Poetry & Resistance Literature

Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud

1913–1948

The 'martyr poet' — a schoolteacher who wrote of carrying his soul in his palm and was killed in battle at al-Shajara in July 1948.

Dareen Tatour

1982–

A poet from Reineh whose poem "Resist, My People, Resist Them" brought her three years of prison and house arrest — and made her case a global test of whether poetry itself can be put on trial.

Fadwa Touqan

1917–2003

One of the most celebrated female poets of the Arab world, Touqan gave voice to love, loss, and the Palestinian struggle from her home in Nablus.

George Abraham

A Palestinian American poet of diaspora, queerness, and survival, Abraham writes in the space between languages — "for yesterday & her inherited traumas."

Ghassan Kanafani

1936–1972

A pioneering voice of Palestinian resistance literature, Kanafani wove journalism, fiction, and political commitment into a single moral project.

Ghayath al-Madhoun

1979–

A Palestinian poet of two exiles — his family fled Palestine for Syria, and war later drove him from Damascus to Stockholm — al-Madhoun writes prose poems of siege, asylum, and a longing with the mass of Einstein's equations.

Hala Alyan

1986–

Poet, novelist, and clinical psychologist, Alyan maps the Palestinian diaspora in verse and prose alike — inheritance, exile, and the daily work of rebuilding a self.

Ibrahim Tuqan

1905–1941

Poet of the 1936 revolt and author of 'Mawtini,' the verse that served as Palestine's unofficial anthem and became Iraq's national anthem in 2004.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Poet, essayist, and translator whose "Running Orders" carried Gaza's summer of 2014 around the world — and whose later collections made her one of the most honored Palestinian poets writing in English.

Mahmoud Darwish

1941–2008

The national poet of Palestine, Darwish turned exile, memory, and resistance into some of the most widely read Arabic poetry of the modern era.

Mosab Abu Toha

1992–

A Gaza-born poet and librarian, Abu Toha writes from the everyday experience of siege, family, and the search for normalcy under bombardment.

Mourid Barghouti

1944–2021

Poet of exile and return, Barghouti turned the absurdities and griefs of displacement into luminous, ironic prose and verse.

Najwan Darwish

1978–

Jerusalem poet and editor whose flat, sardonic lines refuse consolation — 'one of the foremost contemporary Arab poets,' in the New York Review of Books' phrase.

Naomi Shihab Nye

1952–

A Palestinian-American poet of tenderness and attention, Nye writes of her father's lost Palestine and of the small exchanges that keep people human.

Rashid Hussein

1936–1977

Poet, journalist, and translator between Arabic and Hebrew, who wrote of a country turned into prisons and died alone in a New York apartment at forty.

Refaat Alareer

1979–2023

Professor, editor, and poet of Gaza, Alareer taught a generation of young writers to write back — and left behind a poem asking to be remembered.

Samih al-Qasim

1939–2014

A Druze Palestinian poet of resistance, al-Qasim wrote of steadfastness and belonging from his village in the Galilee, refusing both exile and conscription.

Suheir Hammad

1973–

Born to Palestinian refugee parents and raised on Brooklyn hip-hop, Hammad built a poetry of dispossession and defiance — from "First Writing Since" to the American Book Award–winning breaking poems.

Taha Muhammad Ali

1931–2011

Self-taught poet of the destroyed village of Saffuriyya, who sold souvenirs to pilgrims in Nazareth by day and read poetry at night, and wrote in a plain voice unlike anyone else's.

Tawfiq Ziyad

1929–1994

Poet of sumud and longtime mayor of Nazareth, Ziyad gave the cry 'here we will stay' its definitive poetic form.

I Saw Ramallah

Mourid Barghouti

A poet crosses the Allenby Bridge home after thirty years of exile — the most beloved Palestinian memoir of return.

In the Presence of Absence

Mahmoud Darwish

Darwish's late self-elegy — a prose-poetic autobiography in which the poet addresses his younger self across a life of exile and return.

Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation

Edited by Vijay Prashad

American writers respond to the 2014 Gaza war with essays, poems, and open letters — a document of conscience edited by Vijay Prashad.

Men in the Sun

Ghassan Kanafani

Three Palestinians suffocate in a water tanker crossing the desert toward Kuwait — the defining novella of Palestinian exile.

Returning to Haifa

Ghassan Kanafani

A Palestinian couple return to their Haifa home after 1967 and find their son — raised as an Israeli soldier — behind its door.

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear

Mosab Abu Toha

Poems written from Gaza under siege — a debut that made Mosab Abu Toha one of the most vital young voices in Palestinian literature.

Searching for a Palestinian Necropastoral (Eve)

George Abraham

A search for origins along an American river and a mother's breath — Abraham rewrites the pastoral as a Palestinian form, where to arrive at a landscape is to have a past to run from.

Blood

Naomi Shihab Nye

Nye remembers her Palestinian father through the small parables he passed down — and asks what a 'true Arab' can do when the headlines themselves clot in the blood.

break (clustered)

Suheir Hammad

From breaking poems — Hammad's hip-hop-fused book of war, women, and survival — a meditation on cluster munitions and what they leave behind: do not fear what has blown up; fear the unexploded.

