Imagine an American TV network deciding to take the American Idol format and apply it to poetry: lining up poets to read their poems in front of temperamental judges while the nation gets out its mobile phones to vote for its favorite poet. One can be sure the show would not survive the first commercial break before the chastened executives pull the plug on it and replace it with yet another series on the Life and Times of Nicole Ritchie. Yet, that was exactly the formula for the latest TV sensation to take Arab countries by storm. Read more about Arab poetry's sometimes subversive answer to "American Idol"
“Palestinian girls have a lot of power,” said 17-year-old Haneen Owdeh on a hot summer day in the Dheisheh refugee camp near the West Bank city of Bethlehem. She then added, “but they don’t know how to use it. They need someone to point them to ways on how to use it, to show them what to do.” Haneen Owdeh and her friends, 18 young Palestinian women in total aged 16-19, form a grassroots girls’ art collective in the Dheisheh camp, where over 10,000 refugees live on one-and-a-half square kilometers of land. Dina Awad writes from Dheisheh. Read more about Turning our tongues: Journals from Dheisheh
The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by professors John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt weighs in with 106 pages of endnotes. The controversial tome challenging the might of the pro-Israel lobby is nonetheless accused of “shoddy scholarship” — much as when the authors’ shorter paper on the subject in 2006 unexpectedly burst the bubble of a lobby unaccustomed to challenge and reprimand. However, EI contributor Michael F. Brown finds that the heavy-hitting academics did not suddenly lose their intellectual acumen in penning this well-reasoned criticism of the Israel lobby. Read more about Book review: "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy"
The image of the separation wall that Israel began building in the occupied West Bank in 2002 has emerged as a trope in literature about Palestine. Its concrete slabs are found on covers of recent books, including Jimmy Carter’s Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, Norman Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah, Rashid Khalidi’s The Iron Cage, Joseph Massad’s The Persistence of the Palestinian Question, and Tanya Reinhart’s The Roadmap to Nowhere. Ali Abunimah reviews two recent books that take the wall itself as their central subject. Read more about Book review: The fantasy of hermetic closure
As the first English-language fictionalized account of the nakba (catastrophe), which befell the Palestinian nation as the state of Israel was declared on the land of historic Palestine, Ibrahim Fawal’s celebrated novel On the Hills of God is an important achievement. But despite its relevant timing, its impressive Pen Oakland award, and its tomelike 446 pages, Fawal’s book only barely manages to surmount its faults. The story takes place in 1947-48, in the fictional village of Ardallah, literally “the land of God,” an everyvillage of sorts. Read more about Book review: "On the Hills of God"
Wael Zuaiter was the first victim in Europe in a series of assassinations of Palestinian artists, intellectuals and diplomats perpetrated by Israeli agents that was already underway in the Middle East. Zuaiter was gunned down by 12 bullets outside his apartment in Piazza Annibaliano, Rome on 16 October 1972. In 1979, Zuaiter’s companion of eight years, Sydney-born artist Janet Venn-Brown published For a Palestinian: A Memorial to Wael Zuaiter. Artist Emily Jacir writes how a chapter of the work which was to be made into a film became the point of departure for her project “Material for a film.” Read more about "Material for a film": Retracing Wael Zuaiter (Part 1)
On Monday, 16 October 1972, Wael Zuaiter left Janet Venn-Brown’s apartment and headed to his apartment at no. 4 Piazza Annibaliano in Rome. He had been reading One Thousand and One Nights on Janet’s couch, searching for references to use in an article he was planning to write that evening. He took two buses to get from Venn-Brown’s place to his in northern Rome. Just as he reached the elevator inside the entrance to the building of the apartment block where he lived, Israeli assassins fired 12 bullets into his head and chest with .22 caliber pistols at close range. Read more about "Material for a film": A performance (Part 2)
“You begin to suspect that there is something extremely odd going on … it is deeply disturbing,” says Alison Weir, narrator of the new documentary Occupation 101, on what one experiences as soon as they read between the lines of news reports from Israel/Palestine. The film indeed succeeds in instilling this feeling in its viewers. The chronology of the conflict is explained through snappily edited interviews with activists, journalists, clergy people, and others, while richly illustrated by archive footage and photographs. EI’s Maureen Clare Murphy reviews. Read more about Film review: "Occupation 101"
Mourid Barghouti was literally completing his final exams for his BA at Cairo University when the 1967 War broke out, an event that marked his exile from Palestine. He wrote the critically acclaimed and award-winning book, I Saw Ramallah, about this period of displacement and his feelings on finally being able to return temporarily to Palestine, visiting the places and homes of people who were part of his first 20 years of life. EI contributor Bill Parry interviews Barghouti on the anniversary of 40 years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Read more about Forty years of displacement: Interview with Mourid Barghouti
Jamil Hilal’s book Where Now for Palestine, the Demise of the Two State Solution is like the biblical Daniel interpreting the writing on the wall. Thorough and compelling, this book contains eleven illuminating essays with razor sharp analysis on the current state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the demise of the two-state solution. “The policy imperatives of political Zionism have been oriented towards occupying land with no, or the minimum of, Palestinians.” Hilal writes. EI contributor Miko Peled reviews. Read more about The Writing on the Wall
