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Hello, and welcome to our weekly dispatch.

Last week, Israeli police and the Shin Bet raided the home of the Palestinian journalist Abed Abu Shehadeh and detained him on the grounds of having “contact with a foreign agent.” The “foreign agent” in question is Azmi Bishara, co-founder of the Balad Party and former member of the Knesset, who has been living in exile since 2007. The “contact” was a public interview that Shehadeh conducted with Bishara in Doha before the Israeli elections in late October.

Shehadeh was not allowed to see his lawyers while he was detained, and the interview was the only clear evidence brought against him. Both Shehadeh and Bishara are Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Adalah, a rights group that advocates on behalf of Palestinians living under Israeli rule, said in a statement, “The message to Palestinian citizens is unmistakable: a public conversation with a political figure can land you in a cell. This is political persecution carried out through criminal law.”

Although Shehadeh was released on November 8, his detention – and the charge against him – are more than an attempt to intimidate a single journalist. The case, write Rachel Leah Jones and Libby Lenkinski, raises the question of “whether Israel can recognize Palestinian citizens as legitimate political actors, with histories, relationships, and ambitions of their own, even when they refuse to accept the limits placed on their identity.” Their story on Shehadeh’s detention continues:

At the center of this story is a word that deserves more scrutiny than it has received: foreign. Bishara is not foreign to Israel. He was born in Nazareth in 1956, into a Palestinian family whose community had remained in its homeland through the establishment of the state in 1948. He grew up in Nazareth, attended its schools, and began his political life organizing Palestinian high schoolers inside Israel. He went on to lead the Arab student movements at the University of Haifa and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, earned a doctorate in philosophy in Berlin, returned to teach at Birzeit University, and, while a senior fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, helped establish institutions devoted to democracy and political thought, including Israel’s foremost progressive academic periodical, Theory and Criticism. In 1995, he helped found the secular Arab political party Balad, and the following year he was elected to the Knesset, where he served for eleven years. His political life was not imported from Doha. It emerged from the experience of Palestinians who remained in their homeland and became citizens of a state that defines itself as belonging to another people.

Bishara was among the most consequential political thinkers to emerge from Palestinian society inside Israel. His central proposition—which he defined as classically “liberal,” not radical—was that Israel should become a state of all its citizens, guaranteeing full equality, regardless of ethnicity or religion. He challenged the contradiction inherent in a state that calls itself a democracy while also reserving self-determination for its Jewish citizens. His political project was not to import a foreign agenda, but to insist that the people indigenous to the land had an equal right to shape its political future. His critics need not agree with his philosophy, or with every position he has taken, to recognize the absurdity of treating his participation in Palestinian political life as foreign interference.

In 2007, Bishara left Israel amid an investigation into allegations that he had assisted Hezbollah during the 2006 Lebanon war. He denied the accusations, among them “contact with a foreign agent” and, fearing he would not be afforded a fair trial, resigned from the Knesset while abroad. The allegations were serious, but he was never convicted of them. He has lived in Qatar ever since, establishing major institutions devoted to research, education, and political thought. His exile in Doha does not undo his birth in Nazareth, his Israeli citizenship, his years in parliament, or his lifelong relationship to Palestinian society inside Israel. Political exile is not foreignness. Indeed, in a 2007 essay titled “Why Israel Is After Me,” Bishara introduced himself as a Palestinian from Nazareth and an Israeli citizen, writing about the accusations that had driven him abroad. Nearly 20 years later, the language of “foreign agents” has returned, this time threatening those who remain in contact with him.

Read Rachel Leah Jones and Libby Lenkinski’s full piece on Shehadeh and Bishara here.

“Freedom for Palestinian artists in the occupied homeland,” Kamal Nicola (1982) via the Palestine Poster Project

In this week’s Dispatch:

  • Benjamin Moser and Ahdaf Soueif on the PalFest podcast;

  • Noura Erakat’s UK book launch next week,

  • A curated calendar of upcoming Palestine-related events worldwide;

  • Dalia Taha’s Enter World;

  • Your weekly media roundup

New from the PalFest Podcast

Up now on the PalFest Podcast is an urgent conversation between Benjamin Moser and Ahdaf Soueif about Moser’s new book Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History.

Inspired by Moser's travel to Palestine with the 2017 Palestine Festival of Literature, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History is a sweeping and revelatory history of the obscured tradition of Jewish thinkers who have opposed Zionism.

Through a cast of artists, rabbis, poets, lawyers, activists, journalists, and politicians — from Europe and Africa and Asia and Latin America — Moser traces a lineage of Jewish dissenters who confronted Zionism’s moral and political stakes, often at devastating personal cost.

This recording is from a live event hosted by the Centre for Palestine Studies at SOAS on 27 October 2026.

You can listen to the episode here, on Apple Podcasts, or on other select podcast platforms (excluding Spotify, which has been accused of several unethical practices)

In the coming weeks we’ll be releasing more episodes, featuring remarkable conversations between Tareq Baconi x Rashid Khalidi, Fred Moten x Lena Meari, Ta-Nehisi Coates x Tania Nasir and more - so if podcasts are your medium then do subscribe.

