“Speak to Gaza, not just about Gaza,” Mohammed Mhawish, one of this book’s contributors, told us when we first met online. His words became our guiding principle for Palestine is everywhere. Gaza would not be rendered an abstraction, nor would it be engaged as a metaphor. We received diaries, poems, literary texts, and testimony—assertions of collective survival and dignity, recording unutterable cruelty and the steadfast resistance of everyday life. In the war on narrative, nothing stood as firm. The strongest networks of writers, artists, journalists, and photographers have been those mobilized by Gazans. They operate despite blockades, blackouts, and relentless threats to life; they keep record but also accept its terms: there is no easy absolution in documentation. These texts teach us what it means to bear witness, to endure its full, unconsoling weight. Every sentence here has circumvented and outlasted censor, bombardment, and erasure. These are precious acts of resistance, scrupulously observed.

We began late in 2023, as Israel’s machinery of genocide was already turning. We watched—on our phones, flickering in real time—the unspeakable unfold in Gaza, and beyond. What we saw did not always appear on television, and almost never in the newspapers. The footage did not match the official reports. What we glimpsed—collapsed buildings, children pulled from rubble—failed to appear in the evening news. US-led propaganda dismissed these images. The lies were flagrant, but the resolve of those who told them held. Institutions fell into line. Dissent was censored, fear instilled, and solidarity criminalized.

How do we move through a world that not only watches but enables— even lends itself—to genocide? There are no easy reckonings. To speak of Palestinian resistance and self-determination in their full, tangled complexity has become difficult, risky, and illegal. Slogans are banned; individuals pulled into prison for uttering them at protests. Historical analogies spark infighting, reinforce dominant frameworks, and demand that Palestinians perform their suffering in ways legible, and palatable, to the very powers enabling their erasure. Discourse, however well-meaning, is forced to contort itself to appease Zionist plotlines. The burden of proof remains, as always, on the subjugated. Writing and reading—skills we studied and cultivated in ourselves—have become contested ground. They do not always illuminate; they sometimes obscure, widening the distance between Gaza and the world that claims to study it, and the world that stands in solidarity.

We started by calling this book “contributor-led.” It was shorthand; it meant we asked those we trusted and admired, who we wanted to hear more from, to write as they chose, without conditions. It meant that no delicate choreography was required of writers, thinkers, or, least of all, Palestinians, just to earn the minimal dignities of attention and permissibility. There was something we returned to often: what to do with the collapse of language in the face of atrocity? Again, Gaza guided us. Poet and novelist Nasser Rabah places together the absurdity of writing amid genocide, “a sin without pleasure,” alongside its necessity, “Who will wash the final words of the dead from the heart doctors’ hands?”

Artist and teacher Maisara Baroud sent us a drawing of Gaza from Gaza, visualizing the forceful division of the north and south. In “Hunger,” writer, editor, and poet Muhammad al-Zaqzouq is precise and unsparing. A family struggles to find fire to make bread, surviving on tea and shared biscuits— starvation weaponizes daily life. The poet and web programmer Anees Ghanima places poems, conversations, and witness accounts together in a single, breathtaking text. A man serenely smokes an empty pipe outside his tent; a father tells his son his mother is dead; a buried victim stops screaming on the second day. The writing is alive with acts of defiance: a shared song, a nighttime political debate, a window opened to spit on the world.

Cool-eyed and precise, artist Amal Al Nakhala asks: what is home for Gazans? And as is astutely logged in a monthly diary by novelist and playwright Nahil Mohana, war cannot erase the stubbornness of life: olives are picked even under bombardment, and coffee cut with chickpeas during siege. Gaza endures. From the diaspora, poet Mira Mattar refuses consolation, “Poets talk of spring as if it contradicts death,” she writes. “You see these greens are livid.”

Teacher and writer Nasser Abourahme’s “In Tune with Their Time” is the essay from which we draw this book’s title. “Palestine is everywhere,” he writes, “because it names a political subject of radical universal emancipation.” The phrase—popular in the imagination, especially in solidarity and resistance movements—is exacting in its formulation. Palestinian liberation is central to our own. Writer and teacher Lina Meruane tracks the many “Palestines” across Latin America, from a vanished railway station in Chile’s Atacama Desert to a picnic ground in Peru. In Arequipa, she meets Jorge, a historian with Palestinian lineage. Their conversation unspools the paradox of diaspora: how identity lingers in recipes and untranslatable phrases—even after archives vanish and names distort. There are also two photographic contributions to this book. Adam Rouhana’s “Blood Memories” is full of movement, inflected with reflections on intergenerational trauma and the endurance of everyday Palestinian life. Ahmad Zaghmouri’s quiet and concise “Song of the Hills” catalogs Palestinian agricultural terraces— their endurance a counterpoint to encroaching settlements.

The essays in this book expose the university, the arms complex, and the prison as instruments of the same system. Academic Rahul Rao logs how universities parallel battlegrounds: figuratively, as Israeli institutions weaponize knowledge to justify occupation, and literally, as soldiers train on college grounds. Gaza’s bombed campuses epitomize “scholasticide,” he writes, which is the deliberate erasure of a people’s intellectual future. In a chapter from novelist Sahar Khalifeh’s autobiography she speaks of her time as a student in Birzeit in 1972, where smuggled books and sit-ins forged revolutionaries. Politics was not an abstraction but a life lived. In a letter from her shelter in Gaza, the teenage Lujayn writes about her love for mathematics and interest in robotics and computer programming. “But then the war came. My dreams were postponed indefinitely.”

From her hometown of Paris, writer and decolonial activist Houria Bouteldja maps Europe’s lethal hypocrisy: the moral alibis it crafts, the diplomatic cover it provides, and the genocide it recasts as policy. Professor and writer Laleh Khalili, with characteristic rigor, exposes the political economy of the Israeli occupation, as well as its inextricability from the US military-industrial complex. Khalili compels us to see that Palestinian liberation is not just defiance but logistics—supply lines and smuggling routes. Against tanks, ingenuity is the weapon.

This book had its own logistics, too. Trust gathered the contributors together, and a commitment to language guided our editorial position. Friendship made so much possible. We reached out to Alaa Abd El-Fattah— the imprisoned Egyptian thinker whose meditations on resistance, hope, and defeat have nurtured us—to share new writing, which takes the shape of prison correspondence. These letters, written to friends and family, grapple with Palestine’s past, present, and future. The writing of history here is a conversation between comrades. The letters were translated into English, like most texts in this book. Translation is only partly a technical discipline; it requires something more profound and steadfast—care. The dedication and commitment of our translators allowed us to reach Gaza, and beyond. Salma Alhafi, Wiam El-Tamami, Ibrahim Fawzy, Katharine Halls, Nada Hodali, Sarah Rifky, Andrea Rosenberg, and Rebecca Ruth Gould. Without our translators, there would be no book.

We end with “After the Ceasefire” by Mohammed Mhawish. The text is a collection of raw, intimate testimonies from Gaza: parents clutch crushed toys, fishermen bury brothers by the sea, and children draw hopscotch squares on rubble. Each voice is a counterpoint to the silence of destruction, and an insistence on life outlasting war. To read them is to wrest history from oblivion. Each is a stand against a second death: being forgotten.