From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine

Summary

An edited collection of thirty-one essays, interviews, testimonies and poems, edited by Sai Englert, Michal Schatz and Rosie Warren and published by Verso Books in 2023, assembled in October–December 2023 in response to Israel’s war on Gaza after 7 October 2023. Part 1, read here, comprises the front matter, the editors’ foreword (dated 11 December 2023) characterising the war as a genocide knowingly armed by European and American states and placing it within “a seventy-five-year-long settler colonial process of expulsion and dispossession” (line 210), a note recording that two Gaza contributors, Hammam Alloh and Khalil Abu Yahia, were killed in Israeli airstrikes while the book was being put together, and the opening of Part 1 of the collection, “In This Moment”: Noura Erakat’s speech “In this moment” (1 November 2023), the Gaza youth testimonies of Dunia Aburahma and Sara Besaiso, Tawfiq Abu Shomer’s lament for his destroyed apartment, Reema Saleh’s account of following her family’s destruction from exile in Lebanon, an interview with Khalil Abu Yahia, the Gaza doctors’ testimonies of Hammam Alloh, Yousef Al-Akkad and Reda Abu Assi, and the first four of five West Bank testimonies on settler and soldier violence in the South Hebron Hills, Masafer Yatta, Tuwani and Burin. Part 2, read here, completes Chapter 7 with Sabri’s testimony from Ein Rashash, closes Part 1 of the collection with Asmaa Abu Mezied on recording as resistance to erasure, Rana Barakat on memory and the ongoing Nakba, and Mohammed El-Kurd on Western journalists’ dehumanisation of Palestinians, then gives Part 2 of the collection, “No human being can exist”: Saree Makdisi on the media’s terms for Palestinian speech and the unprecedented fusion of ethnic cleansing with heavy bombardment, Khaled Hroub’s century history of Hamas within Palestinian resistance, Tareq Baconi on Hamas’ disruption of its containment, Eyal Weizman on the Gaza fence, the Gaza Envelope and the prisoner-exchange rate, and the opening of Samera Esmeir’s argument that Israel’s obliteration machinery seeks not to govern Palestinians but to wish them out of existence. Part 3, read here, completes Chapter 15 with Esmeir’s argument that Apartheid also falls short of that machinery, gives Soheir Asaad’s interview on ‘48 Palestine after the Unity Intifada and Rashid Khalidi’s interview on a war without a day-after plan, opens Part 3 of the collection, “The enemy trinity”, with Allinson and Englert applying Kanafani’s trinity to normalization and the Abraham Accords, Spencer Ackerman on the rules-based international order as American exceptionalism, Adam Hanieh’s “The Oslo illusion” on the class base of the Oslo Accords, and the opening of Toufic Haddad’s interview on Oslo as an Allon Plan Bantustan solution and the religious right it produced. Part 4, read here, completes Chapter 21 with Haddad on resistance exploiting Israel’s internal schisms, gives Nihal El Aasar on Egypt, debt as discipline and the Rafah demand, Samar Saeed on Jordan’s Wadi Araba Treaty, the gas deal and a regime pushed from below, Haim Bresheeth-Žabner on the army that made the Israeli nation and the third phase of the 2023 Nakba, Alberto Toscano on Fascism as immanent to settler-colonialism, and Noah Kulwin on Israel becoming a strategic liability for American power — closing Part 3 of the collection — then opens Part 4 of the collection, “Not in anyone’s name”, with Ashley J. Bohrer on Jewish anti-Zionist organizing and the opening of Hil Aked’s account of Gaza’s Imperial boomerang. Part 5, read here, completes Chapter 28 with Aked’s argument that Palestinian liberation shakes the foundations of the racial world order, then closes Part 4 of the collection and the book’s chapters: Rebecca Ruth Gould on the war on free speech in Europe and North America, Omar Barghouti’s Tribune interview on BDS as the strategic answer to apartheid, and Mohammed El-Kurd’s poem “No Moses in siege” (2021), followed by the back matter — About the contributors and the Notes, which source or qualify claims in Chapters 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 and 28 and the foreword. Across its four parts the collection moves from testimony under bombardment, through analysis of Hamas, Oslo and the regional order, to the solidarity movements and the repression they face in the West, holding throughout that the war is a genocide within a seventy-five-year settler-colonial process and that Palestinian liberation is inseparable from the liberation of all the oppressed.

What the file is

An EPUB (ver. 1.1, ISBN 978-1-80429-733-9), “The collection © Verso Books, 2023” and “All contributions © The contributors, 2023” (lines 28, 30), Verso being “the imprint of New Left Books”, with Haymarket Books also named on the copyright page. The text copy is a supplied text copy with === EPUB item N === markers and no page markers; locators are line numbers in the text copy. The whole text copy is 2,756 lines by the verify count (2,755 newline characters) and about 94,889 words. Many contributions were first published elsewhere in October–November 2023 — the Institute for Palestine Studies blog, Jewish Currents, Foreign Policy, the London Review of Books, Jacobin, The Nation, Tribune and the International Socialist Journal — with two earlier pieces (Adam Hanieh’s “The Oslo Illusion”, Jacobin, 21 April 2013, updated; Mohammed El-Kurd’s “No Moses in Siege”, an extract from Rifqa, Haymarket Books, 2021) and one from a 2022 Haymarket collection; the copyright page (line 32) gives each first publication, credited to the right author. Cover and ex libris items (EPUB items 1-2) are blank in the text copy. The Notes and About the contributors sections are printed at the back of the book (lines 2417-2647) and are read in the final part; the Notes carry entries only for the foreword and Chapters 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 and 28, so endnote markers in other chapters have no printed notes in this ebook. The text copy ends with the navigation table of contents and the BooXtream licence disclaimer (lines 2648-2755); the stated total of 2,756 lines is the verify count of the file’s 2,755 newline-terminated lines plus its final line.

Section by section

• Front matter (lines 1-202): half title and title page — From the River to the Sea, “Essays for a Free Palestine”, edited by Sai Englert, Michal Schatz and Rosie Warren; copyright page as above; Contents listing the Editors’ foreword, “A note on our contributors in Gaza”, and thirty-one chapters in four parts — Part 1 “In This Moment” (chapters 1-10), Part 2 “No human being can exist” (chapters 11-17), Part 3 “The enemy trinity” (chapters 18-26) and Part 4 “Not in anyone’s name” (chapters 27-31) — then About the contributors and Notes.

• Editors’ foreword (lines 203-243; dated 11 December 2023 at line 240): the editors state that “Israel is committing a genocide” and that Israeli officials have made their intentions clear, citing Giora Eiland’s celebration of epidemics as an accelerant of depopulation, Yoav Gallant’s description of Palestinians as “human animals” to be deprived of food, water and fuel, Benjamin Netanyahu’s “children of darkness” and Isaac Herzog’s statement that Palestinians were never innocent nor civilian, alongside expulsion plans discussed at the highest levels of government. European and American states have continued to support Israel and to send “weapons, troops, war boats and spy planes” (line 210), while Western media present the campaign as a war between Israel and Hamas rather than part of a seventy-five-year settler-colonial process, and 7 October as barbarity rather than the predictable outcome of eighteen years of blockade and “mowing the grass”. The toll at the time of writing: over 18,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, almost 50,000 wounded, nearly 7,000 missing, over half of Gaza’s homes destroyed or damaged, twenty-six of thirty-five hospitals no longer operational, sixty-two journalists, over 100 UN staff and more than 200 health workers killed; UNRWA estimates 1.9 million Palestinians in Gaza expelled from their homes, out of 2.3 million inhabitants of whom 77 percent are refugees from 1948. In the West Bank, nearly 300 Palestinians were killed between 7 October and 4 December, at least 10,000 firearms were distributed by the state to settlers, and settlement construction continued. Against this, the foreword sets the global solidarity movement — mass demonstrations, Middle East protests defying authoritarian states, Houthi actions at the entrance of the Red Sea, arms-factory blockades in Britain, disrupted arms deliveries in Oakland, and Belgian airport and Catalan port trade unionists refusing to handle weapon deliveries — and argues the movement must be sustained organizationally, maintain pressure for a break of all ties with Israel as outlined in the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, and be armed with facts and analyses. The collection “brings together essays, interviews and reflections published in a variety of publications — both before and after 7 October 2023 — and a number of original contributions written for this ebook” (line 234), addressing what is happening, how this point was reached and what it will mean for the future, and insisting that contemporary events emerge from more than seventy-five years of dispossession and resistance and from the linkages between Palestine, the wider region and “global systems of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism” (line 238).

• A note on our contributors in Gaza (lines 244-250): “two of the writers in Gaza included in this volume have been murdered in Israeli airstrikes: Dr. Hammam Alloh and Khalil Abu Yahia” since the book began to be put together in October 2023.

• Part 1 title page (lines 251-257): “Part 1 / In this moment”.

