Palestine - 1 : Stories from the eve of the Nakba

by Basma Ghalayini (Editor)

Featuring: Mazen Maarouf, Selma Dabbagh, Ahmad Jaber, Anwar Hamed, Mahmoud Shukair, Liana Badr, Lina Meruane, Abdalmuti Maqboul, George Abraham, Yara El-Ghadban, Ibtisam Azem & Sonia Sulaiman

About:
How can literature respond to a genocide. Is it even possible to write fiction after witnessing the horrors inflicted on Gaza?
The contributors to Palestine - 1 attempt to answer this question, ignoring the lie that history began in October 2023, and addressing the great crime that underpins the entire the invasion and systematic annihilation of Palestine in 1948, displacing over 750,000 people, and stealing 80% of their land – the event collectively remembered as ‘the Nakba’.
Using literary devices typically associated with the horror genre – dreams, visions, ghosts, djinn, doppelgangers and divided selves – these authors explore the lead-up to 1948 and its aftermath, inviting readers to question the very realities that we, safe in the West, have built for ourselves. If the first casualty of war is truth, the last is often the peace of mind of those who are invaded – a generational trauma, in the case of Palestinians, that haunts them in a language that fantasy and speculative fiction can certainly speak to.

253 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 12, 2025

Reviews

[KenyanBibliophile · Rating 5 out of 5]

From Saffouryeh’s buried scream to the final, obscene flood, every story in Palestine -1 is placed with surgical intent. Basma Ghalayini’s editorial eye is merciless and loving at once. She lets the land speak first, splits the book open at its exact center with the diaspora’s drowning heart, and withholds the colonizer’s voice for last. A story about exile and the homeland’s submersion is ironically the sole story in the anthology tethered to a village, a city now, that still stands: Beit Lehem. Unbowed. The clash between erasure and resistance at the very center, the anthology’s spine refusing to snap. Every other tale is preceded by the name of a destroyed village, an homage to the 531 erased in 1948. The final story alone bears no name. It’s colonizer rootless, unclaimed by the land itself. What looks like an anthology is in truth a single, slow exorcism. Ghalayini does not merely curate twelve Palestinian voices, she stitches the severed body of her homeland back together, thread by thread, and in the pattern of the stitches, Saffouryeh hears its own voice returned.

full review here: https://arablit.org/2025/12/04/a-sing...

[Diego Garrido · Rating 3 out of 5]

Antología literaria que reúne cuentos, historias y anécdotas narradas desde diversas perspectivas y géneros literarios.

En "Palestina -1", lxs autorxs logran retratar una Palestina multifacética: esperanzada y a veces desdichada, que vive bajo el peso constante de la opresión. A lo largo del libro, Palestina misma emerge como la protagonista, cobrando vida mediante las múltiples voces que narran su historia, son voces que resuenan y permanecen.

Si bien los cuentos poseen méritos significativos, le puse tres estrellas debido a ciertos aspectos que podrían mejorar. Algunos relatos evidencian una escritura todavía en desarrollo, con narrativas que por momentos resultan densas y difíciles de seguir, lo que afecta el ritmo general de la lectura.

Recomiendo totalmente.

[Eleonora Colli · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The entire land was sinking before our eyes. Unequivocally sinking beneath the waters that now
engulfed it. We watched from our armchairs, staring at large screens, as they cried out to be saved. It was too late; the gods of diaspora told us so. But they didn't tell us whether we should rejoice in their debacle, which was indisputably our debacle since we would no longer have a land to return to. No, we weren't certain whether it grieved us or not, that land disappearing to the bottom of the sea.”