In the public eye: Contributers to “A Land With A People”
A Land With A People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism elevates the moving stories of secular, Muslim, Christian and LGBQT Palestinians along with Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, Palestinian and LGBQT Jews, who find the courage to face what Zionism has wrought in very personal terms.
A Land With a People is a book of stories, photographs and poetry which elevates rarely heard Palestinian and Jewish voices and visions. Eloquently framed with a foreword by the dynamic Palestinian legal scholar and activist, Noura Erakat, this book began as a storytelling project of Jewish Voice for Peace-New York City and subsequently transformed into a theater project performed throughout the New York City area.
Contextualized by a rich historical introduction and timeline charting 150 years of Palestinian and Jewish resistance to Zionism, this collection will stir emotions, provoke fresh thinking, and point to a more hopeful, loving future—one in which Palestine/Israel is seen for what it is in its entirety, as well as for what it can be. Read more…
DIGEST: Reviews, interviews, appearances
Noura Erakat
Mohammed Mhawish
Democracy Now!: “Mhawish writes, quote, “Life in Gaza for the past two years has been a process of losing everything visible — our families, homes, streets. It also means losing what cannot be seen: the private space of the mind, the intimacy between people, and the ability to speak without fear of being monitored by a machine.” Watch in full here.
New York Magazine: “…Life in Gaza for the past two years has been a process of losing everything visible — our families, homes, streets. It also means losing what cannot be seen: the private space of the mind, the intimacy between people, and the ability to speak without fear of being monitored by a machine. A poll conducted just weeks before the October cease-fire by the Palestine-based research organization Institute for Social and Economic Progress found that nearly two-thirds of Gazans believed they were constantly watched by the Israeli government. This is the dystopian consequence of technology, supplied in part by American companies, being placed into the hands of authorities who have virtually unlimited control over a captive population they have openly villainized. It is the culmination of decades of monitored occupation, a totalitarian nightmare spliced with genocidal terror, a system that is already evolving and growing for whatever comes next. The old admonition of authoritarian regimes everywhere — If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to be afraid of — has no meaning in Gaza….” Read more…
+972 mag (published before Oct 7 2023): “Life has become rose-colored since I nestled my newborn son in my arms, tightened him to my heart, and listened to his soft, cuckoo-bird voice cry. For Israel’s rule, however, he’s just another unfortunate: stone-thrower, terrorist. Rafik and I are living different, but similar versions of the same life under constant fear. His childhood is likely to closely follow my own, and those of every one of my family, and every child born and raised in Palestine. Everyone has their own ledgers of violence. Their own memories of horrible, childhood-wrecking moments…” Read more…
Ros Petchesky
NYT Op Ed (print version)
“To the Editor:
I never thought that I’d live to see this day: a full, front-page article that exposes the realities of Palestinian life under Israel’s military rule. The stories you document about house demolitions, children terrorized by late-night raids, a mother separated from her children because of draconic residency restrictions, and the daily indignities of checkpoints and apartheid separations of roads and neighborhoods are horrific and heartbreaking.
None of it is news to Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem or within Israel. Nor is it news to many thousands of your Jewish readers, like me, who have visited Palestine and closely followed what is happening on the ground.
Still, I say mazel tov to you for this shift in The Times’s coverage of Israel and Palestine. It signals a real change in the narrative among mainstream media voices, a change that can be attributed only to the strength, scale and persistence of Palestinians and their many allies across the world who have spent their lifetimes seeking justice for Palestine.” Read more….
“An indomitable anti-Zionist Jewish feminist talks about the steadfastness (sumud) of Palestinians,” by Françoise Girard, for The Famous Feminist
On November 13, 2023, in New York City, I had the privilege of interviewing the brilliant Rosalind P. Petchesky, professor emerita of political science at Hunter College and renowned and beloved feminist activist and thinker. Ros and I first met in 1999 at the UN in New York City, during diplomatic negotiations over sexual and reproductive health and rights, and we have remained friends ever since. Read more…
Also watch Ros’ impressive interview on Al Jazeera, here.
Esther Farmer
Saira Ro, of the podcast Here4 The Kids welcomed Esther Farmer, one of the coeditors of A Land With A People, to discuss her participation in recent actions demanding justice for the Palestinian People. Farmer spent more than 50 years of her life as an activist, fighting for racial equity on college campuses, and advocating a free Palestinian state. Farmer is on the leadership team of the New York branch of Jewish Voice for Peace, which has been one of the groups leading the peaceful protests against the Israeli genocide. She was part of the demonstration recently where Jewish elder women chained themselves to the White House fence to demand action from President Biden. Ro explored Farmer’s origins as the American-born daughter fervently anti-Zionist parents, one of whom was a Palestinian Jew. Farmer’s parents were active politically, causing the FBI to visit her house several times as a child and leading her father to be brought before the House Un-American Committee to testify.
Listen below or at Here4 The Kids
REVIEWS
Reviewed by Inez Hedges for Socialism and Democracy
Anyone who has organized a public event to highlight the situation of Palestinians today has encountered the objection of Zionists who complain that any such event fails to present “both sides of the issue.” Here is, finally, a book that does that brilliantly. The first two personal testimonials, one from a Palestinian whose family was dispossessed in 1948, and another from the descendant of Jewish Holocaust survivors, set the stage for the book’s basic question: how can a people that has suffered persecution become a persecutor in turn?
