With its unique context, skillful execution, and monumental calling, Palestinian literature is an inspiring and fertile ground for study. In my own Arabic courses, it is by far the most popular subject. This term, the haunting and scathing “Why did you not knock on the sides of the water tank?” from Ghassan Kanafani’s Men Under the Sun electrified my Arabic IV classroom. Lines from Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry tattoos many walls around Tahrir Square, and his iconic “On this land what deserves life” continues to echo everywhere. A literature known for its focus on resistance, memory, suffocation, injustice, identity, and the thorny questions of individual memory, Palestinian literature now confronts the ongoing apocalypse in Gaza. Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza marks the most intense and criminal phase of its occupation and apartheid; the 1948 Nakba resulted in the internal and external displacement of 700,000 Palestinians and the massacre of approximately 15,000, while to date, the entire 2.2 million population of Gaza have been forced to internally displace several times as a result of the current genocidal campaign, 85-95 percent of all structures have been destroyed, and 75,000 people have been killed according to the most conservative estimates.
But how and why are Palestinians to write about a genocide? If “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” as German Philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote, how do Palestinian and Arab writers grapple with this genocide without becoming ‘barbaric’?
But how and why are Palestinians to write about a genocide? If “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” as German Philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote, how do Palestinian and Arab writers grapple with this genocide without becoming ‘barbaric’? Hoda Barakat, Lebanese novelist, declared, “We cannot produce literature. Only some organic destruction of our agonizing selves, as the nervous system is incapable of inciting the mouth to speak and the hand to write.”[1] Eminent Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli wrote an essay reflecting on the cancellation of her prize at the Frankfurt Book Fair, stating that since the genocide, she has been haunted by two relentless fears, one of a monster now living in her childhood home from which she was displaced and another about “A loss of language… these two fears have haunted me in the past few months, also with the death of a number of writers who gave me ways to life; Muhannad Yunis, Gilles Deleuze, Gherasim Luca, and Sylvia Plath. All of them died by suicide. I feel that in some way their action ascertains that my two fears are not only a product of my imagination. Rather, they refer to the limits of reality, the limits of language.”[2]
Literary critics of Arabic and Palestinian literature are witnessing the birth of a new type of literature, one that, although bearing similarities and continuities with Palestinian literature, is indicative of a crucial shift. Due to the surprising and incessant nature of the genocide, a new literature came out of the womb of supremely transnational Palestinian Literature. This newly-born ‘Gaza literature’ focuses on the Israeli genocide and its aftermath, and enters the world not as a mute infant, but speaking from the cradle, created in a full swoop. It was born on the thin event horizon of the black hole of destruction of genocide, complete with its themes, genres, authors, aesthetics and preoccupations in place.
What about the Gaza Genres and Themes?
Diaries (and, by extension, daily chronicles and dispatches) as well as collected essays are quintessential to this emerging genre. Here, diaries in particular are the essential building block, not only because of the barring of international journalists from Gaza and biases in international coverage but also because diaries center the visceral day-to-day and minute-to-minute human costs and suffering.
Diaries (and, by extension, daily chronicles and dispatches) as well as collected essays are quintessential to this emerging genre. Here, diaries in particular are the essential building block, not only because of the barring of international journalists from Gaza and biases in international coverage but also because diaries center the visceral day-to-day and minute-to-minute human costs and suffering.
Of note are Yusrī al-Ghūl’s moving Nuzūḥ naḥwa al-shamāl (Displacement to the North)[3] on his displacement within the northern parts of Gaza, the articles and social media posts of the cynical ‘champion of human-brokenness’ Akram al-Surani, and “Yawmiyyāt al-Ibāda” (Genocide Diaries) of writer and novelist Atif Abu Yusuf. As for collected volumes, arguably the most noteworthy is Bi-khatt aḥmar (In Red Script), a collection of essays by influential Arabic writers. Its editor Ṭāriq ʿAṣrāwī opens the collection noting that, “what happened and continues to happen in Palestine since the 7th of October changed the meaning of things. It dwarfed them and eased everything that befalls me personally. Sadness lost its aura. Fear no longer possesses awe. Joy became tasteless.”[4] ّIn this volume, Omani author Bushra Khalfan published diaries of her experience of the genocide from afar.[5] Additionally, many noteworthy collections by international publishers in English and other languages show unprecedented global solidarity and interest in the Palestinian cause, including We Are Not Numbers and Sumud: A New Palestinian Reader.
