Books Reviewed: A Rebel in Gaza: Behind the Lines of the Arab Spring, One Woman’s Story, by Asmaa al-Ghoul and Selim Nassib, and Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Life in Contemporary Palestine, by Marcello Di Cintio; A Rebel in Gaza Format, Price, and Publisher: 208 pp., $18.95 (paperback), DoppelHouse Press; Pay No Heed to the Rockets Format, Price, and Publisher: 256 pages, $26 (hardcover), Counterpoint; Both Books: Explore the predicament of the Palestinian writer in the face of Israel’s matrix of repression and the politico-centric view of life espoused by movements combatting this phenomenon.
Central Question: Do national resistance movements have a mandate to shape culture in their image?
Liberal and leftist Israelis who bemoan the pernicious effect on their country’s politics and culture caused by its occupation of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and its siege of the Gaza Strip are often criticized as self-absorbed by supporters of the beleaguered Palestinians. Surely the damage done to Palestinian bodies and even the Palestinian landscape is greater than that visited upon Israel’s psyche, pro-Palestinian voices argue. Their indignation is palpable: A merciless sanctions regime and repeated wide-scale military assaults on densely populated Gaza (of which Israel technically remains an occupier), as well as construction and expansion of Jewish settlements on expropriated land in the West Bank even as Palestinians are barred from building in 61 percent of that territory, and you want to talk to me about Israel’s tortured soul?
Point taken. Yet the two issues aren’t mutually exclusive. Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza since its occupation of those territories during a war with its Arab neighbors in 1967 has been atrocious. But one manner in which the occupation and military rule manifest themselves is indeed a rise in chauvinism that has infected much of Israeli Jewish life. That some Israeli writers and intellectuals lament such a development is understandable, and even commendable.
Somewhere between the damage to the bodies and landscape of Palestine wreaked by the occupation and the far less destructive effect it has on the Israeli soul is what it does to Palestinian culture, upon which it has impinged in the most drastic of ways. 
How so? Well, occupation—logically enough—spawns resistance. And when the occupation is of lengthy duration, so is the resistance; more often than not, a warping of culture and literature results.
Two recent books delve into this phenomenon—and its discontents. A Rebel in Gaza: Behind the Lines of the Arab Spring, One Woman’s Story, by Asmaa al-Ghoul (and Selim Nassib), revolves around the author’s attempts to break free of the tightening vise around her native Gaza, where she has had to contend with two tormentors:...
You have reached your article limit
Sign up for a digital subscription and continue reading all new issues, plus our entire archives, for just $1.50/month.
Already a subscriber? Sign in