• Chapter 1, “In this moment”, by Noura Erakat (lines 258-300; speech delivered 1 November 2023 at “But We Must Speak: On Palestine and the Mandates of Conscience”, staged by the Palestine Festival of Literature at the Union Theological Seminary in New York): Erakat considers and refuses successive registers. As teacher: Gaza was a city-district of historic Palestine, a focal point of trade and empire; before 1948 the Gaza district contained almost ninety towns and villages and was thirty-eight times larger than the current 140 square-mile strip, the largest district in Mandatory Palestine; on Israel’s establishment a truncated Gaza absorbed nearly 25 percent of Palestinian refugees, its population rising from 80,000 to 280,000 and to 2.2 million today. From 1993, entering the Oslo peace process, Israel circumscribed Gaza in “a process of de-development, isolation, containment of Gaza with the intent to make it a Palestinian statelet and to instead focus on annexing the West Bank” (line 275), imposing a land siege and naval blockade, a subsistence diet just above starvation and repeated bombardment — “To achieve in Gaza by warfare, what it seeks to do in the West Bank through martial law, in East Jerusalem through administrative law, in historic Palestine through civil law.” As attorney: Israel remains an Occupying Power after the 2005 withdrawal because it maintained effective control over the population registry, skies, water, electromagnetic spheres and all ingress and egress, and “Israel has no right to self-defense against a territory that it occupies” (line 279); Palestinians, as a people fighting colonial domination, alien occupation and racist regimes, have a right to use armed force regulated by the laws of war, bound by distinction and proportionality, both of which Israel has promised to disavow; Israeli intent and incitement are sufficient to trigger the Genocide Convention “without a single killing”, and “the number of the dead in twenty-six days exceeds the lives stolen in the Bosnian genocide” (line 281). For two decades Israel “has changed international law to make its grotesque violence permissible” (line 283) — Gaza as a hostile entity, an “armed conflict short of war”, proportionality as forward-looking — setting precedents to be applied globally. As a mother: the dust-covered babies, Wael al-Dahdouh returning to reporting a day after the murder of his wife, son and daughter, 130 newborns in NICU at risk for lack of fuel and electricity, and her Ramallah cousin’s children learning that world powers agree their lives are not worthy. As a Palestinian: the campaign is “a genocidal campaign intended to complete the Nakba, to fulfill the Zionist fantasy of a land without a people” (line 287), against a people who vow not to leave. As a comrade: an inventory of the movement’s actions (shutdowns of Congress, Grand Central Station and highway 101, resignations, Bolivia cutting diplomatic ties, “66 percent of all Americans demand a ceasefire” — line 291) set against repression — Palestine Legal’s over 400 complaints in three weeks against an average of 2-300 a year, revoked job offers and firings, the stabbing of six-year-old Walid Fayoumie twenty-six times in Illinois, and White House comparison of ceasefire calls to the Charlottesville tiki torch marches — closing with an appeal to support Palestine Legal: Palestinians “do not want your charity, they want your solidarity” (line 295).

• Chapter 2, “Testimonies from Gaza Youth”, by Dunia Aburahma and Sara Besaiso (lines 301-325; video testimonies published on the Institute for Middle East Understanding’s Instagram page, transcribed by the Institute for Palestine Studies, 22 October 2023): Aburahma, twenty-two, an architecture student at the Islamic University of Gaza in Gaza City, describes repeated evacuation — home to a friend’s, then again at 3am on 14 October — and the hope of “our simple rights to at least have a home and be safe one day” (line 314). Besaiso describes three evacuations, her neighbourhood “bombed with white phosphorus, and it is known to be illegal” (line 318), the 13 October order for 1.1 million people to go south followed by bombing of the south, and the cutting of electricity, water and all life resources: “What we’re asking for is peace. We want this to stop.” (line 322).

• Chapter 3, “I couldn’t bid my apartment farewell”, by Tawfiq Abu Shomer (lines 326-352; first published in Arabic on the Palestine News Network website, translated by Meriam Mabrouk, Institute for Palestine Studies blog, 11 October 2023): a first-person lament for an apartment built brick by brick with his own hands, and for the adjacent apartments he built for his son and his daughter, all destroyed by a single bomb after a few minutes’ warning — “a single bomb from a murderous occupier stole this happiness in mere seconds” (line 339). The piece dwells on the library, the tiles carried “just as I carried my firstborn child in his cradle”, the ceramic coffee cup that accompanied four published books, and two favourite plates whose smell of gunpowder he cannot imagine losing; the destruction resurrects memories of “my first cradle, seized by the Israeli occupier”. It closes with Pablo Neruda: “You can cut all the flowers, you can kill all the birds, but you cannot keep Spring from coming.” (line 349).

• Chapter 4, “A Gaza daughter in exile”, by Reema Saleh (lines 353-391; translated by Rasha Moumneh, Institute for Palestine Studies blog, 25 October 2023): Saleh, in Lebanon one year, one month and seven days after leaving Gaza, follows the war through phone calls with her family in the Jabalia refugee camp. Her father, on 7 October, combined joy and dread: “Rima, I need you to be strong, even if you come to visit Gaza and none of us are left.” (line 366). Her friend’s house was destroyed and dozens of houses in Jabalia camp destroyed with it, a nine-months-pregnant woman among the killed; her family at first refuse the order to go south — her mother asking how she can leave and “repeat the mistakes your grandparents made when they fled the 1948 Nakba” (line 376) — while a neighbour’s house, Alaa’s, is bombed without warning and a whole family is listed dead, Mohammad and his father the only survivors; her cousin Lama’s dialysis is done by her sister “with some basic materials, so if she doesn’t die from the bombs, she’ll die from lack of proper health care” (line 382). On 16 October the family evacuate south to a tent of bedsheets and blankets; her little brother has lost six kilograms in less than two weeks on one meal a day.

• Chapter 5, “It seems like things can’t get worse”, interview with Khalil Abu Yahia by Maya Rosen (lines 392-434; conducted via WhatsApp voice messages for the Institute for Palestine Studies, 16 October 2023): Abu Yahia, a Gaza-based student, teacher and activist for the Palestinian right of return, has lost family, friends and neighbours and his sister was injured, and describes a shortage of everything: “It seems like things can’t get worse — but when we reach the bottom, it turns out there is another bottom. It’s an abyss. We are experiencing genocide. Systematic, appalling. An apocalypse.” (line 405). This war differs in that a vast majority of people are searching for water, bread and medicine; his postcolonial studies supply the comparison — “You divested from apartheid South Africa. Why are you not boycotting Israel?” (line 413) — and the writers Ghassan Kanafani, Frantz Fanon, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Steve Biko. Of 7 October: “When I heard that the fence had been breached, I felt hope. It felt like a first step toward liberating Palestine.” (line 421). He fears dying without his PhD, without rebuilding his family’s destroyed house and without meeting his friends in person. The chapter ends: “On 30 October, Khalil was killed in an Israeli airstrike.” (line 431).

• Chapter 6, “We have lost the ability to provide true care”, three doctors’ testimonies from Gaza (lines 435-489; first published by Jewish Currents): Hammam Alloh (26 October 2023), a nephrologist, describes pre-war shortages of medications, labs and instruments, dialysis given in place of unavailable injections, and, since the war, dialysis sessions cut in half, decisions on hunches without labs, and a resuscitation stopped because no ventilator could follow it: “We have to prioritize patients who are younger, healthier. We have lost the ability to provide true care.” (line 450). The testimony ends: “On 11 November, Dr. Hammam Alloh was killed in an Israeli airstrike.” (line 454). Yousef Al-Akkad (27 October 2023), director of the European Gaza Hospital, describes sixteen years of siege since 2007 — a CT scanner lacking for more than eight months for want of a simple replacement part that takes months to move from the West Bank to Gaza — and, after 7 October, water from an unsafe local well, bodies arriving in parts, thousands of displaced people sheltering in the hospital, and ICU beds expanded from twelve to fifty-four, every bed occupied, with triage leaving patients thought to have no chance to die: “What I want for Gaza is simply freedom. We have been under occupation for seventy-five years.” (line 474). Reda Abu Assi (29 October 2023) describes seven wars, each deteriorating medical services, the transfer of Al Dora Hospital’s patients including pediatric intensive care patients after that hospital was targeted, shortages of medications, IV fluids, staff and electricity, and a two-month-old patient from Beit Lahia whose whole family was killed: “We cannot discharge him because there is no member of his family left.” (line 484).

• Chapter 7, “Dispatches from the West Bank”, five testimonies (lines 490-552 in this part; first published by Jewish Currents; the chapter continues past line 552 and is completed in part 2): Mustafa (pseudonym), South Hebron Hills, 17 October 2023 — closed roads making Yatta hospital a five-to-six-hour journey, police and army mostly not responding to reports of settler attacks, filming now likely to be shot at, and soldiers twice threatening a disabled relative who could not understand their orders; the village believes in nonviolent resistance and “a long tradition of sumud [steadfastness]” (line 507). Luna (pseudonym), Tuwani, 17 October 2023 — daily settler attacks in Masafer Yatta, settlers “fully armed thanks to [National Security Minister Itamar] Ben-Gvir” (line 513) acting with the army’s protection from Havat Ma’on, her father shot at and his hand broken, a cousin shot, settlers wearing soldiers’ clothes, all routes blocked and donkeys denied food and water. Mariam (pseudonym), Tuwani, 18 October 2023 — the closure of the last agricultural road to Jawaya by bulldozer, and her husband Zakariyah shot by a settler outside the mosque after Friday prayers, “He pushed his rifle into Zakariyah’s chest. Then he took a step back and fired one bullet into his stomach.” (line 535), the ambulance to Hebron turned back by soldiers. Ghassan Najjar, Burin, 19 October 2023 — the olive harvest blocked even between houses inside the village, settlers and soldiers attacking together, settlers given soldiers’ uniforms, the pre-war army coordination with farmers ended, and the decision to go to the land every day: “Because if we don’t, the land will become a military area, and after that, the settlers will come and take it.” (line 549). The range ends with his charge that the world’s media, focused on Gaza, do not see the war being used “as a cover for the soldiers and settlers to attack freely in the West Bank” (line 551).

• Chapter 7 completed (lines 553-569): Najjar’s closing sentence — “This is not just about Zionism or about Palestine. This is about capitalism and colonialism.” — and the fifth testimony, Sabri (pseudonym), Ein Rashash, 17 October 2023: a village of eighty-five people from eighteen families, its goats cut from 3,000 to 600 since the “Angels of Peace” outpost was established in 2018, his eighty-five-year-old grandfather beaten and pepper-sprayed, army and police answering calls with “we are at war”, the community moving its families out while maintaining a presence, and neighbouring communities leaving under threat — “They don’t want Palestinians east of Allon Road. It is another Nakba, seventy-five years after the first.” (line 565).

• Chapter 8, “On why we still hold onto our phones and keep recording”, by Asmaa Abu Mezied (lines 573-604; 2022, excerpted from Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire): Palestinians record to keep their narrative alive and theirs against systematic erasure — Hagar Shezaf’s account of Defense Ministry teams removing historic documents from Israeli archives — and not to prove their humanity to Western media that portray them as terrorists or numbers. “We record for future generations, to tell them this is what truly happened.” (line 600).

