This is exactly the reason why the first issue is dedicated to this central theme. This first volume turns to cultural resistance not merely as a secondary dimension of the Palestinian struggle, but as one of its most enduring and essential forms.
Thinking Palestine is conceived as a space for sustained, critical engagement with Palestine—one that brings together scholarship, journalism, and lived experience to interrogate the most urgent questions shaping the present moment. Each issue is organized around a central theme, allowing for focused and collective reflection. This first volume is centered on cultural resistance.
The choice is neither incidental nor thematic in a superficial sense. It reflects a recognition that culture has long operated as a central, though often underestimated, dimension of the Palestinian struggle—one that persists across time, geography, and conditions of extreme violence. At a moment when Palestinian life is subjected not only to physical destruction but to systematic erasure—of history, language, memory, and identity—culture assumes a heightened urgency.
In this context, culture becomes more than expression. It becomes a form of survival.
As Professor Ilan Pappé brilliantly argues in his essay Indigeneity as Cultural Resistance: Notes on the Palestinian Struggle within Twenty-First-Century Israel, the Palestinian struggle cannot be understood solely through its political or military dimensions, but must also be read through the lens of culture.
He suggests that “the political nature of the Palestinian struggle can be enriched by incorporating the concept of cultural indigenous resistance,” pointing to a broader framework in which identity, memory, and daily practices become central sites of confrontation.
This perspective builds on the work of renowned Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, who long insisted that culture is never neutral, but it is “political”. Rather than limiting it to aesthetic or literary production, Said proposed an expanded understanding of culture as a “theatre of life,” where political and ideological struggles continuously unfold.
Within this broader framework, Pappé argues that cultural resistance is not symbolic or secondary. “For the indigenous population, it is understood within the expanded version”; therefore, it is embedded in everyday existence—in language, education, storytelling, and the preservation of historical memory. It is through these practices that identity is maintained and contested, even under conditions designed to fragment and erase it.
This is exactly the reason why the first issue is dedicated to this central theme. This first volume turns to cultural resistance not merely as a secondary dimension of the Palestinian struggle, but as one of its most enduring and essential forms.
As Nadia Naser-Najjab writes, cultural resistance in Palestine is neither incidental nor symbolic, but foundational to the struggle itself. In her article, she underscores that “art and culture have long enabled us to confront dispossession, assert identity, and resist erasure by colonization and now genocide,” positioning cultural production as both a response to oppression and a means of survival. Crucially, she rejects any attempt to separate culture from politics, insisting that “cultural resistance was not an accessory to political struggle and was instead woven into its fabric.” In this framing, artistic practices are not expressions that follow resistance—they are themselves forms of resistance, embedded in the everyday effort to preserve identity and continuity under conditions designed to dismantle both.
This inseparability becomes most evident in moments of extreme repression, where cultural life persists despite systematic attempts to extinguish it. As Naser-Najjab notes, “embroidery, music, poetry, theatre, and visual art became lifelines, sustaining communities in the face of censorship, curfew, and military violence,” preserving identity even when public expression was criminalized. At the same time, these practices operate as acts of defiance against ongoing erasure, as seen in the destruction of cultural heritage and the targeting of artists themselves. Yet even in these conditions, Palestinian cultural production continues to assert presence, memory, and agency, confirming that culture is not only a site of struggle, but one of its most enduring and resilient forms.
Building on this understanding of culture as inseparable from struggle, Mehmet Rakipoğlu extends the argument into the realm of sound, showing how music itself becomes a site of resistance and identity formation. As he writes, resistance “extends beyond the battlefield and the calculations of military strategy,” encompassing cultural and symbolic forms that actively sustain Palestinian existence. In this context, music functions as what he calls a “sonic fortress”, which preserves collective memory even as physical spaces are destroyed.
This lived dimension of resistance is captured most intimately in the work of Ari Jafari, who reflects on the psychological and existential weight of life under occupation. As she writes, “just being a Palestinian is an act of sumud (steadfastness),” while also insisting that “we resist by existing. This is our way of being”, reframing endurance itself as a form of cultural and political defiance in the face of systematic erasure.
If Jafari reveals resistance as something lived through endurance and psychological survival, Iman Hamouri locates that same resistance in collective cultural practice. As she writes, Palestine’s cultural and political landscapes are “not just vehicles of expression but vital tools of resistance that challenge oppression, preserve national identity, and inspire future generations to continue the struggle for justice.”
This collective dimension of resistance takes on an even more intimate and devastating form in the writing of Naema Aldaqsha, where memory itself becomes a site of survival. Writing to Gaza, she insists that what is destroyed materially persists through recollection and narrative, as “what survives is not the item but its story, passed on in whispered breath to those willing to remember and rebuild.” It is this insistence on presence, even in destruction, that culminates in her stark assertion: “You are not rubble. You are what remains despite the rubble”.
In his article, Imran Ahmed traces how that same cultural force travels beyond Palestine, shaping enduring forms of global solidarity. As he writes, Palestinian culture “rehumanizes Palestinians, challenges hegemonic colonial perspectives, and enables activists to draw upon a potent means of resistance,” transforming solidarity from abstract support into lived, relational engagement. In contexts where political space is increasingly restricted, culture not only sustains connection but becomes indispensable, as “cultural resistance has emerged as perhaps the most enduring type of resistance” within the solidarity movement.
Zarefah Baroud pushes the concept of cultural resistance to its most extreme limit—where resistance is no longer expressed through art or memory alone, but in the face of death itself. Recalling the British Mandate, she writes that prisoners approached the gallows declaring “Filasteen ‘Arabiyya!”, transforming execution into an act of collective affirmation rather than submission. This is not a distant past. As Baroud shows, the reintroduction of execution as a colonial spectacle reflects a deeper failure to grasp a central truth: instead of erasing resistance, repression embeds it further. As late Palestinian leader, Abu Obeida, stated, “this arrogant enemy does not understand history lessons. And neither the facts of reality nor the culture and heritage of our people and nation”.
If it’s meant Religious Culture, political culture, militarily fighting culture, civil liberty protest culture ,pop culture, cullinary/food culture entertainment culture , various art form culture (murals,paintings,street art etc), audio and visual culture(music,movie etc) ,literary textual culture traditional culture etc indeed they have their share of values and importances in various aspects of the historical resistance of Palestine .