Several central themes, major and minor, feature in Palestinian and Arabic literature on the Israeli genocide. First, there is unmistakable intertextuality that engages with iconic works and statements from Palestinian poets and novelists. Khaled Al-Hroub’s “ٍRijal fi al-ard: daqu judran al-khazan wa lam yasmaʿ ahad” (Men in the Ground who Knocked on the Water Tank and No One Heard,) engages with the current moment through Ghassan Kanafani’s Men Under the Sun. Kuwaiti writer ʿĀmir Fardān had a profound conversation with a Kanafani brought to life.[6] Ibrahim Nasrallah, author of a critically acclaimed ‘Palestinian tragedy’ trilogy, writes about his experience republishing parts from his three novels without a date and how this shows Gaza as a mythologized site of repeated tragedy.
The anthropomorphized Gaza is also a common theme, central to the novel, Gaza: al-Najiya al-Wahida (Gaza: The Only One Saved), by Ghada al-Khuri, who engages in deep and long conversations with her, like, “I do not love my child more than you love yours, O Gaza! Not Accurate. Maybe. I do not know. But I will not sacrifice as much as you did. Impossible. Or, I may do so if I live your life… I embrace fear, you embrace miracles. He [my son] sees you carrying the torn limbs of your child, screaming, ‘All my kids are a sacrifice for Palestine. In contrast, he sees me asking him all the time whether he eats fruits and vegetables continuously and whether he plays sports” (p. 90).
Other themes include praising resistance against occupation, genocide, and apartheid, the Gazan spirit of sacrifice and heroism, steadfastness, resilience, subjectivizing the severity of siege and genocide, and Arab and Muslim rulers’ betrayal of the people of Gaza. Other themes include Palestine as a personal and intellectual history in the writing of Kuwaiti novelist Bothayna El Essa and as a shared national political history, in an essay by Somali writer Jāmiʿ Nūr Aḥmad. The distinctive innocence of Gazan Children is exemplified in the writing of prize-winning Kuwaiti novelist Saud Alsanousi.[7]
Three Main Preoccupations
Of these central themes, there are three that I want to focus on: loss, displacement, and the question of how and why to write under such circumstances. Samer Abu Hawwash’s Ruins and Other Poems, capably translated by Huda Fakhreddine, is an iconic work of Gaza literature, emblematic of its central theme of loss. The collection revives the traditional Arabic motif of desert ruins (atlal) in a new poetic form, maximizing its emotive nostalgia to reflect on the current concrete jungle – not desert – that are the ruins of Gaza.
There, on a land, we were told was not our land,
under a sky, we were told, was not our sky,
My people live their death.
We don’t know how we got here,
And there is nowhere to go.
At the peak of despair,
We implore the god of diaspora…
No god promised us anything,
And the books neglected our names.
We were left to chase ghosts that chase us
to an elevator, out of order,
Ascending to the skies (p. 107-111).
Despite being more calamitous and harrowing, the tragic sense in these stanzas seems to have resigned itself to calmer conventions and beliefs. Whether through fatalism, absurdism, or religious certainty, all settle painfully but calmly in the face of this monumental suffering.
If Abu Hawwash utilizes lyrical despair and the powerful trope of ruins, prize-winning writer and poet Alaa al-Qatarawi’s writing, despite her loss, is infused with hope and faith and incorporates scriptural and religious tropes. Al-Qatarawi, who lost her four children, wrote a book for one of her sons, Yukalimunī Kinān (Kinan Speak to Me), where she imagines a dialogue with her lost son. Her writing is filled with grief and hope, and a resolve that Kinan’s death “remain[s]—forever—a curse upon the occupation.” A passage from her conversation with him reads:
You did not grow much since your first giggle.
So that you understand that your laughter is a mobile rose garden…
I cannot believe that you saw dozens of soldiers of occupation around you.
Did you embrace Orkida, Yamen, and Karmel at the time? Did you make a circle around yourselves?
Did you shiver alone? Did they bomb you, or were your bodies glued together?