• Chapter 9, “Is the sky crying?”, by Rana Barakat (lines 606-670; 11 December 2023): an essay on number, memory and historiography through calls with her fifteen-year-old nephew Omar in Chicago. Palestine’s history is marked by numbers — 1919, 1948, 1967, 1994, now 2023 — and remembering is “an ongoing political, ethical and rigorous praxis” (line 635). The split screen of UN speech against Gaza’s bombing; “Gaza Strip, the name, is an invention of settler colonialism” (line 645); Haider Eid’s message from his bombed home, “We are being annihilated”; and the refusal of the supernatural reading — “This is settler colonialism. This is Zionism. This is genocide. This is our ongoing Nakba.” (line 661). Omar’s counter-lesson: “My anger is less hesitant and I am more sure that Palestine will be free.” (line 665).

• Chapter 10, “Western journalists have blood on their hands”, by Mohammed El-Kurd (lines 671-721; 20 October 2023), closing Part 1 of the collection: “The industry standard is to dehumanize Palestinians.” Husam Zomlot’s BBC interview, in which Kirsty Wark answered his account of six family members killed with a demand that he not condone killing Israeli civilians; El-Kurd’s own LBC interrogation over unverified “decapitating and raping” reports; the circulation and retraction of the “Hamas beheaded babies” claim and Biden’s repeated-then-retracted version of it; the Illinois landlord’s killing of a six-year-old Palestinian American child; the under-reporting of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Lemkin Institute and Raz Segal genocide warnings and of Israeli officials’ genocidal statements (the New York Times omitting “human animals”, the Financial Times removing Herzog’s words); miscaptioned images and cut Associated Press paragraphs; and the omitted roots — the seventeen-year blockade and that 70 percent of Gaza’s Palestinians hail from lands they were dispossessed from. Reporters “resemble stenographers and state secretaries” and “their hands are bloody as hell” (lines 718-720).

• Part 2 title page (lines 722-728): “Part 2 / No human being can exist”.

• Chapter 11, “No human being can exist”, by Saree Makdisi (lines 729-799; 25 October 2023): Palestinians are summoned to Western media on the tacit assumption “that our people’s lives don’t matter as much as the lives of the people who do” — his Australian-Palestinian friend’s “Well, what about our lives?”, the author’s cancelled US cable appearance and his last BBC appearance. Occupation kills without bullets: “Between 2000 and 2004 … sixty-one Palestinian women gave birth this way; thirty-six of those babies died as a result.” (at checkpoints, line 745). Anticolonial parallels from Haiti to Oran are understanding, not justification. The bombardment: rescuers calling “hadan sami’ana?”, phosphorus dug out by scalpel, the toll climbing through the text to 6,500 with “almost three thousand children” killed, 6,000 bombs and over 1,000 tons of explosives in week one, 40 percent of housing units damaged or destroyed (UN estimate), the 12 October order for one million to flee and the 14 October bombing of the Salah al Din Street “safe corridor” column (seventy killed). The title is Giora Eiland’s aim: “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.” (line 779), echoed by Ghassan Alian’s “You wanted hell, you will get hell.” The campaign is “perhaps the first fusion of old-school colonial and genocidal violence with advanced state-of-the-art heavy weapons” (line 787), against Western indifference — State Department briefings barring “de-escalation/ceasefire”, Karine Jean-Pierre’s “we believe they’re repugnant, and we believe they’re disgraceful” — and media that make some lives grievable and others “just numbers”.

• Chapter 12, “Hamas and a century of resistance”, by Khaled Hroub (lines 800-892; 2 December 2023): Palestinian resistance has been designated terrorism through a century, by a Western colonial pattern from Abd Al-Qadir to Mandela and Arafat, insisting on a “snapshot” narrative with no context before 7 October. Casualty ratios (UN and B’Tselem): first Intifada 1,376 to 94 (1:14), second Intifada 10,559 to 881 (1:12), 2008–September 2023 6,665 to 314 killed (1:21) and 156,803 to 6,346 injured (1:24). Hamas’ 1994 offer to neutralise civilians, refused by Israel; the PLO’s history from the Arab League fig leaf to Madrid and Oslo; the Islamists’ path from the mid-1940s Muslim Brotherhood branch in Sheikh Jarrah through Islamic Jihad’s 1981 breakaway to Hamas’ founding statement on 11 December 1987; Hamas’ rejection of Oslo in the Ten Faction alliance; Sharon’s 2005 withdrawal as West Bank consolidation and division-sowing; the 2006 election as a move to dodge the “war on terror” through the democracy campaign, Fatah’s coup with Israeli, EU and US support, and the blockade of “the largest open-air prison on earth”; the ignored 2017 charter compromise; Mohammad al-Dhaif’s 7 October speech quoted at length; and the conclusion that Hamas is integral to the national struggle and the terrorist label “holds little relevance for the Palestinians”.

• Chapter 13, “What was Hamas thinking?”, by Tareq Baconi (lines 893-1005; Foreign Policy, 22 November 2023): the post-2007 “violent equilibrium” in which military force negotiated concessions under a hermetic blockade of 2.3 million people; Hamas’ shifts through the 2018 Great March of Return and the 2021 Jerusalem retaliation; 7 October as “the next logical step”, exceeding Hamas’ expectations in the scale of civilian killing, against the only alternative of slow strangulation within “various Bantustans”. Lost diplomatic openings — the 2005-2007 de facto political programme and the 2017 amended charter — were refused while Netanyahu’s “separation policy” supported Hamas as governor and demonised it as terrorist. Decimating Hamas will fail: the movement is bigger than its military wing, and killing Islamist ideology-holders would be “nothing less than a genocidal call”. The regime is “committed to Jewish supremacy from the river to the sea” (line 973); Hamas’ governance was meant to revolutionise, not beautify, a Bantustan; and the US-Israeli “day after” of compliant rule, absent accountability and dismantling apartheid, “will be clear to all Palestinians that it is just another Bantustan solution” (line 1001).

• Chapter 14, “Exchange rate”, by Eyal Weizman (lines 1006-1048; London Review of Books, 2 November 2023): the 1956 killing of Roi Rotberg and Moshe Dayan’s eulogy — “Why should we complain of their hatred for us? Eight years they sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and saw in front of their eyes how we turned the lands and the villages in which they and their forefathers once dwelled into our homeland.” (line 1016) — against Dayan’s conclusion of permanent war. The plowed ditch became the fence system Hamas struck on 7 October; Arieh Sharon’s master plan on “absentee land” (via Zvi Efrat) built Sderot, Ofakim and the kibbutzim on named Palestinian villages’ and Bedouin tribes’ land, “All of these settlements were targeted on 7 October”; the Gaza Envelope’s fifty-eight settlements and 70,000 inhabitants, whose civilian inhabitants, co-opted into “the living wall”, “couldn’t defend themselves like soldiers, and they weren’t protected like civilians” after fighters killed about 1200 civilians and soldiers and captured two hundred. The exchange-rate history — 1968: sixteen prisoners for twenty-two hostages; the 1985 Jibril agreement: 1150 for three soldiers; 2011: 1027 for Gilad Shalit — Israel’s asset-arrests and body-keeping, and the resistance’s inversion of the colonial asymmetry that one colonizer’s life is worth a thousand of the colonized. The Hannibal Directive (1986), its 1 August 2014 Rafah application killing 135 Palestinian civilians, and the current government’s apparent return to “preferring dead captives to a deal” (Smotrich, Erdan).

• Chapter 15, “The end of colonial government”, by Samera Esmeir (lines 1049-1104 in this part; 9 December 2023; the chapter continues into part 3): “Danger looms heavy over Palestine.” Neither “the Israel-Gaza war” nor the frames of state violence, apartheid and even genocide catch the repetitive rhythm of an obliteration machinery transforming “the largest open-air prison in the world into an open-air death camp” (line 1060); the “humanitarian pause” (24 November–1 December 2023) let obliteration resume. Against totalisation, the details: mass graves, the 1.7 million uprooted, steadfast teachers, doctors and journalists. Genocide’s legal frame targets physical and biological life, present and future, but cannot frame the destruction of historicity — the land and built world where memory dwells; “ethnic cleansing” is likewise insufficient beside the Arabic verbs iqtila’, tarhil, tahjir, tashrid, all pointing to “the colonial project to not govern Palestinians” (line 1082). The machinery in the West Bank (checkpoints become gates of a “mini-blockade”; Area C — 60 percent, 300,000 Palestinians, 400,000 settlers — depopulated of tens of villages in two months toward “a land without a people”) and inside Israel (the crackdown on the “Palestinian-in-struggle”, the arming of 400,000 citizens under Itamar Bin Gvir’s regulations, citizenship-revocation tracks), reducing government of Palestinians to “mere repression, pacification, and removal”.

• Chapter 15 completed (lines 1105-1112): apartheid also falls short — at its core is biopolitical government, not necropolitical obliteration and removal; Israel’s ambition is the production of Palestinian absence “from Gaza to Hebron to Haifa”, and an equal-rights imaginary that does not contend with removal falls short too. The danger is an older colonial, international effort to liquidate the question of Palestine; the radical Palestinian tradition answers that the more the bond with the land is severed, the more it is affirmed, and land in the Palestinian imaginary is not a measured economic resource but abundance, sustaining a collective existence in struggle among refugees and diaspora since 1948.

