Join the Center for Palestine Studies for an evening with Rana Barakat in celebration of her new book, Ongoing Return: Mapping Memory and Storytelling in Palestine (UNC Press, March 2026). Rana will be in conversation with Nadia Abu El-Haj. 

In Palestine, a walk across the landscape is a journey of return that defies time, layered with sediments of personal experience and collective peoplehood. For Palestinian scholar Rana Barakat, the experience of place is guided by the stories and memories of her grandmother, who was among the 750,000 people forcibly displaced in 1948 by the newly formed Israeli government. Since then, the violence of settler colonialism has actively prevented the return of Palestinian refugees, including those from Lifta, her family’s ancestral village. In the present, the settler state of Israel controls the fate of the remaining structures in Lifta, enforcing so-called development plans that limit access and leave the valley appearing frozen in time. By gathering stories from family and community members alongside archival sources and lived experience in the West Bank under Israeli occupation, Barakat reveals how storytelling provides a form of ongoing return to a once-thriving village and to Palestine itself.

One of the first books to position Palestinian studies within Indigenous studies, Ongoing Return offers a rich perspective on Palestinian history and the lives of its people today. Embedded in a deeply personal journey, Ongoing Return takes the reader through the past via the present and dares to imagine futures for Palestine and its people.

Copies of Ongoing Return will be available for purchase.

Find out more and register here.

The Erasure of Palestine is the outcome of a three-year journey by award-winning photographer and filmmaker Ahmad Al-Bazz, who set out to document what remains of the hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns depopulated and destroyed during the creation and expansion of Israel from 1948 to the present.

Today, unmistakable traces of destroyed Palestinian communities haunt nearly every Israeli settlement, revealing not just a past catastrophe but an ongoing process – a continuing history of colonisation and removal. Combining visual evidence, field research and historical testimony, Al-Bazz shows that what began as a single act of ethnic cleansing has evolved into a sustained strategy of occupation and erasure.

Come and listen to Al-Bazz’s journey of making this book. In his presentation, the author will also reflect on his project in relation to the current escalation in the Gaza Strip, whose population is made up of 80% refugees from depopulated locations across Mandatory Palestine, many of which are documented in his book.

Presented by the Palestine Festival of Literature in partnership with Ibraaz and Museums Etc.

 TICKETS 

Join the Palestine Youth Movement for the NYC debut of The Architecture of Genocide, a 3D exhibition map of Gaza's infrastructure before and after two and a half years of US-backed Israeli genocide—on display April 3rd–5th.

The Architecture of Genocide is a large-scale, tactile map display of Gaza before and during the genocide. The maps trace the annihilation of Gaza’s education, healthcare, energy, water, and food systems, exposing the way in which Israel deliberately targets and destroys Gaza’s life saving infrastructure. While Israel massacres journalists in attempt to hide the brutality of its genocide, the Gaza maps serve as a tool to document the genocide and confront Israel’s disinformation campaign. They tell not only the story of Zionist genocide, but also that of Gaza’s steadfastness, by detailing the strip before October 2023, showing how despite a 17-year long siege, the people of Gaza built homes, communities, and critical infrastructure in order to remain on their land.

The Architecture of Genocide exhibit is a tool to build, teach, organize and fight for our people in Gaza who have given the ultimate sacrifice. It seeks to offer a path forward: to expose the architecture of genocide, confront the systems that sustain it, and equip ourselves with the clarity, grounding, and tools needed to rebuild, organize, and fight for the total liberation of Palestine.

The exhibition will open on April 3 with a keynote presentation walking through the maps and historic documentation of two and a half years of genocide by the Palestinian Youth Movement. It will be followed by a special performance by the Palestinian Youth Choir.

A Mask the Color of the Sky is a bold, psychologically rich novel of identity, exile, and resistance from one of Palestine’s most vital literary voices—written entirely from behind bars. 

