Join us for the launch of Witness to the Hellfire of Genocide: A Testimony from Gaza (2025) by Wasim Said, a searing first-person account from inside the siege. This book refuses the distance that writing about Gaza often imposes, it is a testimony that holds you to the reality of what Gaza has been subjected to over the past three years.

A 22-year-old living in Gaza, Wasim recounts his testimony as he watches the horrors that unfold in front of him. As much as it is harrowing, his testimony, also unveils a world that we must fight to save. In reading his words and bearing witness to the genocide, the book urges the reader to acknowledge their responsibility to join the struggle for Palestinian liberation. In that sense the testimony is transformed into a call to witness.

In conversation, Mezna Qato and Nihal El Aasar will discuss the book’s significance as a historical document, as literature and as a political intervention. They will discuss what it means to bear witness, how testimony functions under genocide and why this account demands to be read now.

Mezna Qato teaches history at the University of Cambridge. She is a founding steering member of LIbrarians and Archivists with Palestine, amongst other formations.

Nihal El Aasar is a writer, researcher, political analyst and an organiser with the Palestinian Youth Movement.

Hosted in collaboration with Palestinian Youth Movement and Mosaic Rooms.

Last week, a group of artists and writers launched 92NO, a new boycott and pressure campaign against the 92nd Street Y (92NY), a staunchly pro-Israel literary institution in New York City that has spent the past two years de-platforming pro-Palestinian writers and uplifting calls for the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians. In the campaign’s own words:

Since 92NY canceled Viet Thanh Nguyen’s event in October 2023 over his support for Palestine, many writers and artists of conscience have withdrawn from scheduled events and refused invitations to appear on the stages of 92NY’s Center for Culture and Arts, among them: Nikky Finney, Chris Kraus, Christina Sharpe, Dionne Brand, Saidiya Hartman, Andrea Long Chu, Dan Chiasson, and many others. These artists did not allow their names to be used to launder the Center’s reputation, and others should follow their example and seek out alternative venues across New York City that host poets, novelists, journalists, musicians, actors, and dancers.

This stage and venue are tainted by 92NY's actions throughout the genocide — like canceling its entire literary season over a single writer's opposition to the genocide in Gaza, firing employees for wearing and displaying symbols with support for Palestine, or hosting events with Israeli politicians and military officials and other public figures who justify the genocide, dehumanize Palestinians, and call for war on Iran and Lebanon.

You can find out more about the campaign, which offers ways of participating for both writers and members of the general public, on the 92NO website.

By now you’ve probably read something over at The Key, our brand-new online magazine which is dedicated to covering Palestine as the core issue at the heart of the modern world.

We are committed to making as much of our work free on publication as possible, so have launched our new subscription drive.

Across all our publications and live events, we are building platforms for writers and thinkers whose work is committed to the liberation of Palestine and resistance to colonialism.

We hope you would consider supporting our work by becoming a paid subscriber.

For $2 a month, you’ll get new articles on The Key, as well as full access to its growing archive and the PalFest Podcast - and you’ll be the first to know about our upcoming events in your city.

At $10 a month we’ve organised for 10% discounts at bookshops and publishers around the world, as well as in our own shop. 

For $15 you’ll get a PalFest Bookshelf book selection in the mail every two months, along with unique extras. 

There are even more options at $25 and above - check out our Subscriber tiers and see what might work for you.

Thanks for supporting our work.

Who gets to tell the story of Palestine? For decades, Palestinian writers, historians, and journalists have worked to recover suppressed histories and share narratives of dispossession and exile.

On May 1, Tareq Baconi and Ramzy Baroud will be joining Zaina Arafat at Judson Memorial Church to grapple with this question.

In Tareq Baconi’s Fire in Every Direction, he traces his family’s history of displacement, from his grandmother fleeing Haifa in 1948 as Israeli militias seized the city, to their departure from Lebanon during the civil war, before they ultimately settled in Jordan. Ramzy Baroud’s Before the Flood reflects on Palestinian history and personal stories of his family and their village, reclaiming Palestinian narratives from distorted portrayals.

In conversation with Zaina Arafat (You Exist Too Much), Baconi and Baroud will explore the ways Palestinian history is written and remembered, from family memory and storytelling to political analysis and the fight against erasure.

This event is free but registration is required.

Join Another Story Bookshop for the Toronto launch of This Death is Not One, with co-author Jasbir K. Puar. Featuring a conversation with Maya El Helou.

This Death is Not One, published by Bilna’es, marks the first translation into Arabic of the chapter “Will Not Let Die”: Debilitation and Inhuman Biopolitics in Palestine, alongside the postscript of The Right to Maim. Not simply a reissue of previously published work or a translation, This Death is Not One includes a new preface from Jasbir K. Puar revisiting the right to maim from within this moment of genocide in Gaza that interrogates the new vectors of living and dying under settler-colonialism, and how maiming, in fact, speaks of extermination; an introduction by Nasser Abourahme reflecting on the book’s stakes in the present and its reception in the past, alongside searing analysis of genocide in excess of the law, and what this reveals and forecloses in how we understand the juridical body and militancy in the wake of Zionism; and original drawings by Xaytun Ennasr that inscribe a relation between land and body mapped through cosmological patterns tracing the relation between martyrs, who are referred to as moons, and the moon, a symbol for martyrdom in Palestine.

Find out more and register here.