Essays for a Free Palestine – free ebook

JVL Introduction

Verso Books, in partnership with Haymarket Books, has produced an urgent collection of essays From the River to the Sea.

This brings together personal testimonies, essays and interviews. Collectively they help us grasp “how we got to the nightmarish present” and prepare us for the struggles ahead.

Available as a free ebook.

RK

From the River to the Sea:
Essays for a Free Palestine

An urgent editorial intervention

Verso Books published in collaboration with Haymarket Books.

In the final months of 2023, as this ebook is published, Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.

Israeli officials have repeatedly made their intentions to do so extremely clear; talking of collective punishment, mass murder, and ethnic cleansing in newspapers, at press conferences and on television. While Western governments have supported the unjustifiable, or spoken inane words of condemnation while failing to take any concrete action, millions around the world have poured into the streets to denounce their complicity, to demand a ceasefire and a free Palestine.

From the River to the Sea collects personal testimonies from within Gaza and the West Bank, along with essays and interviews that collectively provide crucial histories and analyses to help us understand how we got to the nightmarish present. They place Israel’s genocidal campaign within the longer history of settler colonialism in Palestine, and Hamas within the longer histories of Palestinian resistance and the so-called ‘peace process’. They explore the complex history of Palestine’s relationship to Jordan, Egypt, and the broader Middle East, the eruption of unprecedented anti-Zionist Jewish protest in the US, the alarming escalation in state repression of Palestine solidarity in Britain and Europe, and more.

Taken together, the essays comprising this collection provide important grounding for the urgent discussions taking place across the Palestine solidarity movement.

Published in collaboration with Haymarket Books.

Cover design: Tom Greenwood.

This ebook is free to download.

From the River to the Sea: download here

Contents

Editors’ foreword

A note on our contributors in Gaza

Part 1. In This Moment

1. In this moment
Noura Erakat

2 .Testimonies from Gaza youth
Dunia Aburahma, Sara Besaiso

3. I couldn’t bid my apartment farewell
Tawfiq Abu Shomer

4. A Gaza daughter in exile
Reema Saleh

5. It seems like things can’t get worse
Khalil Abu Yahia

6. We’ve lost the ability to provide true care
Three doctors’ testimonies from Gaza

7. Dispatches from the West Bank
Five testimonies from the West Bank

8. On why we still hold onto our phones and keep recording
Asmaa Abu Mezied

9. Is the sky crying?
Rana Barakat

10. Western journalists have blood on their hands
Mohammed El-Kurd

Part 2. No human being can exist

11. No human being can exist
Saree Makdisi

12. Hamas and a century of resistance
Khaled Hroub

13. What was Hamas thinking?
Tareq Baconi

14. Exchange rate
Eyal Weizman

15. The end of colonial government
Samera Esmeir

16. Lessons from ’48
Soheir Asaad and Riya Al’Sanah

17. A war without a plan
Rashid Khalidi

Part 3. The enemy trinity

18. The enemy trinity
Jamie Allinson and Sai Englert

19. What the rules allow
Spencer Ackerman

20. The Oslo illusion
Adam Hanieh

21. The shifting dynamics of Palestinian resistance
Toufic Haddad

22. Bread, freedom and an Arab Palestine
Nihal El Aasar

23. Ink, gas, and water: Jordan’s peace with Israel
Samar Saeed

24. Reality denial: the war to resuscitate the myth
Haim Bresheeth-Žabner

25. Israel, fascism, and the war against the Palestinian people
Alberto Toscano

26. Three new realities for American power after 7 October
Noah Kulwin

Part 4. Not in anyone’s name

27. Not in anyone’s name
Ashley J. Bohrer

28. Gaza’s imperial boomerang
Hil Aked

29. The war on Gaza and the war on free speech
Rebecca Ruth Gould

30. For Palestine, it’s BDS or bust
Omar Barghouti

31. No Moses in Siege
Mohammed El-Kurd