• Chapter 16, “Lessons from ‘48”, Soheir Asaad interviewed by Riya Al’Sanah (lines 1116-1178; 4 December 2023, first published by the Middle East Research and Information Project): unprecedented silence and fear in Haifa and across ‘48 since 7 October, against Gaza radicalizing the world. The May 2021 Unity Intifada was led by a new social class with anonymous manifestos, mutual aid and an 18 May general strike demanded from below; Israel arrested more than 2,000 and indicted 545, the most marginalized paying the highest price, and the structures collapsed. The May 2023 killing of Diar Omari in Sandala and the nightly removal of the Palestinian flag from his grave show the post-2021 paranoia. Since Oslo, ‘48 leadership has been stuck in a citizenship framework: the 2015 Joint List under Ayman Odeh pursued “impact policies” of integration, while ‘48 family poverty rose from 38 percent in 1997 to 45 percent in 2018 against 13 percent of Jewish families; power has shifted to local councils and NGOs, developing a Palestinian capitalist class dependent on state funding. Since 7 October there have been 200 arrests, mostly for social-media posts, and on 8 November 2023 the Knesset passed the consumption of terrorist material bill. Her task: a liberation infrastructure of community-led mutual aid — food sovereignty, union organizing, protecting detainees — and lasting global solidarity infrastructure beyond transactional slogans.

• Chapter 17, “A war without a plan”, by Rashid Khalidi (lines 1179-1335; 30 October 2023, edited transcript of Jacobin’s Long Reads podcast with Daniel Finn), closing Part 2 of the collection: under an information blackout the Gaza death toll reached 8,300 by 30 October, about 3,500 children, with over a million displaced and at least 120 killed in the West Bank. Biden cast doubt on the casualty figures; the Gaza Ministry of Health answered with a list of almost 7,000 identified dead. Israel has a bombing and invasion plan — encircling Gaza City, more bombs in weeks than the US dropped on Afghanistan in a year — but no day-after plan; an Intelligence Ministry plan would expel much of the population to Sinai, and the West Bank Bantustan strategy may be applied to Gaza. Hamas as a political movement cannot be eliminated without killing hundreds of thousands. Western support reflects Biden’s ideological commitment and a double standard toward Arab deaths; public opinion, especially the young (an unnamed survey referred to by a CNN anchor: 10 percent of 18-35s supporting Biden’s policy), is in a different place. Arab regimes were dragged by public opinion; reported US offers to Egypt (cancelling half its $160 billion debt) were resolutely rebuffed, possibly in coordination with Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Strategy lessons from Ireland, Algeria, Vietnam and South Africa: liberation is won in the metropole as well as on the battlefield, and with no political horizon, resistance follows “as sure as night follows day”; shutting down BDS, protest and speech leaves the field to armed struggle.

• Part 3 title page (lines 1336-1342): “Part 3 / The enemy trinity”.

• Chapter 18, “The enemy trinity”, by Jamie Allinson and Sai Englert (lines 1343-1449; 29 November 2023, commissioned by Salvage): Ghassan Kanafani’s study of the 1936-9 revolt named three enemies — “the local reactionary leadership; the regimes in the Arab states surrounding Palestine; and the imperialist-Zionist enemy.” Zionism is itself a regional project: Palestine as nodal point for Suez and the Kirkuk-Haifa oil pipeline, Storrs’ “little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”, Haig’s unsinkable aircraft carrier, Herzl’s “rampart of Europe against Asia”. Israel broke the Arab Revolt with British-trained Special Night Squads, invaded Sinai for Britain and France in 1956, and in 1967 and 1973 broke Arab nationalism for the US — Kissinger: US policy aimed “to enhance Israel’s strategic capacity in the region, consolidate friendly Arab regimes, and to isolate and debilitate the Palestinian movement.” Normalization followed: Qualified Industrial Zones (Jordan 1998, 8 percent Israeli inputs; Egypt 2004, 11 percent), MENA summits linking normalization to neoliberal reform, deep Israeli-US capital integration, and the 2020 Abraham Accords; Saudi negotiations were in substance with Washington, on the background of 2023 as already the deadliest year since the Second Intifada and Netanyahu’s 22 September 2023 UN map with Palestine disappeared. Operation Al Aqsa Flood shattered that status quo; millions mobilized regionally, Saudi Arabia broke off normalization talks, while Iran and Hezbollah made clear they would not intervene — a taxonomy of the resistance axis (proxies, clients under a passive veto such as Hezbollah, independent allies such as Hamas, and the outlier Ansar Allah in Yemen). In the West the movement rolled back French bans and claimed Suella Braverman’s job, while the US, overstretched between Ukraine, Palestine and China, asked Egypt to facilitate ethnic cleansing into Sinai. The left’s task: sanctions, an end to military exports and to all relations with Israel, “until freedom and democracy are a reality for all, from the river to the sea”.

• Chapter 19, “What the rules allow”, by Spencer Ackerman (lines 1450-1486; 17 November 2023, first published by The Nation): two anonymous US diplomats warned in a leaked memo, as the toll crossed 10,000, that the US must criticize Israel’s violations or sow “doubt in the rules-based international order that we have long championed”; King Abdullah II and Avrum Burg both drew the Ukraine comparison, Burg calling the IDF approach a “Russian military strategy”. Ackerman: the Rules-based international order is not international law but its substitution with American hegemony — not hypocrisy but exceptionalism; the US hails the ICC against Putin but revoked its own signature and sanctioned ICC prosecutors’ families over Afghanistan. Traced from Kosovo through Iraq, Slaughter and Ikenberry’s 2006 “concert of democracies”, Libya, Syria and Soleimani, with Mary Ellen O’Connell warning the concept severely degrades international law. In Gaza by early November: an estimated 180 children killed a day, “dozens” of Hamas commanders claimed out of 10,500 dead — unsquarable with distinction and proportionality. Segal and Bartov place Israel at or past the genocide threshold; the order’s reality is “not a world of liberty under law, but a mass grave”.

• Chapter 20, “The Oslo illusion”, by Adam Hanieh (lines 1487-1581; first published Jacobin, 21 April 2013, updated and extended, dated 8 December 2023): Oslo’s stated two-state goals are confused with its real aims — a perception of peace under which Israel consolidated control since 1967, ideologically disarmed the movement above all on the right of return, and freed itself from Arab boycotts estimated at $40 billion (1948-1994). Edward Said foresaw “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles”, the PLO as “Israel’s enforcer”. The leadership’s complicity has a class explanation: the Allon (1967) and Sharon (1981) plans, agricultural destruction (cultivated West Bank land down a third 1967-1974; 87 percent of irrigated land removed in the Jordan Valley; agriculture’s labor share 40 percent in 1970 to 26 percent in 1987, GDP share 35 to 16 percent by 1991), enclave patchwork, and the 1994 Paris Protocol (imports 70-80 percent of GDP; 2005: 74 percent of imports from Israel, 88 percent of exports to Israel; 1995-2000: 60 percent of PA revenue from Israeli-collected indirect taxes). Palestinian labor became a tap turned on and off (employment in Israel 116,000 in 1992 to 28,100 in 1996), replaced by dependence on PA public employment (nearly a quarter of employment by 2000) and a capitalist class fused from Gulf returnees, historic landowners and occupation interlocutors, enriched by PA monopolies and tied to Israeli consent. The neoliberal turn added austerity, debt-based growth (bank credit almost doubled 2008-2010; consumer credit up 245 percent 2008-2011) and deep poverty for one in four West Bank Palestinians in 2010. Close: violence and negotiations are complementary, the Zionist left and right share the fracturing of the Palestinian people, and “Oslo may be dead, but its putrid corpse is not one that any Palestinian should hope to resuscitate.” The 2023 postscript restates this amid the war: a ceasefire is not a cessation of violence, an Oslo-type return is the Western endgame, and a single democratic state argued on class and imperial grounds is the only viable long-term route.

• Chapter 21, “The shifting dynamics of Palestinian resistance”, interview with Toufic Haddad by Anne Alexander (lines 1582-1656 in this part; 5 October 2023, International Socialist Journal; the chapter continues into part 4): Oslo was an implementation of the Allon Plan — limited autonomy without sovereignty to scuttle self-determination and preserve a Jewish demographic majority — a Bantustan solution avoiding “convergence”; Arie Arnon’s formula is “neither two nor one”. Its successes were obfuscation, a co-opted elite and dual infrastructure that by the IMF’s 2012 acknowledgment had every fixture of statehood except sovereignty, while Gaza remained an open-air prison for about two million refugees under siege and “mowing the lawn”. The public sector is 36 percent of Gaza’s workforce; more than 150,000 now work in the Palestinian public sector, and settlers in the occupied territories rose from fewer than 200,000 at Oslo’s start to 700,000, built largely by Palestinian labor. The religious right grew from constituencies the Ashkenazi Labour Zionist elite had marginalized — religious and Mizrahi/Sephardic Jews — coalescing around Likud’s Revisionist Zionism; Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Givr [as spelled at line 1631] pursue demographic, territorial and spiritual battle including partition of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound. “This monster grew out of the Oslo process.” Apartheid is the temporary managerialist solution; demographic indicators are unfavourable and a renewed ethnic-cleansing push may follow. On the Unity Intifada: the May 2021 general strike was a one-off vision of convergence, frustrated by differing legal regimes across the fragments; labor leverage is now insufficient. Oslo produced two leaderships — the PLO and Hamas — neither what Israel wants; Jerusalem and the West Bank already see a slow-paced Intifada of disorganized “lone wolf” attacks, and Gaza’s military resistance has won a prisoner exchange releasing 1,200 prisoners and cutting 25,000 years from sentences [as printed] and fires hundreds of rockets daily despite Iron Dome.

• Chapter 21 completed (lines 1657-1678): resistance expertise “is not going away”; Israel is vulnerable and exposed because settlers and Palestinians live very close in the West Bank and the settlement enterprise is costly. Internal schisms are remodelling Israeli institutional life — reserves threatening to boycott duties over the “judicial coup”, pilots (largely privileged Ashkenazi) speaking of withholding service, “Some 28 percent of the Jewish Israeli population is considering emigration” (line 1669). The West guaranteed Israel’s “Qualitative Military Edge” because it preferred the region disorganized under dictators and “the watchful gaze and cudgel of the Israeli nightwatchman” (line 1663). Unification of the Palestinian struggle is likely to take place only “beneath the table”. The emergent violent, racist, fascistic formations in office feel entitled to power but are constrained by the Oslo legacy and the officer class; the alternatives they believe in are unapologetic Jewish-supremacist apartheid, total annexation of the OPT and ethnic cleansing of those who resist.

