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policy

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Recipe for Being Palestinian

Rise like our bread to speak for those who have no food.

  • Alia Yunis
  • May Grabli
  • October 2023
Artwork by May Grabli
  • Art, Poem
  • Protest

By Alia Yunis

Use olive oil every day, many times a day…
it will keep strong those of us who have a home in which to
cook,
even when the news makes it hard to breathe.
Rise like our bread to speak for those who have no food.
Experiment with maqluba until it stands upside down perfectly
while you stay upright no matter how others try to bring you
down.
Soak knafa cheese until is sweet enough to counter the
aftertaste of tears.
Fold into conversations with those who only know us as
terrorists or hummus experts,
hummus and humanity sound similar in English, and they are
better shared.
Remember our heritage is baked into Palestine’s soil-- sage in
the fall, grape leaves in the spring,
And rooted year-round in our family trees –pomegranate, fig,
apricot, almond, orange.
Taken care of by our ancestors to garnish with pine nuts
memories for our descendants.
Use olive oil every day, many times a day…
…lest we be eaten away.
  • ceasefire now family Food occupation palestine

Alia Yunis

Alia Yunis is a writer and filmmaker and a past PEN Emerging Voice Fellow. Her feature documentary, The Golden Harvest (2019), a 6,000-year-old love story that began in Palestine, is currently playing in festivals and other venues and won Best of the Fest at its US debut at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival. Her debut novel, The Night Counter (Random House), was critically-acclaimed by the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly and several publications. Alia thinks about trees a lot and is currently producing an interactive documentary, Tree-Routed, connecting people’s personal stories around their trees to a shared heritage across the oceans. She is also writing a screenplay about a Muslim girl in small Minnesota town obsessed with Christmas trees. Her fiction and non-fiction writings and film works have have been translated into 10 languages.

May Grabli

May Grabli is a Palestinian-Israeli artist born in Jaffa. Being born in Jaffa means that May is a "48 Arab" as she does not hold a Palestinian identity card, but an Israeli one. Being a minority in her country of origin has strongly influenced her work which deals with the struggle of understanding one's identity. May's parents moved her family to Ontario, Canada in the early 2000s while the Second Intifada was taking place to try to raise her and her siblings in a more peaceful environment. Five years later, they returned to Jaffa where May slowly began to learn about her history and embrace her Palestinian roots.

‹Also in this Issue›
  • Art, Opinion
Gaza, I Wish We’d Meet Under Better Circumstances

Hasheemah Afaneh , Dalia Tuffaha

I first met the Gaza Strip on a television screen back in 2004, at eleven years old. 

  • Protest
  • Art, Essay
To Live Free

laila r. makled , Dina Fawakhiri

To colonizing propagandists, our story is the American Dream. To us, it’s an ongoing tragedy.

  • Intervention
  • Art
Girl from Ramallah

Mariam Darraj

  • Intervention
  • Art, Essay
My Gifts from Gaza

Yousef Abu-Salah

Baba once mentioned how Palestinians were the patient dough of the Taboon. No matter how much we are kneaded, beaten, and stretched beyond our limits, our capacity for hope is supernatural. Taboon, even burnt beyond recognition, is still Taboon.

  • Intervention
  • Art, Poem
Three Poems

Rashid Hussain , Salma Harland , Dana Barqawi

I’m against my country’s revolutionaries / Wounding an ear of wheat / Against the child / Any child / Holding a grenade

  • Protest
  • Art, Poem
I am the stranger

Bassam Jamil , Nicole Mankinen , Bint Bandora

I am the stranger / The shadow beneath the cloud / Adrift and looming over my land

  • Protest
  • Video
Scenes From Home, Memories in Motion

Rania Lardjane

  • Protest
  • Art, Poem
(out of borders)

Hani Albayarie , Khaled Jarada

He wears winter and searches for another land, / Where he will say to the raining clouds, / To sow the sea in a land other than the one we know. / Hope was the last breath of the traveler, / Hope was his land.

  • Intervention
  • Art, Poem
Two Poems

Summer Awad , Dana Barqawi

I want to whisper to him that his existence / Is revolutionary, that his sumud is breathtaking, that I see his gentleness

  • Protest
  • Art, Poem
Why I Love Secrets and Lies

Veera Sulaiman , Dina Fawakhiri

You learn to make your gods as small as a coffee cup and hide your future in it

  • Protest
  • Audio
Hell in My Home

Suzana Sallak

Have you ever wondered what hell feels like on Earth?

  • Violence
  • Art, Essay
In October, the sky turned white

Nama’a Qudah , Dina Fawakhiri

Why are these babies asking too much when they demand nothing but the most basic human rights?

  • Violence
  • Art
Timekeeper

Michael Jabareen

Time stops. The clock’s pointer, at all times alarmed, stands still.

  • Protest
  • Art, Poem
Recipe for Being Palestinian

Alia Yunis , May Grabli

Rise like our bread to speak for those who have no food.

  • Protest
  • Art, Testimony
From the river to the sea

Yara Ghabayen

There was no time to mourn. No time for the dead or the living.

  • Violence
  • Art, Poem
Two Poems

Aiya Sakr , Asma Barakat

You’ve burned the sheikh’s field, worth a lifetime of planting / and fed him a variety of jail cells instead.

  • Protest
  • Art, Poem
Two Poems

Edward Salem , Bayan Dahdah

God said (and already you can tell / I’m making this up), / If you lift a rock, I am there.

  • Violence
  • Art
Unprovoked

Ahmad Mallah

We became just numbers with no stories, no dreams.

  • Protest
  • Art, Poem
A Farm in Gaza

Kat Abdallah , Mette Ehlers

My grandma had a farm in Gaza where her children played outside. Only her two oldest sons remember living there.

  • Protest
  • Art, Poem
Letters to the Unliving and Unborn [for Palestine]

Liane Al Ghusain

We are the land and the land is us. / Its holiness and grime cannot be dispelled from us.

  • Protest, Violence
  • Art, Poem
Two Poems

Priscilla Wathington , Bayan Dahdah

One honey eye got stuck open / watching the burned enter the street.

  • Protest
  • Art, Poem
For the Dead Among Us

Lisa Suhair Majaj , Fadia Jawdat

We will open the day for you, and the night. We know that you are beneath the earth, or ash

  • Protest
  • Vignette
A Few Lines

Bader Alzaharna , Fadia Jawdat

At a hospital-turned-housing-shelter, a father wept, cradling his newborn son at the gate of Al Shifa hospital. 

  • Intervention
  • Art, Poem
Homeland

Farah Alhaddad , Fadia Jawdat

is this a disappearing game or stretching membrane?

  • Intervention
  • Art, Poem
I Was Imagining

Mikhail De Palraine , Fadia Jawdat

Planes claim the sky; claim mothers and fathers, / Claim dreams, futures, one last kid's hope

  • Intervention
  • Art, Poem
[ ∙∙∙ ]

Fady Joudah , Fadia Jawdat

This is what faith taught you. / This way, art. That way, God.

  • Intervention

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