You are here
Books (31)
A young Palestinian named Usama returns from working in the Gulf to support the resistance movement. 
His mission is to blow up buses transporting Palestinian workers into Israel.
Shocked to discover that many of his fellow citizens have adjusted to life under military rule, Usama exchanges harsh words with his friends and family. Despite uncertainty, he sets out to accomplish his mission … with disastrous consequences.
Originally published in Jerusalem, Wild Thorns was the first Arab novel to offer a glimpse of social and personal relations under Israeli occupation. Featuring unsentimental portrayals of everyday life, its deep sincerity, uncompromising honesty and rich emotional core plead elegantly for the cause of survival in the face of oppression.
Despite the Israeli authorities’ attempt to shut out aid workers and the media from the conflict zone, NORWAC (the Norwegian Aid Committee) succeeded in getting some of its envoys into the heart of Gaza City including two doctors: Erik Fosse and Mads Gilbert. For some time, the two were the only Western eyewitnesses in Gaza. 
This book is an account of their experience during sixteen harrowing days from 27 December 2008 to 12 January 2009. Each chapter covers just one day, as the reader follows the doctors’ journey through the ravaged city, treating local Palestinians and hearing their stories. Hailed by the influential Norwegian Newspaper Klassekampen as the ‘best book of 2009,’ Mads Gilbert’s and Erik Fosse’s shocking, yet sober account sheds much-needed light on this recent chapter of one of the most prolonged and complex conflicts of our time. Eyes In Gaza is translated from the Norwegian.
Gaza is the frontline in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and rarely out of the news, this book explores the daily lives of the people in the region, giving us an insight into what is at risk in each round of violence.
Ramzy Baroud tells his father’s fascinating story. Driven out of his village to a refugee camp, he took up arms and fought the occupation at the same time raising a family and trying to do the best for his children. Baroud’s vivid and honest account reveals the complex human beings; revolutionaries, great moms and dads, lovers, and comedians that make Gaza so much more than just a disputed territory.
Israel’s 2009 invasion of Gaza was a vicious act of aggression that left well over one thousand Palestinians dead and devastated the infrastructure of an already impoverished enclave.
In this searching examination of Israels policies, award-winning journalist Gideon Levy shows how the ground was prepared for the assault and documents its continuing effects. From 2005 – the year of Gaza’s liberation – through to 2009, he tracks Israels abandonment of the pretence of diplomacy in favour of a policy of provocation and raw military power, with the ultimate aim of denying Palestinians any chance of forming their own independent state.
and the Quartet of international powers for the democratic election of Hamas, Gaza has been transformed into the worlds largest open-air prison. From Gazan families struggling to cope with the random violence of Israels blockade and its targeted assassinations, to the machinations of legal experts and the continued connivance of the international community, every aspect of this ongoing tragedy is eloquently recorded and forensically analyzed. Levy’s powerful journalism shows how the brutality at the heart of Israels occupation of Palestine has found its most complete expression to date in the collective punishment of the residents of Gaza.
The Gaza Kitchen is a richly illustrated cookbook that explores the distinctive cuisine and food heritage of the area known prior to 1948 as the Gaza District—and that of the many refugees from elsewhere in Palestine who came to Gaza in 1948 and have been forced to stay there ever since. 
In summer 2010, authors Laila El-Haddad andMaggie Schmitt traveled the length and breadth of the Gaza Strip to collect the recipes presented in the book. They were also able to build on the extensive knowledge that Laila, herself a Palestinian from Gaza, had gained from family and friends throughout the years.
The 130 recipes presented in this book have all been thoroughly kitchen-tested. Amounts are presented using U.S.-style measures, and the authors suggest alternative ingredients and recipe adaptations for cooks working in the United States or other countries where some of the ingredients may not be easy to find. Numerous illustrations help readers understand how to perform the listed techniques—and what the finished product should look like!
But The Gaza Kitchen is not only a cookbook. A lot of other things happen in the kitchen as well as cooking: conversations, the re-telling of family histories, and the daily drama of surviving and creating spaces for pleasure in an embattled place. In this book, women and men from throughout Gaza tell their stories as they relate to cooking, farming, and the food economy: personal stories, family stories, and descriptions of the broader social and economic system in which they live.
When Laila and Maggie launched this project in 2009, they wrote:
Why do we want to talk about food and cooking?
Because food is the essence of the everyday. Beyond all the discourses, the positions and the polemics, there is the kitchen. And even in Gaza, that most tortured little strip of land, hundreds of thousands of women every day find ways to sustain their families and friends in body and spirit. They make the kitchen a stronghold against despair, and there craft necessity into pleasure and dignity.
Gaza has a rich food tradition and a unique cuisine combining Levantine and Egyptian elements. The history of its population can be traced through its recipes, which reflect the influence of exile from all over Palestine as well as a changing society and customs. A cookbook which brings together these recipes serves as testimony to this heritage and history.