• Chapter 22, “Bread, freedom and an Arab Palestine”, by Nihal El Aasar (lines 1679-1757; 11 December 2023): the 14 October ultimatum to 1.1 million people, the bombing of the Rafah corridors, and a toll as written of over 17,700 killed including 7,870 children. Framing Egypt’s closed border as humanitarian obscures the goal of ethnic cleansing. Palestine’s liberation was at the heart of pan-Arabism and Nasser’s legitimacy, from Egypt’s largest contingent in 1948 through the 1956 tripartite aggression to the 1967 Naksa, after which the PLO became a truly Palestinian entity; Sadat’s infitah and the 1979 Camp David Accords set Egypt on the path of eroded sovereignty. Debt as discipline: Bloomberg Economics ranked Egypt second only to Ukraine for default vulnerability, and in 1991 the US and its allies forgave half of Egypt’s external debt ($11.1billionof$20.2 billion) for its participation in the anti-Iraq coalition. In October 2023 the first sanctioned demonstrations since Sisi became president in June 2014 escaped their designated areas to Tahrir Square, chanting “bread, freedom, and an Arab Palestine” (line 1731); over 100 were arrested and further protests prohibited. A transfer of Gaza’s population into Sinai would make Palestinians the majority there, give Israel a pretext to attack Sinai, and might revive the Muslim Brotherhood; the demand instead is that Rafah be opened indefinitely as a humanitarian corridor under Egyptian sovereignty, as the Egyptian Journalists Syndicate’s “Global Conscience Convoy” call (10 November) demanded.

• Chapter 23, “Ink, gas and water: Jordan’s peace with Israel”, by Samar Saeed (lines 1758-1856; 23 November 2023): as of 23 November more than 14,800 Palestinians killed, over 225 killed and over 5,000 arrested in the West Bank and Jerusalem, doubling the number of Palestinian prisoners. Jordanians — who consider the Palestinian struggle their very own, not solidarity — demand abrogation of the Wadi Araba Treaty (October 1994; parliament ratified it without reviewing its five annexes; the US waived Jordan’s debts in exchange) and of the 2016 gas deal binding Jordan to buy electricity from Israel for fifteen years at $10 billion from the Leviathan field, which King Abdullah II ratified only after dissolving Parliament and dismissing the government. Daily protests at the Kalouti Mosque and across Jordan’s cities; the regime escalated under pressure — the Baptist Hospital bombing (17 October, approximately 300 killed) called a “heinous war crime”, displacement into Jordan a declaration of war, the 27 October UNGA truce resolution adopted 120-14-45, the ambassador recalled on 1 November when the toll stood at 9,376 including 3,912 children — and on 16 November Jordan backed out of the UAE-brokered water-for-energy deal, the treaty to “remain on the back burner gathering dust for now” (line 1832). Protesters also target the 2021 US-Jordan defense deal, signed bypassing Parliament in violation of the constitution, and the seventeen US bases; Sahar Aloul’s letter “The Masks Are Off” names the liberal facade of Western-funded NGOs.

• Chapter 24, “Reality denial: the war to resuscitate the myth”, by Haim Bresheeth-Žabner (lines 1857-1929; 11 December 2023): on 6 October 2023 Israel was the most socially-riven nation on earth, but the rift was not left against right — “There is no Socialist left in Israel, and in a deep sense there never has been” (line 1867). Left-Zionism built the state-in-waiting from the 1920s; Zionist organizations controlled less than 8 percent of Palestine as late as 1947, fielded more than 100,000 under arms by 1948 (120,000 by the war’s end), expelled two thirds of the Palestinians (750,000 refugees) and took 78 percent of Palestine, learning total impunity from the unenforced Resolution 194. Ben-Gurion’s nation-at-arms project made the IDF the only mutual institution of Israeli citizens, excluding Palestinians and the Ultra-Orthodox, “the two others of Zionism” (line 1887). On 7 October around 2,000 fighters took eleven military bases within four hours and returned with more than 250 hostages; the IDF took six to eight hours to regroup, and the shelling of kibbutz houses holding hostages was likely a combination of confusion and the Hannibal Directive. Gaza’s dead at writing numbered nearly 20,000. Gila Gamliel’s official report “clearly and unmistakably recommends the transfer of Gaza civilians as the preferred outcome of the war” (line 1917, quoting Yuval Abraham), in phases ending in expulsion to Sinai with no return — an idea running from Herzl’s 1895 diary to Ben-Gurion’s 1937 diary entry on compulsory transfer. Hamas “is the Gazan society” (line 1923), Israel is incapable of imagining a civic solution, and the IDF is carrying forward “the third phase of the 2023 Nakba” (line 1925); the only just resolution remains the single, secular democratic state the PLO proffered before 1988.

• Chapter 25, “Israel, fascism, and the war against the Palestinian People”, by Alberto Toscano (lines 1930-2012; 28 November 2023): the Birzeit University union’s “colonial fascism”, Maki and Hadash’s “fascist right-wing government” and Gustavo Petro’s “global 1933” against the prominent Israeli discourse of incipient fascism — Haaretz’s “Israeli Neo-Fascism Threatens Israelis and Palestinians Alike” four days before the attack, Zeev Sternhell, and Uri Avnery’s comparison of discrimination against Palestinians to the first phase of Nazi Germany and of Smotrich as a “bona fide Jewish fascist” (line 1950). Smotrich’s three doors from the Book of Joshua — accept rule, leave, or fight — “there is no fourth door” (line 1952). Daniel Blatman names the Kohelet Policy Forum, not Likud, as the biggest threat. Toscano argues the liberal framing brackets Palestinians: Fraenkel’s dual state of a normative state for the dominant and a prerogative state for the dominated, Serfaty’s “fascist logic” at the heart of the Zionist project, and Smadar Lavie’s “Fascism is immanent to Zionism from its onset and throughout its history.” (line 1970). Against Englert’s and Ehrlich’s compelling critiques of the instrumentalization of a fascist menace, he proposes the capacious approach: “Whoever is not willing to talk about settler-colonialism should be quiet about fascism.” (line 1998), attending to the historical entanglement of European fascisms with settler histories and to deputized settler violence as a hallmark of fascism; unless settler colonialism is dismantled, fascism can only ever return.

• Chapter 26, “Three new realities for American Power after 7 October”, by Noah Kulwin (lines 2013-2083; 12 December 2023), closing Part 3 of the collection: not a turning point but a great intensification — disenchantment (67 percent of Americans aged 18-34 disapprove of Israel’s military action, Gallup; Biden’s approval at 37 percent; the UAW’s 2 December ceasefire call; the largest-ever American Palestine solidarity protest, over 100,000 on 4 November), a romance (the threadbare rules-based order, Israeli violence instrumentalized from the 1970s, Israel as significant supporter of the Iraq invasion with phony intelligence and media surrogates, George W. Bush’s new unequivocal support in 2006), and a death pact (Israel’s prize position become a unique strategic liability, in Mearsheimer and Walt’s 2007 contention that the special relationship “is no longer defensible on strategic grounds”, line 2063). The $3.8 billion annual package did not keep Israel safe on 7 October; CSIS’s “Israel Could Lose” (Jon B. Alterman, 7 November) maps estrangement from its partners; on 8 December the US alone vetoed the Security Council ceasefire resolution, 13-1 with the UK abstaining. As US priorities shift toward confrontation with China, Israel’s decreasing centrality may open unprecedented space for American activists.

• Part 4 title page (lines 2084-2090): “Part 4 / Not in anyone’s name”.

• Chapter 27, “Not in anyone’s name”, by Ashley J. Bohrer (lines 2091-2177; 1 December 2023): Jewish anti-Zionist organizing’s groundswell — Jewish Voice for Peace at over 22,000 dues-paying members, over eighty actions in several weeks, over 2,000 activists arrested, 189,644 calls and 212,004 emails to Congress through its contact tool. The tradition runs from pre-Nakba Jewish rejection of Herzl’s proposal and the Jewish Labor Bund’s doikayt (“hereness”) through Matzpen, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (2008) and the 2014 inflection; the Center for Jewish Nonviolence and allied organizations bring diaspora Jews to witness the occupation firsthand. The far right is the real driver of contemporary antisemitism — mainstreamed conspiracy theories and neo-Nazi rallies chanting “Jews will not replace us” — while AIPAC endorses white-nationalist candidates, the ADL focuses on anti-Zionist Jews, and the 14 November “March for Israel” platformed John Hagee. Lessons: the work between the waves matters; identity functions strategically and motivationally; alternative communities and intergenerational organizing sustain people; united-front coalitions made the ceasefire demand unanimous on the left. Challenges: most Jewish communal institutions are not yet anti-Zionist, and there are many more secular and Christian Zionists than Jewish ones — Christian Zionism expanding in Brazil, South Korea and Nigeria — so Jewish anti-Zionism is one crucial piece of a larger anti-Zionism directed at all the powers preventing a liberated Palestine.

