Centring Palestine: a Summer Reading List

Over the past three months, many of Aotearoa’s artists and arts workers have come out strongly in support of Palestine. Expressions of solidarity with those living under Israeli occupation, and now constant bombardment still unfolding in Gaza and the West Bank, have been flaxroots-led, with many circulating and signing open letters, attending rallies, scheduling screenings or raffling artworks.

In the words of activist and abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, the community is calling for the recognition that “where life is precious, life is precious,” which world leaders are drastically fail to do.

In recognition of the history from which today’s crisis stems, The Art Paper invited Hana Pera Aoake of Kei te pai Press to compile a reading list that provides a starting point for understanding the occupation, the case for Palestinian liberation and its connection with global anti-colonial resistance.

Melanie Tangaere Baldwin, *Mai i te awa ki te Moana*, 2023, woodblock print (red ink on paper), 21 x 29.7 cm
This artwork was produced as a fundraiser toward on the ground support in Gaza. The artist donated her own time, materials and all postage costs.

Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

“The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves.” (p. 39)

In order to understand any decolonial struggle it is essential to read the Martiniquan/French philosopher, anticolonial hero and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. Written in the context of Algeria’s anti-colonial struggle, Fanon argues that colonised states are created and maintained by the use of violence or the threat of violence and the construction of racial and cultural hierarchies. This is particularly pertinent when considering the Great March of Return in 2018–19, when Palestinians initiated weekly peaceful mass demonstrations near the Gaza–Israel border, during which a total of 223 Palestinians were murdered by Israeli forces. What option do the colonised have but violence when peaceful non-violent forms of resistance result in brutal repression? Fanon’s writing reminds us that the violent nature of colonisation is inherently dehumanising, and offers hope, inspiration and guidance at this time of unthinkable suffering.

Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine (1979)

“... the question of Palestine is a concrete historical one that can be comprehended in human terms; it is not a gigantic, psychological monster poised to threaten the entire world. But this is precisely how it has been represented.” (p. 230)

Edward Said is perhaps the best known Palestinian thinker and writer in the west. His book, The Question of Palestine, was written in the context of exile and in the tradition of aligning political and philosophical arguments, alongside his personal history of displacement following the 1948 Nakba. The book was written following comments made by then-US President Jimmy Carter, who had spoken in support of Palestine and for a ‘Palestinian homeland’. This statement was significant given that the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasir Arafat, was, at that time, prepared to accept Israel’s right to exist if Israel would simultaneously endorse a Palestinian homeland.

This book clarifies what Palestine is, what Zionism is, how this has impacted Palestinian lives, and the historical movements and future possibilities for the self-determination of Palestinian people. The book is hopeful, in part because it echoes the goals and aspirations of a segment of the Palestinian community in diaspora, particularly in the United States during Carter’s term. It is grounded in the matter and origins of land dispossession, but also argues that the future cannot be shaped by the so-called ‘two state solution’, but by a secular, democratic state in which Jewish and Palestinian peoples coexist and cogovern.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (2019)

Azoulay writes beautifully and incisively about her own family’s history as Jewish Palestinians who became ‘Israeli’ and how she chooses to use the privilege of having access to archival materials, and the freedom of being able to move through the world as an Israeli citizen. The book is essentially a treatise on the ways in which museum workers should not just de-imperialise museum collections, but develop new methods and ethics for working with historical and archival materials that refuse to see these items as objects of the past.

Azoulay wrote this work with a companion: a photograph of an elderly Palestinian man, whom she speaks to and of throughout the book, acknowledging the man’s mauri embedded not just within the photograph, but on the stolen land where she is standing. It offers a way of working in museums and a set of politics that can help us understand how to live and understand [... e.g. objects as loaded with relationships, with history and its injustices, but also the possibility of redress]. Anyone working in museums or archives should read this book.

Anthony Lowenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory (2023)

The Palestine Laboratory is a clear and concise history of the development of Israeli arms manufacturing. What becomes clear in reading Lowenstein’s work is that Israel has one of the world’s most powerful militaries, bolstered by more than $3.8 billion of military aid each year from the US. It is a nuclear power with an arsenal of weapons, granted funding and impunity by western powers. These technologies are currently sold to over 130 nations around the world, and have played a role in bolstering violence at the US–Mexico border and in Indian-occupied Kashmir, arming and training apartheid regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia, colonial regimes in the Middle East and North Africa, and dictatorships in Central and South America and also in Asia.

Other useful texts:

Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (2007) by Eyal Weizman; From Ruins of Empire: the Revolt Against The West and The Remaking of Asia (2012) by Pankaj Mishra; Freedom is a constant struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the foundations of a movement (2015) by Angela Y. Davis; The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development (2016) by Sara Roy; Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom (2018) by Norman G. Finkelstein; The Colonial Lives of Property: Land, Law and Racial regimes of property (2018) by Brenna Bhandar; and Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (2022) by Ruth Wilson Gilmore.