Palestine-Israel Journal

Culture, Literature and the Arts

Jerusalem Song

Your walls fold gently, a wingspan embracing the dreaming city.Your air drifts with the odor of incense, women’s voices floating upwards, a twist of prayer toward heaven’s ear.I ho

Vol. 27 No. 1 & 2 2022

Heidi Basch-Harod

The Power of Film to Eliminate Gender-Based Violence

Film employs the most powerful weapon that we as a human race have to protect ourselves against self-inflicted destruction. That weapon is empathy.

I want to tell you a story. It is a warm August evening in Southern California. You are sitting with me in a high-ceilinged art gallery at the southern end of a palm-tree lined Lincoln Boulevard in Ve

Vol. 26 No. 1&2 2021

Mai Sayigh

Elegy for Imm ‘Ali

Palestinian Poetry

Elegy for Imm ‘Ali1Don’t go away! Across the distances you kindle our fires, deliver joy, ignite our dreams Leaving was never your style; you were always about to arrive Now t

Vol. 25 No. 3&4 2020

Mohammad al-As’ad

A Song

Palestinian Poetry

A Song1When we remember things One string rings out. Women alone Plays on all the strings With one stroke Because she is the entire homeland._____________________________1 Jay

Vol. 25 No. 3&4 2020

Tamar Hess

First Person, Identification, and Collective Guilt in Israeli Women's Poetry

The murder of the Dawabsheh family in an arson attack perpetrated by a Jewish terrorist (Duma, July 31, 2015) stirred widespread reactions of horror. Several Hebrew poems were published in the afterma

Vol. 25 No. 3&4 2020

Rita Mendes-Flohr

Art and Activism: Dilemma, Dialectic, Duet?

As the talk about Israel’s intended annexation of Area C in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) was being overshadowed by the coronavirus crisis, the de facto efforts to minimize the number of Pa

Vol. 25 No. 3&4 2020

Salma Arraf-Baker

Palestinian Heritage … An Act of Resistance and a Battle for Existence

In the context of hegemony and occupation, the preservation of cultural heritage is at the heart of the national struggle due to its association with memory and its role as a tool of resistance against the obliteration and falsification of the history of the Palestinian people.

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the Czech writer Milan Kundera says: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” If we consider this phrase, we find that

Vol. 25 No. 3&4 2020

Ofra Bloch

Filming the German and Palestinian "Other":The Making of AFTERWARD

Growing up in Israel after WWII, the air was saturated with the Holocaust, which I experienced as unrelenting hatred of Germans. I inhaled it, as one does oxygen, but could never exhale it until

Vol. 24 No. 3 2019

Recently Received Books and Publications

• Brynen, Rex and Roula El-Rifai eds., The Palestinian Refugee Problem: The Search for a Resolution. London: Pluto Press, 2014. The book brings together leading analysts, many of whom have been activ

Vol. 19 No. 3 2014

The Poet’s Struggle

Poems by: David Barbi , Adi Tishrai, Amir Or, Lital Michaeli, Raanan Ben-Tovim, Miya Shem-Ur, Gili Haimovich, Oded Hon, Mati Shemoelof

David Barbi Tul-Karem Mother told me that at three years old I asked Why can't we visit the houses yonder? After the war When I entered I did not understand Today also after fifty years As a three y

Vol. 18 No. 4 2013