• Chapter 28, “Gaza’s imperial boomerang”, by Hil Aked (lines 2178-2208 in this part; 14 November 2023; the chapter continues into part 5): Ghassan Abu Sitta’s charge that every western politician supporting Israel’s attacks “has the blood of children on their hands” (line 2186), Sunak’s military aid and Starmer’s “Israel has the right!” on cutting water and electricity. Britain nurtured Zionism, issued the 1917 Balfour Declaration twelve years after the antisemitic Aliens Act, colonised Palestine for nearly thirty years, repressed the 1936-39 revolution with RAF bombers and the Royal Navy, and trained Zionist militias in Wingate’s Special Night Squads. While Abu Sitta worked in Gaza, counterterrorism police visited his family in London: if those in Gaza are “animals”, Palestinians in the West and their allies are criminals. The Imperial boomerang — Arendt, Césaire, and Foucault’s summary that colonial models were brought back so the West “could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself” (line 2200) — runs from the Special Branch’s origins in surveilling Irish migrants and the Hong Kong-tested tactics used at Orgreave to the Prevent policy shaped by Frank Kitson’s counterinsurgency doctrine, the same US tear gas used in Israel and against Black Lives Matter, and Israel’s use of Gaza as a testing ground for weapons and surveillance technology sold worldwide, including NSO’s Pegasus. France’s protest bans, Germany’s criminalization of “from the river to the sea”, Britain’s planned BDS ban and over thirty US states outlawing BDS are a distant reverberation of the same colonial logic: “And eventually, it will come for us all.” (line 2208)

• Chapter 28 completed (lines 2209-2222): the racism that selectively mourns Israelis and dehumanises Palestinians is the same racism that lets migrants drown in the Channel and the Mediterranean; the IHRA re-definition of antisemitism enacts Nakba denial, invisiblization of apartheid and gaslighting, as the Sewell report gaslit communities of colour in Britain. Palestinian liberation — as Barnaby Raine has argued — shakes the foundations of the racial world order, and the US-Britain-Israel alliance defends that order. Under the subhead “Teaching life”: Palestine is axiomatically “controversial” because Zionism emerged from European imperialism and is woven into western liberal culture; Kanafani is quoted — “Palestine is not a cause for Palestinians only, but a cause for every revolutionary, wherever he is, as a cause of the exploited and oppressed masses in our era” — and Colombian president Gustavo Petro calls Gaza “the first experiment in considering us all disposable”. Following Kohl Journal, the chapter moves from solidarity to collective resistance: allow Israel, “the model coercive state”, to finish the unfinished Nakba, or stand in unconditional solidarity with liberation, return and decolonisation; Palestinians, in Rafeef Ziadah’s poem, “teach the world life”.

• Chapter 29, “The war on Gaza and the war on free speech”, by Rebecca Ruth Gould (lines 2226-2266; 2 November 2023), closing Part 4 of the collection: Israel’s thirty-four-hour communications blackout in Gaza on 28 October 2023, then the reprisals — the London Underground driver suspended for leading a “free Palestine” chant on 24 October while TfL had proudly offered free travel to Ukrainian refugees; an anonymous US freelance journalist dropped for a post expressing solidarity with “the over 4,000 Palestinian people killed in recent days”; the Dublin Wix employee fired after the company urged staff to “show Westernity”; the Berlin Jewish Museum guide removed for saying apartheid; the suspended Ofcom staffer; rescinded Davis Polk and Winston & Straw offers to Harvard, Columbia and NYU law graduates; the Canadian doctor doxxed and threatened; Starbucks suing its union; the SEIU Connecticut director forced out; and Artforum editor-in-chief David Velasco fired the day his 19 October ceasefire letter was challenged by collectors, the letter deleted and three colleagues resigning. The UK’s criminalisation dates to its 2016 adoption of the IHRA definition; at writing Israel had killed over nine thousand civilians, nearly half of them children, and wounded thirty-two thousand. Liberation movements are won in public opinion — Algeria, Vietnam, South Africa — so consumers should boycott complicit companies and academics join the PACBI boycott. The US 2017-2028 aid package is $38billionwith$14 billion more proposed, in weapons including F-35s from companies such as Elbit Systems and Lockheed Martin (Congressional Research Service); Josh Paul resigned from the State Department on 18 October 2023 when Leahy vetting was set aside for Israel. The US blocks ceasefire resolutions as it blocked action on Rwanda, and Biden doubts Palestinian figures — “I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using” — as he adopted Israel’s account of the al-Ahli hospital bombing and of Shireen Abu Akleh’s murder. Close: document suppression and report it to the European Legal Support Center or Palestine Legal.

• Chapter 30, “For Palestine, it’s BDS or bust”, Omar Barghouti interviewed by Tribune (lines 2274-2359; 9 May 2023; first published in Tribune): the most far-right, fundamentalist, homophobic and sexist government in Israel’s history has lost the mask of liberalism — “You cannot have democracy with apartheid” (line 2285) — while for Palestinians it is a continuation of seventy-five years, the Israeli Left making “the far-right in Europe look liberal”. There is almost a human-rights consensus on apartheid (UN experts, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem), and Labour’s forcing Kim Johnson to apologise for the word is “McCarthyism, pure and simple” (line 2291); Amnesty’s finding is that Israel treats Palestinians as an inferior racial group. Desmond Tutu called Israeli apartheid worse than South Africa’s: “We did not have F16s bombing our Bantustans in South Africa.” (line 2293). The response to apartheid is targeted lawful sanctions, sports, academic, cultural and financial boycotts and expulsion from international forums. Britain’s Anti-Boycott Bill attacks local democracy itself and, like the first McCarthyism, will come for every movement next. The IHRA definition’s conflation is terrible for the real struggle against antisemitism; the answer is anti-racist principle and refusing self-censorship. The South African boycott took thirty years to build from the 1950s call. The ask of people in Britain is to end complicity — union, council and pension-fund divestment from JCB, Barclays, Elbit Systems — because all systems of injustice are connected. BDS is year-round and institutional: the Norwegian Sovereign Fund ($1.2trillion)divestedafterL{O}^{\prime }scampaign,pensionfundsinNewZealand,theNetherlandsandBelgiumdivested,thelargestUSProtestantchurchesdivested,theGatesFoundationleftG4S,Veolialostover$20 billion and withdrew from Israel entirely in 2015, and Orange withdrew, with Hewlett Packard in progress and silent academic boycott widespread. “You never can tell when the tipping point will come”; victory is not guaranteed without building power beyond existing supporters. Israel’s system “cannot continue without state, corporate, and institutional complicity. You cut those links and Palestinians can do the rest to undermine the whole system of oppression.” (line 2349) Close: Latin America’s turn shows hopelessness is not fate; BDS targets strategically — “Who’s going to boycott 100 companies at the supermarket? Six Che Guevaras in London?” (line 2355).

• Chapter 31, “No Moses in siege”, by Mohammed El-Kurd (lines 2364-2412; 2021; extract from Rifqa, republished with permission), the collection’s last chapter and its only poem: an epigraph records that on 16 July 2014 four boys aged nine to fourteen were killed by Israeli naval fire while playing soccer on a Gaza City beach (line 2372), and the poem addresses the killers — “Was it because there were no more graves in Gaza / that you brought us to the beach to die?” — through the drowned Exodus image: “No place to run. No Moses in siege.” (line 2398), “Here, we know two suns: earth’s friend and white phosphorus.” (line 2408), closing “What do you say to children for whom the Red Sea doesn’t part?” (line 2412). Poetry; the poem’s events are stated as the poem’s, not as fact.

• About the contributors (lines 2417-2495): alphabetical entries for the chapter authors and testimony-givers, from Reda Abu Assi to Eyal Weizman, giving the affiliations and books recorded in the reading notes — among them that Khalil Abu Yahia “was killed in an Israeli airstrike on 30 October” (line 2425) and Hammam Alloh “was killed by an Israeli airstrike in November” (line 2437), that Sara Besaiso is “a sixteen-year-old Palestinian from Gaza” (line 2449), and that Rebecca Ruth Gould is the author of Erasing Palestine (Verso, 2023) and Distinguished Professor at SOAS (line 2465). The co-editors Michal Schatz and Rosie Warren and the interviewers Maya Rosen, Anne Alexander and Daniel Finn have no entries.

• Notes (lines 2500-2647): entries for the Editors’ foreword (thanks, including to Haymarket Books, the Journal for Palestine Studies and the Institute for Palestine Studies, and to cover designer Tom Greenwood) and for Chapters 9 (an earlier Arabic version in Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya, Winter 2024), 12 (six notes, below in Evidence), 15 (thanks only), 18 (seven notes: Salamanca et al. on settler colonialism, Al Qassam’s Arab milieu, the Black and Tans in the Palestine gendarmerie, Machover, the Special Night Squads’ trainees Allon and Dayan, Nitzan and Bichler, Hanieh’s Lineages of Revolt), 21 (four notes added by the ISJ editors: the Allon Plan, the 1967 demographic dilemma, Smotrich’s Regavim and the Jubbet ad-Dib school demolished in May 2023, Sheikh Jarrah 2021), 22 (Nasser and Walid Khalidi’s memoirs), 23 (five notes: Hashemite-Zionist history with Shlaim, Wilson and Abu Nuwar; the 2022 electoral laws; Namaa and Al Ghad; the 15 November UNSC pauses resolution, the US, Russia and UK abstaining; US assistance to Jordan in 2023 of $1.2 billion, over 40 percent of the official aid Jordan receives), 24 (eight notes: the Survey of Palestine—Supplement land figures, the author’s An Army Like No Other, the Gamliel document published in Hebrew on Siha Mekomit, Masalha’s The Bible and Zionism), 25 (twenty-one notes: Arendt, Havrelock, the Kohelet Policy Forum, Serfaty, the Habermas-Forst letter, Peled-Elhanan and Davar 1961, Englert’s “Smoke and Mirrors”, Ehrlich, Kanafani on fascist patterns and the PNC’s 1988 Algiers communiqué, Poulantzas, Whitman, Memmi, the Amalek tradition, Loewenstein, Habbas, and Abeer Butmeh on water and climate justice), 26 (four notes: Mearsheimer and Walt, Hersh’s “Watching Lebanon”, Sharp’s CRS US Foreign Aid to Israel) and 28 (one note: Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond borders, 1998, for the boomerang model). There are no Notes entries for Chapters 1-8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 27, 29, 30 or 31.

• Navigation table of contents and disclaimer (lines 2649-2755): the EPUB navigation lists the cover, front matter, the four parts and all thirty-one chapters in order, About the contributors, Notes, Disclaimer and Guide; the BooXtream disclaimer records the licence, the absence of technical DRM, the prohibition on resale or upload, and the visible and invisible watermarks (name, email, transaction code) by which distribution can be traced.

Key passages

• “Genocide is being knowingly armed and facilitated by our leaders” (From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, line 210).

• “Our hope is that this collection serves as a modest contribution to that process.” (line 234)

• “Israel has no right to self-defense against a territory that it occupies” (Noura Erakat in this collection, line 279).

