Survival and Hope – Palestinian Daily Life Between Paradise and Landmines

Land, Memory, Love: Palestinian Life Under Occupation

This event will take place in English & Arabic.

What does it mean to live, work, create, love and remember under occupation and settler colonialism?

This evening brings together stories, reflections and creative work exploring the everyday realities of Palestinian life — from checkpoints and displacement to the preservation of memory, the significance of the olive tree, and the enduring power of love.

Drawing on work including Secrets Jerusalem Kept With Me, Mined Paradises, The Papers of a Travelling Rain, I Am Still Alive, and research into al-Rameh, museums and Palestinian memory, the conversation will explore the visible and invisible “landmines” Palestinians encounter in their daily lives.

We will consider the realities of living and engaging in cultural life under occupation, including checkpoints, the wars on Gaza, and the spread of crime within Palestinian communities inside Israel. Alongside these contemporary challenges, the evening will ask how Palestinians preserve memory and reconstruct identity in the face of erasure — through archives, museums, letters, stories and the act of documenting what might otherwise be lost.

At the heart of the discussion will be the olive tree: a source of livelihood, a symbol of rootedness and resilience, and a witness to the continuing struggles faced by Palestinian communities both inside Israel and across the West Bank.

And, running through it all, is love — love of land, family, memory and one another. Through Mined Paradises and the stories collected in The Papers of a Travelling Rain, we will explore love not simply as something personal, but as an act of endurance, connection and resistance.

The evening will conclude with a reading from Mined Paradises, bringing together the themes of land, memory, struggle and love.