Stars in the Sky of Palestine​
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Foreign Affairs Department, PLO​​​​
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‘Palestine is still alive,
and there is room here
for you and us.’
The republication of Stars in the Sky of Palestine invites a return – not merely to a book, but to a moment. Published originally in 1978 by the Foreign Affairs Department of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the collection assembles voices that emerged from the crucible of occupation, exile, siege and political struggle. These are not the distant echoes of a bygone era, but urgent, present-tense engagements with a reality that continues to unfold. The writers gathered here were working in the shadows of catastrophe, often in the margins of statelessness, and their art carries the full burden of that condition. Yet their stories do not collapse into propaganda, nor do they settle into victimhood. Instead, they offer something rarer: narrative forms that insist on Palestinian life in all its difficulty, ambiguity and imagination.
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The title, Stars in the Sky of Palestine, gives us our first metaphor, and perhaps our first question. What are these stars? They are not celestial only in a poetic sense; they are constellations of memory, resistance and grief. In a night without statehood, without sanctuary, without fixed belonging, they serve as points of orientation. They illuminate what has been lost, but also what continues – fragments of continuity across a sky that remains, despite all, Palestinian. The stars might be the martyred dead. They might be the exiled living. They might be stories themselves.
The collection unfolds as a kind of dispersed epic. Its stories are various in form and voice – some elliptical, some testimonial, some fiercely allegorical – but they are united by a shared ethical impulse: to record, to remember and to refuse silence. The text functions as a collective literary act of presence. In this sense, it is also a political intervention: not in the narrow terms of ideological allegiance, but in the broader act of reclaiming narrative space. To be Palestinian in these stories is not to be reduced to a symbol, or a problem, or a cipher for geopolitical abstraction – it is to exist, stubbornly and humanly, with agency, complexity and imagination.
But that is precisely why this work must be available. To read Stars in the Sky of Palestine is not to endorse a political platform or to adopt a fixed stance – it is to engage with the lived and imagined worlds of a people grappling with dispossession and the search for meaning within it. Suppressing or marginalizing these stories because of their institutional origin would be a disservice to literary history and to the principle of critical inquiry. Instead, the challenge is to read them fully: to attend to their contradictions, their aspirations, their formal innovations, and their political implications. Only when such texts are accessible can readers bring a discerning eye to bear, forming judgments grounded in reading rather than assumption. Literature is not immune to politics – but nor should it be held hostage by them. These stories endure because they ask questions that remain unresolved, and because they continue to speak across silences that still persist.
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September 2025
Japanese Hand-Sewn Paperback
148.5 x 210 mm – 72pp
+ Insert – 105 x 148.5mm – 8pp
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What links these stories is not a shared style or form, but a shared ethical intensity. They are unified by a refusal to let the Palestinian experience be flattened – into statistics, headlines or slogans. These are not stories of “the conflict.” They are stories of people, rendered with specificity, dignity, and a profound moral urgency. They are stories that demand to be read not out of sympathy, but out of recognition.
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To return to this collection in the present is to recognize how little has changed – and how much. The conditions that gave rise to these stories remain: occupation, exile, siege, dislocation. And yet the literary response remains just as vital. In an age of fragmentation and distraction, the act of sitting with these narratives – of reading them closely, humanely, and politically – is itself a kind of solidarity.
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This volume, then, is not merely a republication. It is a reactivation. It returns us to a period when literature was not a luxury but a necessity – when stories were weapons and refuges, both. The writers in Stars in the Sky of Palestine remind us that storytelling is not a secondary activity in times of crisis. It is foundational. It is how a people speak themselves back into being. It is how they resist the slow erasure of exile and the daily violence of occupation. It is how they remember, and how they imagine.
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These stories do not offer simple hope. But they do offer insistence. They insist that Palestine is not a ghost, not a memory, not a metaphor – but a living reality, shaped by the voices of its people. The stars in this sky do not twinkle passively. They burn, they signal, they speak.
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​The republication of Stars in the Sky of Palestine will, inevitably, raise questions – not only about its literary merit, but about its provenance. That this collection was originally published by the Foreign Affairs Department of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, an entity historically entangled in armed struggle, diplomacy and international controversy, may prompt hesitations or objections. For some, the institutional origin casts a political shadow over the text; for others, it may be viewed as a legitimate expression of a national liberation movement. Still others may approach it with caution, unsure how to navigate literature produced within the framework of revolutionary or anti-colonial struggle. These tensions are not only expected – they are necessary. To encounter this collection is to confront the entangled histories of literature and politics, aesthetics and ideology, resistance and representation.
