime, Arab or Israeli. Even after two instances of unjust imprisonment, he continued to fight.
Several aspects of the text assert a memoir as distinctively Palestinian. Shehadeh does not weave his father’s story through a single timeline; he makes consistent connections between past and present, takes precedents from before his birth to inform his (and his father’s) legalistic activism. There are several such instances in the book, but perhaps the most salient one is a passage where Aziz’s work is rendered meaningless by Jordanian and Israeli authorities.
The Shehadeh family have spent much of their lives in Ramallah, a town under Jordanian rule until 1967, before its annexation by Israel. Aziz and his family moved to their Ramallah property due to expulsion from Jaffa. Privileged as the family was, they were by no means disconnected from less fortunate refugees, nor were their lives undisturbed by violence, imprisonment, and financial struggles. Significantly, Aziz worked tirelessly in helping some Palestinians reclaim monetary assets after they had been frozen in establishments such as Barclays and the Ottoman Bank. Aziz’s victories against Israeli authorities were diplomatic, legal, peaceful, and rightful. Yet, as Raja describes, “after 1967, it failed to serve as an example of what could be done to restrain Israeli excesses using the law. […] the Palestinian leadership took no notice of that case as a possible way of fighting illegal Israeli actions.”
The history of Israel freezing the assets of Palestinian people stretches back to 1948 when the Palestinian pound lost its currency, and money in Palestinian accounts was liquidated “as if they belonged to the [Israeli] state.” Such measures are important in the larger picture of dispossession and displacement; not only were Palestinians denied return to their homes following several conflicts, but their futures were also nullified.
Potentially the most Palestinian cornerstone of the memoir is the title of its final chapter: ‘To be continued.’ In the first chapter, we learn about Aziz’s assassination, but the final page reveals that decades after the murder, Raja “is still waiting to hear confirmation” about the assassin and “why the Israeli police closed the file before the investigation was completed.” The text is concerned with legacy, visibility, and memory in every line, much like Toha’s poetry. The resistance to erasure is a testimony not only to the resilience of these individual authors but also to the urgency of wider audiences to listen to perspectives cast under unspeakable threats for over a hundred years now.
Needless to say, this piece serves as an incredibly brief introduction to some Palestinian voices, whose struggle I cannot even begin to represent comprehensively. That being said, my words, or anyone else’s for that matter, should not be the final one. Reading is about picking up one text after another, seeing points of conversation, of discordance, of shared struggle. Just as each page leads to the next one, each piece of literature should lead to another.
I wholeheartedly encourage you all to branch out into further essays, novels, and poetry. Many of you will be familiar with the work of Edward Said, who has written extensively about Palestine – those experiences and accounts have greatly informed his seminal postcolonial work, Orientalism. His ‘Reflections on Exile’ ends on the arrestive articulation of exile as a “nomadic, decentred, contrapuntal [existence]; but no sooner does one get accustomed to it than its unsettling force erupts anew.” The state of exile never settles, and our eyes and minds must follow its course with empathy and urgency. The next item on my list is Suad Amiry’s 2022 novel, Mother of Strangers. Please keep Palestine in mind as you browse through the wealth of books available in this country.