CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Normal life before the Nakba
JOHN GREEN recommends a stunning collection of images that is testament to the vibrancy of Palestinian society prior to occupation
Palestinian refugees, initially displaced to the Gaza beach refugee camp, boarding boats to Lebanon and Egypt, 1949
[UNRWA]
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
Against Erasure: A photographic memory of Palestine before the Nakba,
Teresa Aranguren and Sandra Barrilaro
Haymarket Books, £35
THIS new book could not be more important at this time when Netanyahu’s Israeli forces in Gaza are carrying out genocide.
It was first published in Madrid by two Spanish women with experience of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – photographer Sandra Barrilaro and writer Teresa Aranguren – in response to the Israeli version of history which erases all memory of Palestinian society.
Israel’s raison d’être is based largely on the Holocaust carried out in Europe by the Nazis. However, in establishing its existence in Palestine it has consistently attempted to hide the way it eradicated or expelled hundreds of thousands of Arab residents during the Nakba in order to make way for Jewish settlers. The idea of Jewish supremacy created a system that has increasingly confined Palestinians living under occupation, behind the vast West Bank barrier or caged in Gaza, largely unseen by ordinary Israelis.
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