• “We have lost the ability to provide true care.” (Hammam Alloh in this collection, line 450).

• “On 30 October, Khalil was killed in an Israeli airstrike.” (line 431)

• “They don’t want Palestinians east of Allon Road. It is another Nakba, seventy-five years after the first.” (Sabri in this collection, line 565)

• “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.” (Giora Eiland as quoted by Saree Makdisi in this collection, line 779)

• “The choice, as Hamas saw it, was between dying a slow death—as many in Gaza say—and fundamentally disrupting the entire equation.” (Tareq Baconi in this collection, line 939)

• “He is engaging in exceptionalism.” (Spencer Ackerman in this collection, line 1467)

• “There was no contradiction between support for the “peace process” and deepening colonization—the former consistently worked to enable the latter.” (Adam Hanieh in this collection, line 1510)

• “no political horizon—no alternative—means resistance, as sure as night follows day” (Rashid Khalidi in this collection, line 1319)

• “Some 28 percent of the Jewish Israeli population is considering emigration.” (Toufic Haddad in this collection, line 1669)

• “Wadi Araba isn’t peace, it’s surrender. Wadi Araba is treason.” (Jordanian protest chant in this collection, line 1794)

• “The document clearly and unmistakably recommends the transfer of Gaza civilians as the preferred outcome of the war” (Yuval Abraham, as quoted by Haim Bresheeth-Žabner in this collection, line 1917)

• “Whoever is not willing to talk about settler-colonialism should be quiet about fascism.” (Alberto Toscano in this collection, line 1998)

• “what we can do is make sure that when sparks fly, the gas is turned on” (Ashley J. Bohrer in this collection, line 2151)

• “Documentation is an act of resistance, because it makes visible what the censors want to hide” (Rebecca Ruth Gould in this collection, line 2262)

• “You cut those links and Palestinians can do the rest to undermine the whole system of oppression.” (Omar Barghouti in this collection, line 2349)

• “What do you say to children for whom the Red Sea doesn’t part?” (Mohammed El-Kurd in this collection, line 2412)

Evidence the work relies on

• Testimony gathered or republished by the collection itself: the Gaza youth video testimonies transcribed by the Institute for Palestine Studies, the three Gaza doctors’ testimonies first published by Jewish Currents, the five West Bank testimonies, and original contributions written for the ebook in October-December 2023, each credited to its author and, where applicable, its first publisher and date on the copyright page (line 32) and the chapter headings.
• The casualty, displacement and destruction figures of the foreword and the dated chapters, given as the figures of their dates — UNRWA’s estimate of 1.9 million displaced in the foreword (line 212-214), the Gaza Ministry of Health list of almost 7,000 identified dead produced in answer to Biden’s doubts (Chapter 17), and the UN and B’Tselem casualty ratios in Hroub’s Chapter 12 (line 812) — with the chapters’ own attributions.
• Documentary and official material quoted or cited inside the chapters: Giora Eiland’s and other Israeli officials’ statements (Chapters 11 and 15 and the foreword), the Intelligence Ministry transfer plan reported in Chapter 24, Moshe Dayan’s 1956 eulogy for Roi Rotberg (Chapter 14), Hamas’ 2017 charter and Mohammad al-Dhaif’s 7 October speech (Chapter 12), and the Congressional Research Service arms-trade documentation (Chapter 29) and US Foreign Aid to Israel reports (Chapter 26, note 4).
• The book’s Notes (lines 2500-2647), which supply the scholarly apparatus for the chapters that carry it: Hroub’s Hamas: Political Thought and Practice and Skare’s history of Islamic Jihad (Chapter 12); Salamanca et al., Machover, Nitzan and Bichler and Hanieh’s Lineages of Revolt (Chapter 18); Shlaim, Wilson and Abu Nuwar on Jordan (Chapter 23); the Government of Palestine’s Survey of Palestine—Supplement land figures (Chapter 24, note 1); Arendt, Serfaty, Poulantzas, Memmi, Whitman and Kanafani’s The 1936-1939 Revolt in Palestine (Chapter 25); Mearsheimer and Walt and Hersh (Chapter 26); and Keck and Sikkink’s Activists beyond borders for the boomerang model (Chapter 28, note 1). Chapters without Notes entries — including the testimonies, Gould’s Chapter 29 and Barghouti’s Chapter 30 — rest on their authors’ reporting, interviews and stated sources in the text itself.

Analysis

• Method: an edited anthology assembled within weeks of 7 October 2023, mixing republication (October-November 2023 journalism, speeches and interviews, two pre-war pieces from 2013 and 2021-2023, and one May 2023 interview) with original testimony. Its evidence is therefore strongest where a contributor reports or testifies directly — Gaza and West Bank testimony, the solidarity-movement chapters written by participants (Bohrer, Aked, Gould, Barghouti) — and most argumentative where chapters synthesise other works, as the Notes show for Chapters 12, 18, 24 and 25.
• Perspective: the collection is openly partisan for Palestinian liberation; its umbrella claims — genocide, settler-colonialism as the war’s frame, the enemy trinity of local leadership, Arab regimes and the imperialist-Zionist enemy — are stated by the editors and argued, with varying frameworks (legal, historical, class, movement), by the contributors, not treated as open questions inside the book.
• Limits, as the work presents them: the chapters are dated snapshots of a war still escalating, so their tolls and political readings are those of October-December 2023 (May 2023 for Chapter 30, 2013/2021 for Chapters 20 and 31); figures differ between chapters and stand with their dates (see Open questions). The Notes are uneven — full scholarly apparatus for some chapters, none for others — and two contributors were killed before publication, so their chapters are testimony the editors could not revise with them.
• Support: within the book, the central factual claims (officials’ statements, the exchange-rate history, Oslo’s economic architecture, the divestment record) are attributed to named documents, organisations or the author’s own research as cited; claims the text does not source are recorded under Open questions rather than resolved.

People, organizations, places and events

Sai Englert, Michal Schatz, Rosie Warren, Noura Erakat, Dunia Aburahma, Sara Besaiso, Tawfiq Abu Shomer, Reema Saleh, Khalil Abu Yahia, Hammam Alloh, Yousef Al-Akkad, Reda Abu Assi, Ghassan Najjar, Wael al-Dahdouh, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ghassan Kanafani, Palestine Legal, Jewish Currents, Institute for Palestine Studies, UNRWA, European Gaza Hospital, Gaza, Jabalia, Masafer Yatta, Tuwani, Burin, Beit Lahia, Hebron, Nablus, Hamas, Asmaa Abu Mezied, Rana Barakat, Mohammed El-Kurd, Husam Zomlot, Saree Makdisi, Khaled Hroub, Tareq Baconi, Eyal Weizman, Samera Esmeir, Ein Rashash, Hannibal Directive, Palestine Liberation Organization, Fateh, Palestinian Authority, Oslo Accords, Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic Jihad, First Intifada, Second Intifada, Great March of Return, Soheir Asaad, Jamie Allinson, Spencer Ackerman, Adam Hanieh, Ayman Odeh, Rashid Khalidi, Toufic Haddad, Unity Intifada, Abraham Accords, Paris Protocol, Al-Aqsa Mosque, Hizballah, Nihal El Aasar, Samar Saeed, Haim Bresheeth-Žabner, Alberto Toscano, Noah Kulwin, Ashley J. Bohrer, Hil Aked, Ghassan Abu Sitta, Wadi Araba Treaty, Rebecca Ruth Gould, Omar Barghouti, Desmond Tutu, EUMC Working Definition of Antisemitism, PACBI

Concepts

Genocide, Settler Colonialism, Ethnic Cleansing, Nakba, Sumoud, Right of Return, BDS movement, Apartheid, Bantustans, Normalization, Rules-based international order, One-state solution, Two-state solution, Fascism, Imperial boomerang, Christian Zionism

How it relates to other sources

• With Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights: Barghouti’s Chapter 30 interview restates his book’s framework a decade on — apartheid as the system’s name, PACBI and institutional boycott as the method, South Africa as the model — and updates its record with the Norwegian Sovereign Fund, church and Veolia divestments; where the book argues the case at length, the interview reports its results.
• With Palestine: A Socialist Introduction: the collections share contributors (Englert, Hanieh, Barghouti) and a socialist frame; this collection applies the earlier book’s analysis of Oslo, class and the regional order to the war of October-December 2023, with Allinson and Englert’s enemy-trinity chapter drawing directly on Kanafani’s study, also central to Awad and bean.
• With Written Testimony of Kenneth S. Stern: Stern, the working definition’s lead drafter, warns against using it to chill campus speech; this collection’s Chapters 28-30 treat the adopted IHRA form as an instrument for criminalising Palestine solidarity. Both sources record the definition’s use against pro-Palestinian speech, from opposite evaluations (see EUMC Working Definition of Antisemitism).
• With the wiki’s other 2023-war sources: the foreword’s and chapters’ tolls are December 2023 snapshots and sit alongside, not over, the dated figures on pages such as Gaza and Genocide; the chapters’ disagreements with each other (tolls, refugee shares, 7 October figures) are kept under Open questions with their authors and dates.

Open questions

• The narrator of Chapter 4 is bylined “Reema Saleh” on the title page and in the Contents and copyright credits, but is addressed throughout the text itself as “Rima” (lines 366, 374, 380, 386); both spellings stand as printed in their places.

• Chapter titles are settled by the chapter headings and the navigation table of contents where the Contents and copyright page differ: Chapter 6’s heading is “We have lost the ability to provide true care” (line 438), as is its navigation-list entry (line 2675), against the Contents’ “We’ve lost the ability to provide true care” (line 87); Chapter 13’s heading and the navigation list give Tareq Baconi’s piece as “What was Hamas thinking?”, against the copyright page’s “What does Hamas want?” (line 32); Chapter 29’s heading is “The war on Gaza and the war on free speech” (line 2226), with no conflicting copyright credit. The copyright page’s Khalidi credit, “We Are Seeing a Horrifying Attempt to Shut Down Speech Around Palestine” (31 October 2023), belongs to Chapter 17, “A war without a plan” (heading line 1182), not to Chapter 29.

