The written word is a critical outlet for expression: to share human experience, advocate change, and foster camaraderie. For the Palestinian citizens of Israel, local literati relied on poetry and prose to protest the state imposed upon them in 1948 and to forge belonging despite their isolation from the rest of the Arab world. The resulting literature began to reach wider audiences and served as a bridge to Arab readership across the region after the 1967 war, even as the compositions had been tenderly developed to maintain identity and mobilize the masses inside Israel. Within the frame of intellectual history and cultural studies, this project delves deeply into the untranslatable, reckoning with the political activism of Palestinian Israelis, isolated in bilingualism, bicultural identities, and engagement in a parliamentary system. How was this corpus translated, mistranslated, and coopted throughout the wider Middle East, and onwards into English-language discourse?

Molly Bernstein is a historian of the Middle East. Her research focuses on the intersection of media, literature, and identity, investigating the mutual influences through the lens of intellectual and cultural history. Previously, she was opinion editor at Israel’s Haaretz newspaper and spent many years as a humanitarian aid worker in crisis zones across the Middle East and the globe. Molly holds a PhD and MA in Middle East History from Tel Aviv University, and BAs in each Arabic Studies and Government & Politics from the University of Maryland. Molly has lived in a smattering of strange places such as Taiwan, Morocco, Greece, and Tajikistan, learning Arabic and Persian alongside her native English and Hebrew.