By Martin Halpern, for MLT: “The title of the work is a critique of the Zionist concept that “Israel was a land without people for a people without land.” Zionists viewed the millions of Palestinians – Muslims, Christians, and even Jews — as less worthy than European Jews. When I first began teaching U.S. history in 1990, the textbook that I used and then replaced similarly viewed the indigenous people of the “empty” Americas as inferior and invisible. The resulting settler colonial states, from the sixteenth century to the twenty first century, were built on racism, patriarchy, exploitation, and genocide….”
LAUNCH
I never choose activism. It chose me,” Riham Barghouti began. “It’s like I was born into royalty, but in my case the exact opposite….”
In 2021, for the first time since years before the pandemic, Monthly Review Press, together with Jewish Voice for Peace, drew together a live crowd to celebrate the release of A Land With A People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism. Hosted by The People’s Forum, the book launch drew over 200 RSVPs, and featured Riham Barghouti alongside the coeditors of the book, Sarah Sills, Rosalind Petchesky and Esther Farmer, as well as two of her fellow contributors, Asaf Calderon and Tzvia Thier.
Riham continued:
“…I was born into a people being dispossessed, a history being erased, a culture being appropriated, a land being confiscated.
But I was also born into a family whose mind refused to be colonized. I was born into resistance.
My grandmother ran guns for the resistance in the 1930s. My aunts were all activists supporting the cause in various ways. My aunt’s husband – Ahmed Qatamesh has been arrested 7 times being held imprisoned for a total of 14 years under administrative detention – without charge or trial. Ultimately each time he is released, because there are no charges against him, only to be rearrested as he was most recently this past October.
Both my parents were political activists – mind you on opposite sides of the Palestinian political spectrum; My father was an ardent Arafat supporter while my mother leaned left. I leaned with her!
I was raised on liberation songs and dabka and political debates that went long into the night. I walked the streets of NY in protest from 2nd Avenue in front of the Israeli embassy to Atlantic Avenue through the largest Arab community in NY at the time. I remember one demo when I was scheduled to take part in a civil disobedience action. However, when I saw police dragging people off the street literally pulling one man’s shirt off, I promptly got up and walked back to the demo, only to have my mother ask in puzzlement and with a little bit of disappointment, “why didn’t you get arrested?”. I explained to her that is not what most parents hope for their children!
So for me it was not a question of if I would resist but merely how I would contribute to my people’s struggle. I don’t see myself as a writer but I welcomed the opportunity to participate in this project. It provided me with a new avenue to contribute to the Palestinian struggle.
Participating in the book gave me hope…it is a manifestation of my vision of liberation. What this book epitomizes is that it does not matter if you are a queer Southern Palestinian woman, a Muslim Gazan man, a self-identified Palestinian Jew, a refugee living in Syria, Lebanon or Jordan, or an Israeli Jew raised in a kibbutz, you are my people.
The dichotomy is not one of Israeli vs. Palestinian or Jew v. Muslim and Christian; It is one of colonizer vs. anti-colonizer, it is one of those that maintain and perpetuate oppression and those that oppose it. It is one of zionist vs. anti-zionist.
So you are all my people because my people are anyone that stands for justice – no matter how you got here. By presenting our collective narratives, I hope that this book will help decolonize the reader’s mind so that more and more of us can be born into resistance….”
Riham’s cousin Omar Barghouthi sent in a recorded endorsement for A Land With A People, followed by special video appearances by contributors Sara Abou Rashedand Mohammed Rafik Mhawesh. Shurouq Aljammal, a contributor to A Land With A People scheduled to read an excerpt ultimately could not appear, but managed to send the following message, read aloud by Jewish Voice for Peace-NY Organizer Elena Stein:
When my father first learned that the story of his experiences as a Palestinian during the time of the Nakba was going to be published in this book, he was beside himself with Joy. As a former journalist, he is aware of the resonant power that stories can possess. The fact that his experience could be of interest and meaning for those so far from home, that it would be of such significance for those of Jewish identity, makes him feel connected to the brotherhood of man in a way that he perhaps had become cynical about over the years…”
Watch this powerful event at The People’s Forum, below.
It was a completely full house, and we sold every single copy — 90 books!
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PRAISE
Regardless of one’s perspective on Palestine, it is impossible to read this book and not be transformed.
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
By seamlessly and passionately weaving history with heartfelt life experiences, and intensely symbolic stories with candid reflections, this collection reveals the real wreck Zionism has created, shattering the mythology that Zionism has always hidden behind.
—Omar Barghouti, Palestinian human rights defender and co-founder of the BDS movement
A Land With A People is a singular contribution to the decades-long effort to forge global solidarities against Israeli settler colonialism. In giving us everyday narratives of Palestinian courage and resilience, alongside accounts of a growing Jewish resistance to Zionism, the book offers a collective story of fierce struggles against racism and apartheid.
—Angela Davis, abolitionist activist-scholar and author of, among other books, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement
A community of Palestinians and Jews committed to a future without Jewish Supremacy Ideology, and with Palestinian autonomy. This is a volume of Palestinian voices towards movement building and creation of a joyous future, and Jews listening and then doing the work of changing their self-perceptions and living our responsibilities.
—Sarah Schulman, activist and author of, among other books, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International