Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/Israel : Anticolonial Literature and Radical Print

Traces the early history and afterlives of Palestinian and Jewish co-resistant literature, translation and cultural activism under colonial rule.

In the years after the Palestinian Nakba and the establishment of the state of Israel, Palestinian and Arab Jewish writers created a cultural front of opposition to Zionism in the Communist magazine al-Jadid. Thinkers such as Hana Ibrahim, Tawfiq Zayyad, Sami Michael, Emile Habiby, Jabra Nicola,and Shimon Ballas formed a new literary aesthetics; they drew on internationalist, anti-colonial and Arab left cultures to challenge the Zionist narrative with stories of their communities. In Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial Literature and Radical Print, Hana Morgenstern brings this forgotten literary world and its radical commitments to collaboration to life for the first time, tracing its influences on decades of subversive writing, translation and print. She follows experiments in building cultures of solidarity under conditions of extreme inequality, illustrating a theory and practice of what she terms cultural co-resistance. Engaging in close historical and literary readings informed by a decade of archival and field work, the book demonstrates how co-resistance shapes and innovates oppositional literature and social imaginaries practised jointly by Palestinians and Israeli Jews in the region. Published alongside this volume is the companion anthology A People’s Literature of Israel/Palestine: Anticolonial and Socialist Writing, which presents the Arabic-language fiction, essays and poetry of this early anticolonial circle in English translation for the first time. The two books together document and interpret cultural co-resistance, situating it within the wider traditions of internationalism, anti-Zionism, and anti-imperialism.