Over 100 students and faculty attended a reading of Sumūd: A New Palestinian Reader at New York University (NYU) on Wednesday, Feb. 5. The event, which took place on a packed floor in the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute on campus, was sponsored by NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies. Panelists Lina Mounzer and Mosab Abu Toha, two of the book’s featured authors, spoke about steadfastness as a cultural value of everyday Palestinian resistance and creativity before, during, and in the aftermath of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Sumūd — an anthology of short essays, memoirs, poems, art, and even recipes from over 300 contributors — exemplifies the Palestinian struggle for liberation by bringing voice to writers and journalists from a variety of different backgrounds. The anthology was edited by The Markaz Review’s Malu Halasa and Jordan Elgrably, who also spoke at the event. which took place on a packed floor in the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU.
Halasa opened with a recounting of images from the Gilboa Prison break in 2021, the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022, and the gliders of two PFLP fighters flying into Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon in 1987 — recurring symbols of Palestinian sumud (Arabic for steadfastness).
“Sumud is practiced by every man, woman and child [in Palestine] struggling on his or her own to learn to cope with and resist the pressures of living as a member of a conquered people,” Halasa said, quoting Palestinian lawyer Raja Shehadeh. “Sumud is watching your home turn into a prison. You choose to stay in that prison because it is your home and because you fear that if you leave, your jailer will not allow you to return.”
Abu Toha, a writer and poet from the Gaza Strip, then read his poem “Palestine A-Z,” published in his 2022 debut book of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear. In this poem, he employs the English alphabet to describe his life in Gaza before the start of Israel’s genocide, from his experience of devastation and loss through the 2014 bombardment to the birth of his children in the years following.
“Everything that has been happening after Oct. 7 has been happening, but on a smaller scale, or the cameras were not there, or we did not have access to the internet, or we did not lose as much as today — but we have been losing,” Abu Toha told the crowd. “Whether slowly or quickly, but it is still loss.”
In describing Gaza as “a city where tourists gather to take photos next to destroyed buildings or graveyards,” Abu Toha alludes to U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent proposal for the United States to take “ownership” over the territory and displace over two million Palestinians, ironically calling Gaza “an investment.” Abu Toha founded the Edward Said Public Library in 2017 as Gaza’s first English language library — it was destroyed during Israel’s bombing campaign in January. His second book, Forest of Noise: Poems, was published by Knopf late last year.
Mounzer, a Lebanese writer and senior editor for The Markaz Review, followed Abu Toha with a reading of her editorial, “Palestine and the Unspeakable,” written on Oct. 16, 2023. She detailed the beginning of Israel’s siege on Gaza, as well as the cutoff of food, water, electricity, and fuel to its residents. In her editorial, Mounzer also criticized Western media coverage of Israel’s actions, noting that “less has been written about anger, about who has the right to be angry and why, and how anger might be spent when it is an entire people raging.”
“This was written on Oct. 16, and it could be written also at any point after Oct. 7, in that it became very clear very quickly where we were headed, what was happening, that this was a genocide, that this was a war of words, that there were certain red lines that were going to be crossed,” Mounzer said.
Later in the discussion, Mounzer spoke about objectivity in journalism, calling it a “false postulation.” She criticized mainstream media outlets for telling Arab journalists that they can’t write about Palestine while the children of editors and reporters for major newspapers and magazines served in the Israeli military. Mounzer commended the Palestinian journalists in Gaza for risking their lives to report the atrocities and said that “they are the story as they are reporting the story.”
Elgrably, Editor in Chief and Art Director at The Markaz Review, read excerpts from his essay, “They Kill Writers, Don’t They?” — highlighting the lives of journalists, writers, and intellectuals killed under oppressive regimes. Drawing from the killing of Spanish poets under Francisco Franco’s dictatorship and the incarceration of writers under Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, Elgrably noted the systematic murder of Palestinian figures, “people who had never even picked up a gun,” under Israeli Occupation, including Ghassan Kanafani’s assassination in 1972 and, more recently, Abu Akleh’s killing.
“The word sumud is a word, and it was not invented by Palestinians, but it has been honored by the Palestinian people,” Abu Toha said during the Q&A session following the reading. “It can be bestowed on any people who are as steadfast as the Palestinian people. I can see so many people in this world who stick to their guns, who do not give up their rights — the minorities of this country, even people who are fighting for their freedom from their dictatorship or their colonial powers.”