Cultural Co-Resistance is the first study of anti-zionist collaborative literature in Palestine/Israel. The book reconstructs the history, politics, and aesthetics of Palestinian-Jewish joint anticolonial literary activism, from the 1950s to the present day.
Drawing on a decade of archival work and interviews with writers and public intellectuals, it tells the story of a Palestinian and Iraqi Jewish literary movement that launched an Arabic, anti-zionist literature in the 1950s and 1960s.
Through the movement’s periodicals, key intellectuals such as Emile Habiby, Sami Michael, Mahmoud Darwish, Tawfiq Zayyad and Shimon Ballas drew on Arab socialist and global anticolonial movements to form a new oppositional aesthetics. The book then traces the influence of these Palestinian and Arab Jewish thinkers on successive generations of writers, who continued to challenge national and colonial division through poetry, prose, literary journals, underground presses and translation projects.
The book argues for a Palestinian-Jewish literary anticolonial practice, reflecting on three critical areas that contain the potential to reshape the way in which Israeli and Palestinian literatures are researched, read and taught. Firstly, the book defines the social, cultural and aesthetic forms that emerge from collaborative work under colonial conditions. Secondly, it reveals the relationship between leftist cultural producers in Israel/Palestine and the histories and traditions of cultural decolonization; and finally, it demonstrates the defining aesthetic impact of colonialism on the progressive literatures and cultures of the region.
Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/Israel will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2026.
Image credit: al-Jadid 1954.
