People’s Literature in Palestine/Israel

For the first time in English translation, A People’s Literature in Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial and Socialist Writing after 1948 brings together stories, poems, and essays by Palestinian and Arab Jewish intellectuals who created a shared anti-Zionist literary movement after the Nakba and the establishment of Israel in 1948. At the heart of the movement was Adab al-Sha'b ('A People's Literature'), popular writing-from-below published in the Communist periodicals al-Jadid and al-Ittihad. Located in prisons, border villages, transit camps and Palestinian areas under military rule, these works capture the linked struggles of Palestinians, Arab Jews, and Left organisers during the 1950s and early 1960s.This collection shares intimate and imaginative histories of everyday life under occupation and displacement. Personal accounts of partition, ethnic cleansing and expulsion of village communities, and colonial policies in the transit camps reflect an early alternative history to Zionism.Stories of border murders, strikes, covert action, organising and solidarity link local struggles to global anticolonial and socialist movements. Writers including Emile Habiby, Sami Michael, Tawfiq Zayyad, Hana Ibrahim, Shimon Ballas and Jabra Nicola, all included in this anthology, drew inspiration from socialist realism and the currents of Third World liberation from Egypt to Vietnam to reimagine literature as a form of radical history and imagination.

Dr Hana Morgenstern is Associate Professor in Global South and Middle Eastern Literatures at Cambridge University and a Fellow at Newnham College. She is a scholar of Middle Eastern literature and cultural histories of the Left, with a specialisation in Palestine and Israel, including Jewish, Hebrew, Palestinian and Arabic literatures and literary cultures. She is the author of Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial Literature and Radical Print, editor of A People’s Literature of Palestine/Israel: An Anthology of Anticolonial and Socialist Writing (both Edinburgh University Press, 2026), and has published articles in in Journal of Levantine Studies, Modernism/modernity and Radical History Review. Morgenstern is co-founder and co-investigator of Revolutionary Papers, a transnational research collaboration on 20th-century anticolonial and anti-imperial periodicals. She is also co-founder of Archives of the Disappeared, an interdisciplinary initiative for the study of communities, social movements, spaces and cultures destroyed through acts of political repression and mass violence.