It is hard for me not to hear your lisp. No one can vocalize it as you do.
Even the letter Ra’ shall cry crushingly;
How soft were you on it! It will not find this subtle softness on the lips of many.
The targeted killing of Palestinian poet and professor Refaat Alareer by Israeli forces, who was massacred alongside his brother, sister, and their children, marked a particularly abysmal moment in the war. His student, writer and award-winning poet Mohammed El-Kurd, author of the acclaimed Perfect Victim and renowned for the quality and depth of his writing in English, penned a eulogy for his teacher in Arabic. El-Kurd wrote that he could not compose a eulogy in English for the news site where he works. Instead, he published the following in Arabic, engaging with the linguistics and aesthetics of loss and the forced need to find a higher calling for mourning,
We do not exist in the language of the colonizer. Announcing your death necessitates reclaiming the very recognition of your being, and reclaiming recognition is itself a form of self-flagellation. This language transforms the Palestinian funeral into a site for mobilization, persuasion, and pedagogy, void of objective truths and facts. In this equation, I cannot introduce the world to Rifaat without introducing them to the Shuja’iyya neighborhood, and they will not know Shujaʿiyya without knowing the Gaza Strip, and they will not understand the latter without understanding Palestine, colonialism, Zionism, and the Nakba. Therefore, when mourning, we wear the cloak of the historian, the activist, and the political analyst, making international charters, laws, and statistics a reference that pervades the lines of the eulogy, which may compete with your achievements, if not surpass them, the memories of your loved ones, your funny practical jokes, and our letters to your wife and children.[8]
Alareer is only one of many writers, poets, and literati who were targeted and killed by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, including Noor Aldeen Hajjaj, ʿUmar Abu Shawish, and Hiba Abu Nada–a ‘literaricide’.
Alareer is only one of many writers, poets, and literati who were targeted and killed by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, including Noor Aldeen Hajjaj, ʿUmar Abu Shawish, and Hiba Abu Nada–a ‘literaricide’.
The question of why and how to write about genocide pervades all Gaza literature. With the genocide both invisible and omnipresent, no writer escapes its suffocating grip, forcing them to either find a higher calling, be it self-preservation, sanity, documenting, memorializing the victims, or to cement the use of certain concepts or methods and establish their relevance. One of the most profound examples is a correspondence between two female novelists and journalists: Roza Yaseen Hasan, a Syrian living in exile in Germany, and Egyptian Mansoura Ezzeldin. The four-letter exchange was published between 18 May 2024 and 8 June 2024 in al-Arabi al-Jadid. It engages with writing as a method for self-discovery, personal salvation, preservation of sanity, and rebellion against forgetfulness, but also fluctuates between emphasizing the benefits and function of writing and embracing its apparent, and perhaps liberating, powerlessness. Roza pleads, “Perhaps writing rekindles collective consciousness, although as slow as a snail.” Mansoura responds by affirming that instead:
In cases of genocide and the complete erasure of a people, every whisper, cry, and murmur galvanizes significance… However, the inherent peril hovering over it in such situations lies in its potential to be transformed into propaganda. Propaganda is inherently and definitionally reprehensible, even when employed in the service of a just cause. One of the ironies and striking paradoxes of writing is that it has the greatest impact when it doesn’t seek to influence in a simplistic, propagandistic sense. Rather, it resonates deeply with readers when it is born from profound pain, erupting like the whooping gasp of a drowning person.
The correspondence further dwells on different forms of cultural solidarity, transcending the boundaries of identity politics, and embracing intersectionality and decolonial liberation poetics to overcome geographical and ethnic divisions.
The continuing and devastating loss of human souls and the accompanying destruction of Gaza both hinder and compel Arabic and Palestinian literature to rise to the literary challenge. Responding to the afore-mentioned statement by Adorno, Hamid Dabashi illuminates the discussion by arguing, “One should not, nor can we afford, to be fatalistic. We must seek the light through the depth of this terror and darkness. To think of the power and necessity of poetry after the enormity of such horrors in Gaza beyond the myopic reach of Adorno or any other European’s self-indulgent gloom, we need, as always, to open up our horizons beyond the Eurocentric imagination.”[9] The result is a creative tension that transforms many aspects of Palestinian literature, looking beyond the typical Western fixations.