Upcoming PalFest events

Confronting Zionism

We're pleased to be organising the UK launch for Noura Erakat & John Reynold's Confronting Zionism. 

Please do join us on November 17th at The Light, the beautiful auditorium at the centre of Friends House in Euston. Noura and John will present their new book, followed by a conversation with Rafeef Ziadah. Ta-Nehisi Coates will introduce the night. 

For over one hundred years, Palestinians have struggled for liberation in their homeland. Confronting Zionism takes direct analytical aim at the ideology and institutional structures animating Israel’s brutal rule over Palestinian lives.

Taking lessons from ongoing inequalities in South Africa as well as anticolonial and socialist policies across the global south, Confronting Zionism argues that at this crucial historical juncture, decolonization in Palestine predicated on redistribution, reparations and refugee return remains the only just way forward.

Tickets

Upcoming Palestine events around the world

Book of the Week

Writing from Ramallah, Dalia Taha captures her proximity to the Gaza genocide — the losses unspeakable and the destruction near total. In Enter World, poetry emerges as an answer to the violences of war, as a means to encounter and foster resilience. Taha’s lines bear witness to the atrocities in Palestine, but also reflect lyrically on beauty, justice, and humanity.

In Sara Elkamel’s spare and emotionally direct translation, each poem’s title begins with “enter,” an invitation to fill an empty stage, for a landscape to form. The poet’s world materializes: olive trees, hills, inscribed walls in prison cells. These images accrue into an intimate and mythic declaration of resistance through art, of beauty found amid terror. A world is captured, made permanent on the page, even as it is obliterated.

Order Enter World from our Bookshop.org shopfront:

North America

Media Roundup

The Palestinian Writers Fund – A new fellowship opportunity for Palestinian writers in any genre, with a deadline of 1 December. 

What Now: On Palestine, Freedom, and Our Global Future – An excerpt from Tareq Baconi’s new book What Now?, now on the PalFest Bookshelf: “Revolutions cannot be built the same way houses can. They cannot be preplanned and methodically constructed. They will erupt, spontaneously, energetically, as they have repeatedly done in our history. But while we cannot predict or anticipate our revolution, we can prepare the scaffolding that can support it when it does erupt.”

In Every City, There Is a Palestine – A podcast conversation between Shilpi Chhotray and Hatem Bazian, in which Bazian discusses how environmental destruction functions as a weapon of genocide and colonial control in Palestine and how the architecture of the occupation is part of that ecocidal project.

In Jericho, Israeli Settlers Violently Seize and Occupy Palestinian Homes – Katrine Dige Houmøller reports on a recent settler rampage through Jericho, in which settlers seized Palestinian homes, as part of the worsening Israeli settler violence across the West Bank.

Why Israel Targets Sacred Sites in South Lebanon – Mahdi Krayen writes about the scorched-earth policy that Israel has taken in the south of Lebanon, destroying sacred religious sites in order to ethnically cleanse the region.

In Gaza, Even Play Becomes Survival – Samah Zaqout recalls her childhood in the aftermath of Israel’s 2008 assault on Gaza, and compares her experiences to those of children in Gaza today. 

Balfour at 109: Britain Must Answer for the Abuses in Palestine It Now Condemns – Writing on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, Victor Kattan highlights a pending legal petition submitted over a year ago seeking the British government’s acknowledgment, apology, and reparations for the wrongful acts it committed in Palestine.

For the Love of the Theatre: An Interview with Ahmed El Attar – Georgina Van Welie speaks to Ahmed El Attar about his play Salma, Mon Amour, which appeared at Avignon Theatre Festival this year and follows how the Gaza genocide affects a wealthy Egyptian family. 

Amid Deepening Financial Crisis, UNRWA Conducts Mass Layoffs in Gaza – Mohamed Solaimane reports on the cut to UNRWA’s services in Gaza, suggesting that the goal of these layoffs and cutbacks is “abolishing the camp, abolishing refugee status, and circumventing, if not eliminating, the right of return.”

The Book Collectors of Gaza – A poem by Jim Aitken: “Unhappy the land with bombed-out libraries. / Unhappy the land that needed to bomb them.”

Elections in a Genocidal State Are Not Democratic – Raz Segal writes that “the defining feature of Israeli ‘democracy,’ including its elections last week, is its operation according to a Jewish supremacist logic, intensifying the discrimination, oppression, apartheid, mass violence, and genocide against Palestinians.”

The 100-Year-Old Zionist Plan to Steal Southern Lebanon – susan abulhawa examines the longer history of Zionist designs on the land of southern Lebanon, and suggests that Israel has its eyes set on eastward expansion into Jordan next.

Arabic Music – A poem by Mahmoud Darwish from a forthcoming new collection of his work: “Whenever the eyes wander, / Do these clouds, one by one, / Put me to flight? / When a sparrow scratches at the horizon / Do I search for an idol?”

Donate & Subscribe

As ever, thank you to everyone who subscribes to different parts of the PalFest Extended Universe. If you would like to make a one-off donation to help keep our work going, you can do that through our website here.

Thanks for reading.

Until next week.

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