Nur, a young Palestinian refugee from a camp near Ramallah, is often mistaken for an Ashkenazi Jew. Fluent in Hebrew and with a degree in archaeology, he dreams of freedom beyond the fences of the camp—and of writing a novel about Mary Magdalene based on the Gnostic Gospels. When he discovers an Israeli ID card in the pocket of a secondhand coat, he assumes a false identity and is hired for an archaeological dig near Megiddo. Passing as an Israeli, he moves through a world previously off-limits, gaining insight into the lives and beliefs of those he’s been taught to see as enemies. 

But as Nur’s borrowed identity deepens, so does the rift within: between Nur, the Palestinian, and “Ur,” the Israeli. By exploring this internal conflict, unfolding alongside friendships and love affairs, Bassem Khandaqji offers a meditation on the personal toll of occupation and the elusive desire to belong somewhere—fully, honestly, and without fear. 

A Mask the Color of the Sky is out now in the US, and out in June in the UK. Order your copy through our Bookshop (US / UK).

Ramadan Has Become My Measure of What We’ve Lost – As Ramadan comes to an end, Zainah El-Haroun reflects on how movement around the West Bank has grown more and more difficult over the past five years, and especially since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza.

Al-Aqsa Mosque Closure Heralds a Dark New Chapter for Palestinians – Lubna Masarwa writes about Israel’s closure of Al-Aqsa Mosque in the leadup to Eid, the first time since 1967 that Palestinians have not been able to attend Friday prayers there, as an unprecedented escalation that many fear might be prelude for worse.

Zaghareed, Hakawati and Palestinian Storytelling – A new episode of the Tarwida podcast, featuring Sally Shalabi on different genres of storytelling in Palestine that open up imaginaries of “what liberation from a settler colonial reality might look like, which is the first step towards building alternative futures.”

The Gaza Doctrine – Neve Gordon examines how Israel’s approach to Gaza - mass displacement, mass killing, and mass destruction of civilian infrastructure - is guiding its illegal wars against Lebanon and Iran.

‘The Camp Has Grown Tighter Around Us’: Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon Between War and Internal Restrictions – Jaber Abdel Latif and Jana al-Hassan report from Palestinian camps in Lebanon on the unprecedented changes that refugees in these camps have faced as the Lebanese state works to disarm Hezbollah and quash the Palestinian resistance in Lebanon.

Tearing Up the Map – Andrew Arsan examines how the Israeli-US war on Iran is altering how American foreign policy has been devised across the region, ultimately threatening the nation-state order that emerged out of the collapse of the Ottoman empire.

Evacuation Orders – Loubna El Amine describes the social worlds in southern Lebanon—where approximately twenty percent of the country’s population lives—that Israel is trying to make disappear.

Writing Amid Catastrophe – Hana Morgenstern writes about Jabra Nicola and a cohort of Palestinian communists who worked to rebuild the national literary and cultural institutions of Palestine after the Nakba.

Under Cover of War, Israel Speeds Up Seizures of Palestinian Land – Maya Rosen writes about how the Israeli state is using its illegal war on Iran as a pretext to resume building a wall that is to cut through parts of the Jordan Valley, fragmenting the West Bank even further.

Memories of Diminishment – Ibtihal Rida Mahmood reviews a forthcoming collection of testimonies from Gaza, Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life: Voices from Gaza, edited by Samar Yazbek. 

“I Love You When You Lie” – A new poem by Gazan writer Ibrahim Badra, written in epistolary form to Sudan: “I did not come to save anyone. / I came to stand close enough / so the truth could not pretend / it did not see us.”

Here’s the referral program we mentioned earlier. We’ve got ten copies of Floodlines and five of Ismail Khalidi’s selected plays – so if you want those then grab your unique referral link from below and start sharing.

Finally, we’ll be trying out some advert placements at the very bottom of some of our emails. If you’d be happy to click on it that would be genuinely helpful as they are offering a generous rate right now.

OK, that’s it from us all at PalFest and The Key. We’ll be back in your inboxes next week with more.

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