This is a curated list of books, movies, and media that explore current events, the Israeli and Palestinian narratives, and Musalaha. The collection includes historical accounts, personal testimonies, documentaries, and academic works that provide diverse perspectives on the conflict, its root causes, and efforts toward reconciliation.
The Future of Palestine: How Discrimination Hinders Change was inspired by the shocking “honor killing” of the author’s classmate and friend, Israa Ghrayeb. Her alleged crime? The simple act of going out, in broad daylight, with her fiancé and his sister—an act Ghrayeb’s cousin maintained was unacceptable in a conservative society. While Ghrayeb’s killers may be free, their manner of thinking is anything but.
This book addresses the universal theological dimension of reconciliation in the context of the Israeli Messianic Jewish and Palestinian Christian divide. Palestinian Christians and Israeli Messianic Jews share a belief in Jesus as the son of God and Messiah. Often, though, that is all they have in common. This remarkable book, written in collaboration by a local Palestinian Christian and an Israeli Messianic Jew, seeks to bridge this gap by addressing head on, divisive theological issues (as well as their political implications) such as land, covenant, prophecy and eschatology which separate their two communities. The struggle for reconciliation is painful and often extremely difficult for all of us. This unique work seeks to show a way forward.
Our theology does not exist in a vacuum but must relate to the world we inhabit and must influence our moral and ethical actions. This is especially true when discussing theology of “the land” in the context of a violent territorial conflict. The Holy Land has seen so much bloodshed that the earth itself is crying out to God. The chapters presented in this book form a unique collection of voices speaking from different perspectives on the issue of the theology of the land. These voices include Messianic Jewish and Palestinian Christian theologians and scholars who live in the Holy Land, as well as others from around the world. The various chapters reflect a wide spectrum of opinion and reveal how much disagreement still exists among followers of Christ. However, the dialogue generated by having these opposing voices side by side, speaking to each other rather than past each other, is encouraging. This book is both challenging and inspirational, and contributes in an innovative way to this important discussion.
Journey Through the Storm unpacks Musalaha’s thirty years of practical experience building bridges, healing division, and following Christ in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Composed of essays, curriculum excerpts, interviews, and real-life testimonies, this collection offers insight into the theory, theology, and application of Musalaha’s six stages of reconciliation. It is a powerful, hopeful, and deeply realistic look at the demands and rewards of transforming the “other” into a neighbor and an enemy into a friend.
Christians too often disregard the depth and thoughtfulness of Jewish, Muslim, and Middle Eastern Christian concepts of justice. To fill this lack, this book explores the rich development of justice within each Abrahamic faith as it relates specifically to the Palestinian/Israeli context. From a uniquely Palestinian Christian perspective, this book offers a theological framework through the concept of reconciling justice to facilitate better understanding for multiethnic, political, and religious encounters as a prophetic imagination for peace and reconciliation in the region.
Between 1947 and 1949, over 400 Palestinian villages were deliberately destroyed, civilians were massacred and around a million men, women, and children were expelled from their homes at gunpoint. Denied for almost six decades, had it happened today it could only have been called ‘ethnic cleansing’. Decisively debunking the myth that the Palestinian population left of their own accord in the course of this war, Jewish Israeli author, Ilan Pappe offers impressive archival evidence to demonstrate that, from its very inception, a central plank in Israel’s founding ideology was the forcible removal of the indigenous population. Indispensable for anyone interested in the current crisis in the Middle East.
Through the lives of Mahmud, elder of Hadiya, his son Khaled, and Khaled’s grandson Naji, we enter the life of a tribe whose fate is decided by one colonizer after another. Khaled’s remarkable white mare, Hamama, and her descendants feel and share the family’s struggles and as a siege grips Hadiya, it falls to Khaled to save his people from a descending tyranny.
Twin sisters Randa and Lamis live in the besieged Gaza Strip. Inseparable to the point that even their mother cannot tell them apart, they grow up surrounded by the random carnage that characterizes life under occupation. Randa, who wants to be a journalist, writes to record the devastation around her, taking pictures of martyred children. Meanwhile, their beloved neighbor Amna quietly converses with all those she has lost, as she plans the wedding of Lamis and her son Saleh. With their menfolk almost entirely absent, it is the women who take center stage in this poignant novel of resilience, determination, and living against the odds.
