The following poems are the work of a group of Palestinian students with Israeli citizenship, currently enrolled in the Israeli university system. While around five million Palestinians live in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, so-called Arab Israelis make up just over 20 percent (2.1 million) of the Israeli population that resides principally within the borders of Israel established after the Nakba of 1948. Though nominally accorded the same legal rights as Jewish Israelis, Arab Israelis are effectively second-class citizens, subject to significant discrimination and disadvantage. They are also complexly positioned in relation to both mainstream Israeli society and Palestinian life in the occupied territories. Neither fully integrated nor fully excluded, their perspectives tend to be underrepresented in discourse around Israel-Palestine.

Palestinian identity and experience are not monolithic, as these writers would be quick to underscore. Palestinians are Muslim, Christian, and Druze; they are secular and devout; they are Bedouin and Black; they claim many more identifications and disidentifications that cannot be enumerated here. Many Palestinians on Israeli university campuses identify as Arab Israeli, either by personal preference or to avoid the risks that come with openly calling themselves Palestinian. The writers represented here, however, generally refer to themselves as ’48 Palestinians, a term for Palestinians who remain within the armistice lines drawn up after the Arab-Israeli War, embracing one of the most politicized monikers available to them.

These young writers have elected to publish under pseudonyms, to limit their exposure to the retaliation increasingly inflicted against those who speak out on Israeli campuses, particularly since October 7, 2023. In recent months, Palestinian students have faced suspension, dismissal, doxing, and arrest for social media posts or public expressions deemed critical of the Israeli state, as part of a broader pattern of surveillance, censorship, and intimidation targeting pro-Palestinian speech in Israel.

All the writers are women. Two live in predominantly Arab towns and villages, while the third lives in a “mixed city,” populated by both Jews and Arabs. One is a practicing Muslim who wears the hijab (usually paired stylishly with Converse sneakers); the other two are not religious, though they come from Muslim families. All are products of Israel’s education system, which is segregated up to the university level. All are fluent in Arabic, Hebrew, and English. While these poets have found some support in Israeli academia, they emphasize that their writing is possible not because of, but despite the climate on Israeli campuses—spaces they must share with uniformed Israeli soldiers who carry assault rifles into classrooms. They offer their work here both to help open up such possibilities for others, and because they feel that, particularly in Anglophone discussions, the voices of  ’48 Palestinians often go unheard.

—Anonymous, August 21, 2025

History and Cake in Jerusalem

Is it just history that
I was in Jerusalem today and that
I saw what I saw and
I smelled pomegranates from the next street over
but it was only my imagination

That I laughed along with you and
I saw your hands and they looked clean
and I ate your cake and it was good
and I loved your library

Is it all but lamentation and duty?

I liked your cake and your interior decorating
Is this just history?
Would you have done this to your
house in another country?
Would you have chosen this wood for
the kitchen and
kept the old tiles?

Why did you paint the walls white?
Do you just like it this way?
Do you just happen to be living here?
Are we all just living by chance?
Where do I come from?
Where do I see you?

Is it just history, then?
and we are all
painting our walls white
and living in white tents, too
on the skirts of your empire?

If it is all history then
I choose not to stand
on the skirts of my skin
and I get to say no
and I get to perform for you
that once upon a time I said no
and many others
cared that there are white tents
on the other side of your
freshly painted white wall

Maybe it’s mere lamentation and duty
and maybe it’s just history and I
don’t mean anything to anyone

But maybe I will tell you that you
cannot make cake and just live in
history
history makes itself with your hands
alongside your cake as you paint your
walls white with your husband who cannot
speak the language yet and
your child who certainly will

—Habiba Majd

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I Think That BNGVR is the Best

I think that BNGVR is the best because
he is an honest man
he would spit at my face and
threaten to kill me and take my house
and he would love to see me dead
he is an honest man

I think BNGVR is the best because he doesn’t wear a mask
of leftism or cool activism
he doesn’t brag about leaving the army
before inviting his army friends over
to smoke pot and eat McDonald’s
he wouldn’t listen to my folkloric stories
or make the pathetic indigenous poet feel seen by the superior colonizer
by listening to her
BNGVR will never listen to me
and I think that he’s the best

BNGVR will never lie and make up identities
leftist Israeli
two-state solutionist
peace-for-all-nik
two-sidesist
and whatnot
BNGVR is an honest man
BNGVR saves me heartache
he doesn’t lie to me or promise me peace
he tells me the truth
that it is what it really is
us or them. them or us. and it’s only one land. can’t share.