The rise of diaries, a natural and needed result of Israel’s (both informational and material) siege, is one salient feature of documentary efforts.
The rise of diaries, a natural and needed result of Israel’s (both informational and material) siege, is one salient feature of documentary efforts. The tone of Palestinian writers exhibits both an awareness that many around the world are intently reading and, at the same time, an unmistakable conviction that no one will move to elevate their suffering, loss, and displacement. Many of the big questions about theodicy and faith seem to seamlessly fall into place within their authors’ convictions. Answering the question of how and why to write is another feature of this recent Gaza literature.
Albeit different from the cases of Rwanda, the Holocaust, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because of the particularity of the historical context, the relationship between the perpetrator and the victim, and the accompanying motives, this literature also marks the slow and painful transformation of Palestinian literature from ‘tragedy’ to ‘genocide literature.’ In this literature, there are no tragic heroes, like those of Men in the Sun, who fall due to their flaws; the genocide marches on regardless. The catharsis of tragedy, like in accepting displacement and the dismantling of idealized memories in Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah, is replaced with a mission of bearing witness to atrocities and documenting injustice; the celebration of Palestinian identity and resistance in Mahmoud Darwish’s “On This Land” cannot be found, and instead we find the trauma of surviving in the shadow of annihilation and a collective memorialization of the fallen.
Tarek Ghanem is a lecturer of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Islamic Studies, with a focus on the post-classical Islamic legal commentarial tradition. He is also the founder and CEO of Metalingual Translations.
[1] Hoda Barakat, “ʿAn al-kitāba ʿan Ghaza: ʿan ashyāʾ kharbāna,” Bi-khat aḥmar: kitābāt ʿArabiyya ḥawl al-sābiʿ min Uktubar (Ṭibāq li-l-Nashr wa al-Tawzīʿ, 2024), 175.
[2] Adania Shibli, “Bayn Khawfayn,” Bi-khat aḥmar: kitābāt ʿArabiyya ḥawl al-sābiʿ min Uktūbar (Ṭibāq li-l-Nashr wa al-Tawzīʿ, 2024), 112.
[3] Yusrī al-Ghūl, Nuzūḥ naḥwa al-shamāl (al-Muʾassasa al-ʿArabiyya li-l-Dirāsāt wa al-Nashr, 2025), pp. 225.
[4] Tarek ʿAṣrāwī, “Mā yaṣluḥ an yakūn muqadima,” Bi-khat aḥmar: kitābāt ʿArabiyya ḥawl al-sābiʿ min Uktūbar (Ṭibāq li-l-Nashr wa al-Tawzīʿ, 2024), 7.
[5] Bushrā Khalfān, “Al-Sābiʿ baʿd khamsa wa sabʿīn,” Bi-khat aḥmar: kitābāt ʿArabiyya ḥawl al-sābiʿ min Uktūbar (Ṭibāq li-l-Nashr wa al-Tawzīʿ, 2024), 66-72.
[6] ʿĀmir Fardān, “ʿAn al-ṭufān al-ladhī taʾakhkhar miʾat ʿām,” Bi-khat aḥmar: kitābāt ʿArabiyya ḥawl al-sābiʿ min Uktūbar (Ṭibāq li-l-Nashr wa al-Tawzīʿ, 2024), 96-101.
[7] Bothayna El Essa, “al-Ghazāwī al-ladhī yakhuṣunī”, pp. 60-65; Jāmiʿ Nūr Aḥmad, “Ghaza al-fāḍiḥa,” 73-77; Saud Alsanousi, “Ibtisāmāt mubaʿthara fī samāʾ Ghaza,” pp. 88-91 in Bi-khat aḥmar: kitābāt ʿArabiyya ḥawl al-sābiʿ min Uktūbar (Ṭibāq li-l-Nashr wa al-Tawzīʿ, 2024)
[8] Mohammed El-Kurd, “Refaat Alareer: taʾbīn ghayr khāmil,” Institute of Palestine Studies, February 2026, https://www.palestine-studies.org/ar/node/1655132.
[9] Hamid Dabashi, After Savegery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization (Haymarket Books, 2025), 73.