‘The people’s literature won’t be halted by the military government, and its spread can’t be stopped by force or by the restriction of movement. Literature is the only infiltrator whose breath cannot be frozen by the shot of a gun!’
– Hana Naqara, al-Jadid (1953)
In the years following the Nakba, a small group of Palestinian and Arab Jewish intellectuals in Israel joined together to emphatically reject the racist and colonial conflict paradigm presented by official Israeli discourse of ‘the Arabs’ against ‘the Jews’ ’. At the heart of the movement was Adab al-Shaʿb (‘A People’s Literature’), popular writing-from-below published in the Israeli Communist Party’s Arabic-language cultural magazine al-Jadid and its newspaper al-Ittihad. These powerful literary works reflected the economic struggles of the working class, shared legacies of colonialism, and the potential for co-resistance.
For the first time in English translation, A People’s Literature in Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial and Socialist Writing brings together these stories, poems and essays of everyday life under occupation and displacement. 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. Through these writings, the al-Jadid literary circle laid the groundwork for future generations of writers who used literature to push for freedom.
A People’s Literature in Palestine/Israel will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2026. A second version of the anthology will be released at Ayin Press thereafter.
Image credit: al-Jadid 1953.