Enemy of the Sun

Samih al-Qasim

Al-Qasim's defiant refrain — 'I shall not compromise... I shall resist' — traveled far beyond Palestine: a handwritten copy was found among George Jackson's prison books.

Enough for Me

Fadwa Touqan

Touqan's brief late poem asks for one thing only — to die on her country's soil and remain there as dust, grass, and a flower. Its lines are carved on her gravestone in Nablus.

Hamza

Fadwa Touqan

A man from Touqan's own town, ordinary as bread, tells her in the years after 1967 to be patient and not to weaken — the land, he says, will remain alive and will not die.

Here We Will Stay

Tawfiq Ziyad

The anthem of Palestinian steadfastness: Ziyad vows that those who remained in Lidda, Ramla, and the Galilee will stay 'like a wall upon your chest' — rooted, working, and unerasable.

I Call to You

Tawfiq Ziyad

Ziyad's pledge to his homeland and his people: orphaned, naked and barefoot, he has carried his blood in his palm and never lowered his flag.

I Can't Attend

Ghayath al-Madhoun

The exile's litany of excuses: a Palestinian poet safe in Stockholm explains — with black humor and survivor's guilt — why the road between his poem and Damascus is cut off.

Identity Card

Mahmoud Darwish

Darwish's most famous early poem turned an ID number into defiance: its refrain 'Record! I am an Arab' made the young poet famous overnight and remains one of the most quoted lines in modern Arabic poetry.

If I Must Die

Refaat Alareer

Written in 2011 and shared again weeks before an Israeli airstrike killed him in December 2023, Alareer's final poem became a global testament — a request to be remembered as a story, and a kite, bringing hope.

In Jerusalem

Mahmoud Darwish

Darwish walks the Old City from one epoch into another without a memory to guide him — a poem in which prophets share a history and the walker is left asking who he is.

Mawtini

Ibrahim Tuqan

The verse that became Palestine's unofficial anthem — sung at demonstrations and funerals for ninety years, and adopted as the national anthem of Iraq in 2004.

Midnight

Mourid Barghouti

Barghouti's book-length poem keeps a man awake on New Year's Eve as memory, war, and grief pour through his window — and still insists that he was born for joy.

From Acre Prison

Traditional — sung by Firqat al-ʿAshiqin

The funeral song for Fuad Hijazi, Muhammad Jamjoum and Atta al-Zir, hanged by the British at Acre prison on 17 June 1930. It went out with their funerals and never stopped being sung — in the camps, at commemorations, and inside the prisons.

Morning Song

Naomi Shihab Nye

Written for Janna Jihad, the child who began documenting occupation with her mother's phone at age seven: the 'tiny journalist' sees everything — and 'she's bigger than you are.'

Mom

Refaat Alareer

A miniature portrait of a mother's face, where every line holds a book, a hope, a love — Alareer's tender counterpoint to the poetry of siege.

On a Starless Night

Mosab Abu Toha

A bombing night in Gaza: the neighbor's house lies 'like an old carpet on the floor of the earth' — and the poem becomes the only place the small facts of a destroyed household survive.

On This Earth

Mahmoud Darwish

A litany of small, ordinary reasons to live — bread at dawn, grass on a stone — that ends by naming Palestine as the Lady of Earth and declaring 'I deserve life.'

Resist, My People, Resist Them

Dareen Tatour

The poem that put a poet on trial: posted online in October 2015, it led to Tatour's arrest, conviction, and imprisonment — before an Israeli court ruled on appeal that the poem was not a crime.

Revenge

Taha Muhammad Ali

A poem that spends its whole length imagining a duel with the man who killed the poet's father — and then dismantles the duel, one relative at a time, until nothing is left to kill.

Running Orders

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Written during Israel's 2014 assault on Gaza, Tuffaha's poem answers the phone call no one should receive — the one that says your house is next — and asks what courtesy means in a prison by the sea.

Sleeping in Gaza

Najwan Darwish

Darwish addresses the Portuguese fado and proposes to sleep the way people sleep when the shells are falling — a poem about exhaustion rather than defiance.

Spoiler

Hala Alyan

A poem that begins with a diagnosis of fear and ends as an instruction for living: whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful.

The Martyr

Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud

Written by a schoolteacher in his twenties who was killed in battle eleven years later — the poem that earned Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud the name 'the martyr poet.'

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear

Mosab Abu Toha

Addressing the surgeon who opens his ear, Abu Toha catalogs what is stored inside — his mother's voice, songs, and the sounds of drones and bombs — memory as an archive that must be put back in order.

To My Mother

Mahmoud Darwish

Written from an Israeli prison as a letter of longing for his mother's bread, coffee, and touch — later sung by Marcel Khalife, it became one of the most beloved poems in the Arab world.

Travel Tickets

Samih al-Qasim

A short poem addressed to the man who will kill him: search my pockets, you will find tickets — to peace, to the fields and the rain, to the conscience of humankind. Don't waste them.

We Teach Life, Sir

Rafeef Ziadah

Ziadah's answer to a journalist who asked if Palestinians would 'just stop teaching their children to hate' — a spoken-word poem that became one of the most shared performances of Palestinian poetry ever recorded.

Without a Passport

Rashid Hussein

Born without a passport, the poet watches his country turn into prisons — and answers by planting a country, a sun, and wheat inside every house.