What is more, today’s kitchens can tell us much about the difficult and paradoxical realities of Gaza after three years of unrelenting siege: which products are available and where they are coming from (tunnels, local agriculture, humanitarian relief), how cooks manage with extreme shortages of gas and electricity, how families reorganize to compensate for destroyed homes and near-universal joblessness. To spend a day with a Gazan woman doing the shopping and cooking is to understand the Palestinian reality from an entirely different – more material, more intimate – perspective. It is to appreciate the strength and endurance which allows these women every day to confront a hopeless situation and to create within it small spaces of grace, beauty and generosity.
Just World Books is honored to have been able to work with Maggie and Laila in the preparation of this unique contribution to the study of the world’s food heritage.
‘I’m convinced that the majority of Israelis and Palestinians would rather look to the future than be trapped in the past. We see that spirit in [Izzeldin Abuelaish]’ Barack Obama, keynote speech on the Middle East, 19 May 2011
Heart-breaking, hopeful and horrifying, I Shall Not Hate is a Palestinian doctor’s inspiring account of his extraordinary life, growing up in poverty but determined to treat his patients in Gaza and Israel regardless of their ethnic origin.
I wrote my poems through the latest war on Gaza which started in July, 2014 and lasted for fifty-one days. 
I wrote them under the shelling and attacks of the Israeli planes and tanks, under the hovering of the drones and the sounds of rockets and heavy bombs, between the homeless civilians and between my little children. I wrote these poems, with the lack of power and food, and with fear and stress. These poems were written from my heart to the heart of my reader.
Over the summer of 2011, Dervla Murphy spent a month in the Gaza Strip. She met liberals and Islamists, Hamas and Fatah supporters, rich and poor. Used to western reporters dashing in and out of the Strip in times of crisis, the people she met were touched by her genuine, unflinching interest and spoke openly to her about life in their open-air prison.
What she finds are a people who, far from the story we are so often fed, overwhelmingly long for peace and an end to the violence that has so grossly distorted their lives. The impression we take away from the book is of a people whose real, complex, nuanced voice has rarely been heard before.
A MONTH BY THE SEA gives unique insight into the way in which isolation has shaped this society: how it radicalizes young men and plays into the hands of dominating patriarchs, yet also how it hardens determination not to give in and turns family into a towering source of support. Underlying the book is Dervla’s determination to try to understand how Arab Palestinians and Israeli Jews might forge a solution and ultimately live in peace.
Dervla looks long and hard at the hypocrisies of Western and Israeli attitudes to peace’, and at Palestinian attitudes to terrorism. While this shattered people long for a respite from the bombings that have ripped a hole, both literally and psychologically, in their world, it seems that politicians have an agenda that pays little attention to their plight.
How do people and goods get in and out of Gaza? Do Gazans ever have fun? Is the Strip beautiful? And do TV reports actually reflect ordinary life inside the world’s largest open-air prison?
Meet Me in Gaza reveals the pleasures and pains, hopes and frustrations of Gazans going about their daily lives, witnessed and recounted by award-winning writer Louisa Waugh.
Interspersed with fascinating historical, cultural and geographical detail, this is an evocative portrait of a Mediterranean country and its people.
By
Under the Israeli occupation of the ’70s and ’80s, writers in Gaza had to go to considerable lengths to ever have a chance of seeing their work in print.
Manuscripts were written out longhand, invariably under pseudonyms, and smuggled out of the Strip to Jerusalem, Cairo or Beirut, where they then had to be typed up.
Consequently, fiction grew shorter, novels became novellas, and short stories flourished as the city’s form of choice. Indeed, to Palestinians elsewhere, Gaza became known as ‘the exporter of oranges and short stories’.
This anthology brings together some of the pioneers of the Gazan short story from that era, as well as younger exponents of the form, with ten stories that offer glimpses of life in the Strip that go beyond the global media headlines; stories of anxiety, oppression, and violence, but also of resilience and hope, of what it means to be a Palestinian, and how that identity is continually being reforged; stories of ordinary characters struggling to live with dignity in what many have called ‘the largest prison in the world’.
Translated from the Arabic by Tom Aplin, Charis Bredin, Emily Danby, Alexa Firat, Katharine Halls, Alice Guthrie, Sarah Irving, John Peate, Adam Talib, and Max Weiss.
More...
risus enim amet nibh faucibus ante purus mollis quam, lobortis tempus donec urna ornare duis nisi curae ante sit vitae, nisl vivamus cubilia fringilla ligula faucibus nam vestibulum diam. mattis sollicitudin nam phasellus in magna metus, mollis est porta venenatis phasellus curabitur gravida, curae non congue in nisi.
Suscipit sapien vivamus eu neque egestas nulla aliquam risus ad mattis elementum, tincidunt sociosqu nunc nisi dictumst volutpat feugiat euismod lobortis curabitur. consectetur aenean lacinia auctor habitant enim sem ligula lacinia himenaeos, velit ullamcorper suspendisse ante leo magna ad conubia egestas donec, facilisis taciti placerat inceptos arcu id imperdiet curabitur.
Cursus lacinia fusce ut mi pretium convallis nulla turpis, taciti facilisis conubia consequat est aliquam eu fermentum convallis, at fermentum at tortor integer nisl vestibulum. ante aenean scelerisque tellus faucibus facilisis sagittis augue donec, sapien morbi quis cursus dui platea etiam enim nisl, curae elementum posuere eget habitasse lobortis nostra.