Palestine/Israel Review

02/24/2026

We are pleased to share a new publication in Palestine/Israel Review featuring Marah Sarji’s review of Munther Isaac’s 2025 book Christ in the Rubble: Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza. In her review, Sarji presents Isaac’s work as a powerful theological intervention that confronts the moral and interpretive frameworks through which many Western Christians have engaged the genocidal violence in Gaza. Writing from his position as a Palestinian Christian pastor and theologian, Isaac challenges readings of Scripture that have been mobilized to legitimize colonialism, dispossession, war, and even genocide, advancing instead a contextual and liberationist theology that locates Christ amid the suffering and destruction experienced by Palestinians. As Sarji notes, “Isaac contributes to Palestinian decolonial efforts in asserting Palestinian agency on narrative telling, by recounting the story from Palestinian eyes while not compromising on his ethical nonviolent stances. He does well in asserting original Palestinian theological interpretation, as he pastorally speaks to Palestinian sorrow while many religious leaders remained silent in naming the horrors in public.” Link in the first comment

02/24/2026

We are pleased to share a new publication in Palestine/Israel Review featuring Manar Makhoul’s article, Reclaiming Narrative Authority: Esoteric Resistance in Emile Habiby’s The Pessoptimist. In this study, Makhoul analyzes how Emile Habiby’s The Secret Life of Sa’id, the Ill-fated Pessoptimist deploys secrecy as a political and narrative strategy within the context of post-1967 Palestinian literature. The article examines secrecy as a response to Zionist–Israeli epistemic erasure as well as to internal Palestinian debates over forms of resistance, tracing how the novel employs secrecy as an individual, familial, and collective device under conditions of surveillance. By exploring how secrecy shapes questions of identity, continuity, loyalty, and resistance, Makhoul situates Habiby’s work within broader debates over overt and covert forms of political agency among Palestinians in Israel. Link in the first comment.

01/28/2026

We are happy to announce the publication of this article in Palestine/Israel Review - authored by Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber, it makes critical connections between the Palestinian Nakba and ongoing Nakba and the systematic kidnapping of "non-normative" Jewish babies by the Israeli government in the 1950s

Abstract. This article employs an intersectional feminist lens to examine the Yemenite Mizrahi and Balkan Babies Affair, the abduction of hundreds of babies from immigrant families in Israel between 1948 and the early 1950s. It situates the affair within broader settler-colonial practices, drawing p...