In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members―mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists―The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process.
From the lived theology of grandmothers to traditions of scholarship, from ancient liturgies to contemporary resistance, eight Palestinian Christian theologians offer a crucial and vibrant perspective on liberation, reconciliation, and divine imagination. Written within the heart of suffering, the cross and the olive tree interpret each other in an unwavering hope, symbols of faith and homeland.
Decolonizing Palestine challenges the weaponization of biblical texts to support the current settler-colonial state of Israel. Raheb argues that some of the most important theological concepts –Israel, the land, election, and chosen people – must be decolonized in a paradigm shift in Christian theological thinking about Palestine. Decolonizing Palestine is a timely book that builds on the latest research in settler-colonialism and human rights to place traditional theological themes within the wider socio-political context of settler colonialism as it is practiced by the modern nation-state of Israel.
This is a book about genocide and Gaza. Gaza has become the moral compass of our world today. In this war, theology was weaponized against the Palestinian people by both Israeli politicians and Christian Zionists. It is a book inspired by Palestinian liberation theologies. The book foregrounds scholarly and practical responses to the Israeli invasion of a part of the occupied Palestinian territories widely referred to as Gaza in the media and popular discourse. However, the book also situates Gaza and Palestine in the longue durée of settler colonialism, colonialities of power, and the underside of modernity.
Christians have lived in Palestine since the earliest days of the Jesus movement. The Palestinian church predates Islam. Yet Palestinian Christians find themselves marginalized and ostracized. In the heated tensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the voices of Palestinian Christians are often unheard and ignored. Munther Isaac is also a Musalaha Board Member.
Palestinians Said and Khaled, lifelong friends from Nablus now in their twenties, work as auto mechanics in unsatisfying jobs and feel trapped in the West Bank. Blaming Israeli oppression, they join a resistance group’s planned two-stage suicide bombing in Tel Aviv with pre-recorded confessions to follow. While crossing into Israel they become separated, jeopardizing the mission and forcing each to reconsider—especially Said, whose growing relationship with Suha, the daughter of a prominent returnee, complicates his resolve.
The JNF (Jewish National Fund), a Zionist organization founded to buy and develop land for Jewish settlement, launched the famous Blue Box campaign to fund land purchases and forestation in Palestine—displacing many Palestinian communities. Joseph Weitz, filmmaker Michal Weitz’s great-grandfather, led these efforts. Through his diaries and family conversations, Blue Box confronts his role in the land takeover that shaped Israel’s creation and its lasting moral questions.
A young Palestinian freedom fighter agrees to work as an informant after he’s tricked into an admission of guilt by association in the wake of an Israeli soldier’s killing.
Separated by a checkpoint, Palestinian lovers from Jerusalem and Ramallah arrange clandestine meetings.
Filmmaker Elia Suleiman travels to different cities and finds unexpected parallels to his homeland of Palestine.
A Palestinian expatriate filmmaker (Elia Suleiman) documents the loss of national identity in Israel’s Arab population
An examination of the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 through to the present day.
This film explores the life of Nachmani, a Zionist leader and director of the Jewish National Fund in the Galilee during the 1930s–40s. Determined to buy Arab land and build Jewish settlements, his diaries reveal both ambition and doubt amid the rise of Zionism and the early Jewish-Arab conflict. It also traces Tiberius’s transformation into the first mixed city whose Arab residents were expelled during the 1948 war.
Three Palestinian women living in an apartment in Tel Aviv try to find a balance between traditional and modern culture.
A Palestinian father seeks Israeli permission to waive curfew to give his son a fine wedding. Tensions rise as the ceremony proceeds, with youths plotting violence and a loose horse running into a minefield, forcing unlikely cooperation.
The first full length film to be shot within the occupied Palestinian West Bank “Green Line,” Fertile Memory is the feature debut of Michel Khleifi, acclaimed director of the Cannes Film Festival triumph, wedding in Galilee. Lyrically blending both documentary and narrative elements, Khleifi skillfully and lovingly crafts a portrait of two Palestinian women whose individual struggles both define and transcend the politics that have torn apart their homes and their lives.
Years after leaving her Palestinian village to pursue an acting career in France, Hiam Abbass returns home with her daughter, in this intimate documentary about four generations of women and their shared legacy of separation.