BNGVR gives me a reality check
BNGVR reminds me of who I am and who he is
he tells me that I am subhuman and that he is an occupier
he tells me that right and wrong are distinct
and that one of us must be right
and that he wants to kill me and kick me out
BNGVR spits in my face
but he spits the truth
his truth on my face
BNGVR is an honest man
BNGVR doesn’t manipulate
and he doesn’t pretend
he tells me who he is
So I know who he is

I think that BNGVR is the best
he tells me the truth
that he hates me

—Habiba Majd

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No One Parts the Sea for Them

after Mohammed El-Kurd

The Red Sea does not part now
It drinks
It swells with the blood of lambs
too young for altars
And another
And another

No staff is raised
No dry path opens
Only waves
and what they keep

The sky is a chalice tipped
spilling dusk like wine
And the sand
crushed and warm
holds small bodies
like broken bread

Take, eat
this is the cost
Take, drink
this is the world’s forgetting
The sky drinks it
The earth drinks it
and still it runs

No last supper
No resurrection
Only the sea
Whispering mothers
They kneel
not to worship
but to gather pieces
too small to name

Still, they gather
Children with eyes wide as prophecy
They wait for a table
that does not come

And the Red Sea
deep with what it carries only
the weight of unanswered prayers
It does not turn to wine
It stays blood and

tiny shoes
that never reached the other side

Who will tell them that the Red Sea doesn’t open for no child

—Reem Al-Ghurba

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A Corner

after Nina Simone

I think we may be the loneliest

Ghostly rooms, white walls, drought in mugs
deafening silence, blinding lights
disappointed gods, bawling mothers, violent fathers,
ravaging relatives, violating neighbors

Let the children graze until they bleed

I think we might be the loneliest around
Blood and water spouting, wind violently shaking
doors, heartbeats pound in the fingertips
Skin grows thick, as thick as the cover on the old sofa
stained and torn

I think I might be the loneliest

I have a face, a nose, an eye, an ear, a heart
but no kidneys, no stomach, no throat, no mouth
I got an eye, I got an ear, I got a heart
But I ain’t got a lot, no shoes, no dresses, no skirts, no brushes,
no class, no mind, no home, no mothers,
no aunts, no grandmas
What do I got? What I got?
I ain’t got one clue

I am the loneliest
Let us talk, then talk, talk, talk, talk
then fucking talk!
Then smile and laugh and jump and shout, yet demand
Demand your face!
Demand your voice!
Demand your pain! Your joy!

Let us demand to be remembered
I don’t remember your face. I am the one who ain’t got a face
I got no god, no earth, no country, no home,
no house, no room, no walls, no bed, no covers,
and no face

What do I got?
A corner

—Maryam Kanaan

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Roots Were Not Made to Sit

It was merely a school assignment
Not an assignment, just fooling around
With scraps of wood, remnants of time
Pieces of an old chair, ancient
From a Palestinian home

An old Christian woman sat there
Year after year, spine pressed into the grain
Mary on her neck, rosary worn smooth
Praying for a dead husband
Praying for a lost son
Praying for a son who was not dead
But dying all the same

I was given this broken chair
And I was told to make it stand
But a chair is for sitting
A chair is for praying
A chair is for passively waiting, for hoping

So I took this chair and made a sword
Wood, torn from the land,
Wood with roots, wood with memory,
Roots that were never meant to sit
Roots were meant to fight

I shaped the blade
Ran my hands along its edge
Felt the weight of something that was not meant to cut
But could still split
Air, space, fear

And so I carried it
This sword of earth
On my head, like a crown, like a question
Walking, watching, passing the men with real weapons
Men with their own steel prayers strapped to their backs

One of them eyed me
His fingers twitching near his belt
A coward man with a coward gun
Staring down my wooden, rooted weapon
As if it could wound him, as if it could unmake him

And perhaps it could
Perhaps not in steel and blood
But in the idea of it, the defiance of it
A weapon that was not given, but made
A weapon that was not manufactured, but grown

You stare me down
I stare you down
I look down on you

My weapon is better
My weapon is organic
It is an organ, a pulse, a history

Yours is steel, cold and manufactured
Mine is wood, warm and alive

And for a moment, we know it
For a moment, you fear it
For a moment, the world holds its breath

Because roots were never meant to sit
Roots were meant to rise
Roots were meant to fight

—Maryam Kanaan

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