Palestine through creative eyes
Palestine today has a population that is fading, and a culture that is at risk of erasure. Palestinian writers and artists have been producing seminal work since the occupation started, highlighting the atrocities that are occurring within their borders.
Mosab Abu Toha’s “What a Gazan Should Do During an Israeli Airstrike” is a harrowing poem that describes the arbitrariness of bombings and how matter-of-factly Gazans approach these circumstances. His efforts were recognized when he won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
Upon his win, Toha posted on X, “Let it bring hope. Let it be a tale.” This was a nod to another fellow Palestinian poet, Refaat Alareer, whose poem “If I Must Die” ended with these exact words. Alareer died in an airstrike a few days after this poem was published.
Mahmoud Darwish’s “To My Mother” is a love letter to his beautiful homeland, Palestine. Written during his years in exile in Israel, the poem wraps its arms around the sense of loss the poet feels. He yearns for his mother’s coffee, her bread, and her touch — an example of the familiarity of Palestine. He yearns to go back to his mother, a metaphor for the land itself.
Much like Darwish’s nostalgia through verse, The Gaza Kitchen preserves Palestinian identity through food. Compiled by Leila al-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt, this is more than a cookbook. Each recipe is prefaced with stories of the people who cook them, farm and fish them, carefully weaving into the geography and the history of Palestine. The text hence reveals how the people adapt to the scarcity of food due to blockades and carve out different survival strategies.
Belonging to a similar climate, Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa follows the story of the Abulheja family’s displacement from Ein Hod to the Jenin refugee camp. Return to Haifa by Ghassan Kanafani, The Drone Eats With Me by Atef Abu Saif, and Refaat Alareer’s Gaza Writes Back are a few other archives of Gazan lives.
Art has also been used as a tool of protest. Back in the 80s, artist and co-founder of the League of Palestinian Artists, Sliman Mansour, brought the connection of watermelons and the Falasteeni flag to life via his painting, Watermelon Boy.
The preservation of Palestine’s art and literature acts as a deterrent to the possibility of cultural and identity erasure. Each word is a reflection of remembrance, each stroke a symbol of their resilience.
