Abu Manneh argues that the response of many Palestinians to the nakba, the catastrophe of dispossession by the Israelis in 1948, was to articulate a revolutionary optimism in the potential of collective action to win back freedom and self-determination. Liberty was to be regained through armed struggle but also through cultural renaissance. There was recognition that, to an extent, the catastrophe laid bare divisions and social problems within Arab society itself, particularly the inequality and subordination of the working-class poor and of women. Freedom, crucially, had to encompass wider emancipatory aims than territorial reclamation; it had to embrace the rights and needs of all peoples. For this reason, the Palestinian struggle in its early years was understood by those involved not as nationalistic, but as a universal liberation movement.

the contradictory exigencies of those Palestinians who remained within Israeli jurisdiction after the nakba

[...] The Palestinian novel arises out of conditions quite specific to the Palestinian conflict in its various stages from 1948 to the present. How do these geographical and historical specifities inform and, to an extent, determine novelist practice? What is the relationship between fictional words and actuality? Can imaginative accounts offer forms of knowledge unavailable to other kinds of writing? And how do these artistic practices by Palestinian novelists speak to literary and political concerns within a wider geographical context?

Powerful narratives do not give us static pictures of life; they are not true or accurate in any one-to-one mapping of the world. What they do, at their most imaginatively incisive, is foreground aspects of reality that go unnoticed, that are so familiar that we overlook them. More politically, they "redistribute the perceptible" as Jacques Ranciere says, bringing to light what is hidden in full view. They dislocate a sense of what is just "natural," unchangeable. In this way, they provide a dissensus, a dismantling of the consensual way of ordering how we perceive the world and how we evaluate it. [...]