In 2013, Elias Khoury, the renowned Lebanese novelist and public intellectual, delivered a speech from Beirut via Skype to a group of 250 Palestinian activists. The activists had just established an encampment in the E1 area of the occupied West Bank, located between Jerusalem and Jericho, as an act of resistance. They called their encampment “Bab Al-Shams,” after Khoury’s novel of the same name.
In contrast to the activists, Khoury has never lived in Palestine, nor has he ever even been granted the opportunity to visit. Nevertheless, he told the activists: “I will not say, ‘I wish I were with you,’ for I am with you … This is the Palestine that Yunis envisioned in the novel Bab Al-Shams…..more
