“Palestine is the moral compass of our time: it can be saved – and all of us with it”
For Francesca Albanese – a voice that manages to bring together legal expertise and a rare human sensitivity – in this era, when the world seems to be heading tragically towards the dehumanization of the most vulnerable and the exclusive dominance of the strongest, imagining Palestine’s future “means refusing to let horror have the last word and ensuring that civilization becomes a duty each of us can choose to embrace and take upon ourselves.” It is from these very thoughts that the verbs on which Albanese builds this book were born, a work with the force of a manifesto and the feeling of a labor of love: Palestine offers the world a glimmer of light that calls on us to open our eyes and act.
To dream, to judge, to emancipate ourselves, to resist, to nourish, to weep, to heal, to dance, to return: all become forms of the same collective experience – acts we can all perform in order to live the present with justice. Each verb becomes an occasion to tell the stories of the remarkable people who inspired it and to carry their echo into our own daily lives.
A profound journey through the history of Palestine – revisiting the key moments through which, for more than a century, this land has endured colonial violence in all its forms – and through the stories of those who suffered, hoped, and investigated; those who had the courage to tell the truth while lies prevailed all around them, and those who paid for the truth with their lives; those who will forever bear the wounds of violence within and upon them, as well as those who inflicted that violence; those who felt the weight of the oppressor and never gave up their desire to be free.
The cover artwork is by Palestinian painter Malak Mattar.