• Erakat’s Gaza figures (Chapter 1): the pre-1948 Gaza district was “thirty-eight times larger than the current 140 square-mile strip” (line 271), which computes to a district of about 5,320 square miles; no second statement of the district’s area appears in this part to check it against. Her population figures in the same passage — Gaza absorbing nearly 25 percent of Palestinian refugees, its population rising from 80,000 to 280,000, and 2.2 million today (line 273) — stand alongside the foreword’s 2.3 million inhabitants of Gaza (line 214); both stand as printed, with their speakers and dates (foreword 11 December 2023, speech 1 November 2023).

• The foreword’s toll figures (over 18,000 killed, almost 50,000 wounded, nearly 7,000 missing, line 212) are the editors’ figures at the time of writing, December 2023; no other toll for the same period appears in this part.

• Erakat’s claim that “the number of the dead in twenty-six days exceeds the lives stolen in the Bosnian genocide” (line 281) gives no Bosnian figure in this part to check it against.

• The doctors’ testimonies give the siege of Gaza as “since 2007” and “for the past 16 years” (Al-Akkad, line 460) and the occupation as “seventy-five years” (line 474), and Abu Assi’s “seven wars” (line 480) is not enumerated in this part.

• The Arabic phrases in Chapter 1 (“qoumi yamma, qoumi”, line 285; “Lan narhal min hunna”, line 287) are printed without translation in the text; the translations in the reading notes are inferred from context and are not the work’s.

• The Notes at the back of the book (lines 2500-2647, read in the final part) source some claims in this range — for Chapters 9, 12 and 15 — and give no entries for the other chapters of parts 1-2; endnote markers in Chapters 16 and 20 (part 3) likewise have no printed Notes entries in this ebook.

• Hroub’s Hebron massacre figures (Chapter 12): the February 1994 settler attack in the Abraham Mosque “killed twenty-seven Palestinians in injured dozens more” [as printed, including the “in” for “and”] (line 816); no second figure for the massacre appears in this part to check it against.

• Two counts of Palestinians killed by Israel from 2008 to September 2023 appear in this part and do not agree: Hroub gives 6,665 killed (and 156,803 injured), citing UN reporting (line 812), while Weizman gives 3,500 Palestinian deaths from the bombing campaigns between 2008 and September 2023, “according to the UN” (line 1028). Hroub’s scope is all Palestinians killed by Israel in the period; Weizman’s sentence is attached to the bombing campaigns and the siege of Gaza. Both stand as printed.

• Refugee share of Gaza’s population: Makdisi gives 80 percent “refugees, survivors or descendants of survivors of the ethnic cleansing of the rest of southwestern Palestine in 1948” (line 777), against the foreword’s 77 percent “refugees from other parts of Palestine” (line 214) and El-Kurd’s 70 percent who “hail from the lands where many Israeli settlements now stand” (line 714). Each stands as printed with its author.

• Hroub’s account of Sharon’s 2005 withdrawal aims says it would “prevent the emergence of a Palestinian contagious state” (line 874); “contagious” stands as printed, presumably for “contiguous”. His anti-Oslo alliance is named “The Ten Faction” in the singular (line 864), as printed.

• Esmeir spells the national security minister “Itamar Bin Gvir” (line 1098), against Chapter 7’s bracketed “[National Security Minister Itamar] Ben-Gvir” (line 513); both stand as printed.

• Makdisi’s toll series in Chapter 11 climbs to 6,500 with “almost three thousand children” killed (line 767), at the chapter’s date of 25 October 2023; these are the chapter’s running figures as printed, not a total for a stated end date.

• Weizman’s 7 October figures — fighters “killed about 1200 civilians and soldiers. Two hundred people were captured and taken to Gaza.” (line 1032) — stand as printed at the chapter’s 2 November 2023 date.

• Haddad spells the national security minister “Itamar Ben-Givr” at line 1631, against “Ben-Gvir” in the interviewer’s next question at line 1635 and in Chapter 7 (line 513), and Esmeir’s “Bin Gvir” in Chapter 15 (line 1098); all stand as printed.

• Haddad’s Gaza prisoner-exchange success (Chapter 21) is given as an exchange “that resulted in 1,200 Palestinian prisoners being released and 25,000 years being cut from prison sentences” (line 1655); Weizman’s exchange history in Chapter 14 gives the 2011 Shalit deal as 1027 prisoners for one soldier (line 1030). Which exchange Haddad’s figures describe is not stated in this range; both stand as printed.

• Allinson and Englert (Chapter 18) give Gaza’s refugee share as “nearly 80 percent” (line 1427), the same figure as Makdisi (Chapter 11), against the foreword’s 77 percent and El-Kurd’s 70 percent recorded above; each stands as printed with its author.

• Allinson and Englert’s diaspora sentence — “Roughly 7 million today live in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan (where around half of the population is Palestinian or of Palestinian descent), as well as in the West Bank and Gaza.” (line 1370) — does not make clear whether the 7 million covers only the three named states or also the West Bank and Gaza; it stands as printed.

• Khalidi’s toll at 30 October 2023 (Chapter 17) — 8,300 dead, about 3,500 children, at least 120 killed in the West Bank (lines 1194-1200) — is dated later than Makdisi’s 25 October series and earlier than the foreword’s December figures; each series stands with its date.

• Chapter 20 is dated 8 December 2023 on its heading in this ebook (line 1494) and described there as first published in Jacobin on 21 April 2013 and “updated and extended” for the ebook; its body still frames itself around the twentieth anniversary of Oslo (line 1498), with a postscript after the separator at line 1573 marking the decade since. Both dates stand as printed.

• Chapter 23’s toll as of 23 November 2023 is printed as “more than 14,800 Palestinians, including 6,00 children” (line 1768); “6,00” stands as printed, presumably for 6,000. The same chapter’s chant repertoire dates “the second intifada in 2002” (line 1796), while its background section dates the Second Intifada to 2000 (line 1782); both stand as printed. Its gas-deal counterparty is printed “Nobel Energy” for Noble Energy (line 1786).

• The two 11 December 2023 chapters give different Gaza tolls at writing: El Aasar “over 17,700 Palestinians including 7,870 children” (line 1691) against Bresheeth-Žabner’s “nearly 20,000” dead (line 1911); each stands with its author and date.

• Bresheeth-Žabner’s 7 October figures — around 2,000 fighters, eleven military bases taken within four hours, “more than 250 hostages” taken to Gaza (lines 1903-1905) — stand alongside Weizman’s part 2 figures of about 1200 killed and two hundred captured (line 1032); each stands as printed with its author and date (2 November and 11 December 2023).

• Spellings as printed in Chapter 24: the militia is “Haggana” and the federation “Histadruth” (line 1875), against Haganah and Histadrut elsewhere in the wiki; Ben-Gurion is called Israel’s “unelected first Premier” (line 1883); Sadat’s 1973 result is printed as “the return of Sinai and Gaza to Israeli control” (line 1891); the shtetl Jews of the Pale of Settlement are printed “Stetl Jews” (line 1913). In Chapter 22 Nasser’s contemporary is printed “Shimon Perez” (line 1711) and Egypt’s 1973 outcome is printed “After Egypt’s defeat in the 1973 war” (line 1715). In Chapter 25 the Eichmann trial is printed once as “Eichman trial” (line 1984). In Chapter 27 doikayt is printed “Doiykayt” in its second occurrence (line 2119). All stand as printed.

• Chapter 28’s endnotes: the Notes carry a single entry for the chapter (Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond borders, 1998, for the boomerang model, line 2642), which sources the concept’s name but not the chapter’s British examples (Special Branch, Orgreave, Prevent), which stand on the chapter’s text and its named sources (Connor Woodman, Antony Loewenstein) as printed.

• Gould’s toll at 2 November 2023 — Israel had killed “over nine thousand civilians—nearly half of them children—and wounded another thirty-two thousand” (line 2248) — stands later than Khalidi’s 30 October figures (8,300 dead, about 3,500 children) and earlier than the foreword’s December figures; each series stands with its author and date. Her anonymous journalist’s post spoke of “the over 4,000 Palestinian people killed in recent days” (line 2238), an earlier snapshot in the same chapter.

• Chapter 29 as printed names Michael Eisenberg “the inheritor of the company Bath & Beyond” (line 2244); the company is elsewhere Bed Bath & Beyond, and the spelling stands as printed.

• Hroub’s Chapter 12 note 1 (line 2512) gives the initial Israeli casualty figure as 1400, “later reduced” to 1200 with the soldier and policeman share changing, and states that early investigations revealed many Israeli civilians were killed by Israeli helicopter and artillery fire; Weizman’s chapter text (line 1032) gives about 1200 killed and two hundred captured, and Bresheeth-Žabner’s gives more than 250 hostages (lines 1903-1905). Each stands as printed with its author and date.

• The Notes as printed: the Chapter 9 heading is misprinted “Chatper 9. Is the sky crying?” (line 2506); Chapter 24’s note 5 is printed in full as “The latest example” (line 2580) with no further text; Chapter 23’s note 3 says both Jordanian parties were formed in 2022 and then dates Namaa’s founding to September 2023 (line 2564), and its note 1 citation includes the stray characters “w);” (line 2560). All stand as printed.

• The About the contributors list gives no entries for co-editors Michal Schatz and Rosie Warren or for the interviewers Maya Rosen, Anne Alexander and Daniel Finn, though all are named in the book; it also describes Sara Besaiso as sixteen (line 2449), where her Chapter 2 testimony gives no age.

Coverage

lines 1-2756 of 2756, read in full in parts 1-5 of 5. The whole book is accounted for: the front matter, the Editors’ foreword, “A note on our contributors in Gaza”, the four part title pages, Chapters 1-31 in full, About the contributors, the Notes, the navigation table of contents and the licence disclaimer. The text copy’s last numbered line is 2755; 2756 is the verify count.