A father and daughter in the Palestinian enclaves of the Israeli-occupied West Bank are trying to buy a wedding anniversary gift, going through a journey that shows the cruel reality and the restrictions on the right to movement in the West Bank. The film won the BAFTA award for best short film and was nominated for the Academy Awards for the best short live action film.
A young Palestinian school teacher gives birth to her son in an Israeli prison where she fights to protect him, survive, and maintain hope.
Farha is directed by Darin J. Sallam that tells the story of a 14-year-old Palestinian girl whose life is shattered during the Nakba—the mass displacement of Palestinians in 1948. Locked in a pantry by her father to keep her safe, Farha witnesses a horrific massacre that symbolizes the broader violence of that era. Based on a true story, the film was produced in Jordan and premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. It gained international attention after its release on Netflix in December 2022. While Farha received critical acclaim and multiple festival awards, it also sparked controversy, especially from Israeli officials who accused it of spreading misinformation. Despite the backlash, the film has been praised for shedding light on a chapter of Palestinian history rarely depicted on screen.
A Palestinian father, stranded on the otherside of the separation wall, tried to reach his son in the hospital.
A British journalist tries to escape Israel after the UN imposes an embargo on land, sea, and air due to the spreading of a virus. Gaza becomes the safest place in the region.
Directed by Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor. No Other Land is a powerful documentary created by a Palestinian-Israeli collective that depicts the ongoing destruction and forced displacement of the Masafer Yatta region in the occupied West Bank, south of Hebron, by Israeli soldiers. The film highlights the emerging alliance between Palestinian activist Basel and Israeli journalist Yuval, as they work together to document the harrowing realities faced by the local community, and it’s a co-production between Palestine and Norway. The film won Best Documentary Feature Film at the most recent Academy Awards. Yuval is a Musalaha alumnus, and Rachel participated in our recent Civil Society Leaders Program. Despite their courageous work, Basel and Bilal, along with the rest of the Masafer Yatta community, continue to endure attacks from settlers and the Israeli military. The threat of displacement and destruction looms over their villages.
A documentary on a Palestinian farmer’s chronicle of his nonviolent resistance to the actions of the Israeli army.
Directed by twin Palestinian filmmakers Tarzan and Arab Nasser, is a tender, quietly subversive love story set in the heart of Gaza. The film follows a lonely fisherman who discovers a mysterious statue, prompting him to confront his feelings for a local seamstress. Praised for its poetic storytelling, it won major awards at TIFF, Valladolid, and Cairo, and was Palestine’s official Oscar submission.
Documentary about the 2002 deadly confrontations between armed Israeli soldiers and Palestinians in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin.
A story of a city that once connected Palestine to the worls- what it once was, what it is now, and what it could have become.
Set against a backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Palestinian rapper Kareem and his singer girlfriend Manar struggle, love and make music in their crime-ridden ghetto and Tel Aviv’s hip-hop club scene.
Lemon Tree, directed by Eran Riklis, is a quiet yet powerful drama about Salma Zidane, a Palestinian widow whose lemon grove becomes a “security threat” when Israel’s Defense Minister moves next door. Her legal and emotional fight to keep her land symbolizes resistance and dignity amid political injustice. Through understated storytelling, the film reveals the human cost of conflict and the courage to defend what’s yours.
Fun fact: Our mixed cities program meets at the Open House in Ramle—a home once lost in the Nakba, now shared by a Palestinian and Jewish Israeli family, symbolizing hope for coexistence.
Elderly Palestinians are caught between their right to forage their own land and the harsh restrictions imposed by their occupiers on the basis of preservation.
In the war of 1948, hundreds of Palestinian villages were depopulated. Israelis call it “The War of Independence”. The Palestinians call it “Nakba” meaning catastrophe. This film examines one village, Tantura and why “Nakba” is taboo in Israeli society.
The evolution of the village of Deir Yassin which was conquered in a highly controversial and pivotal battle in 1948 after which became a hospital for the mentally ill.
When Israeli soldier Arna Mer-Khamis marries Palestinian Saliba Khamis in the 1950s, she becomes an activist for Palestinian human rights. Moving to Jenin, a city in the West Bank, Arna opens a theater center for children. This documentary shows her work from 1989 to 1996, then returns in 2002 after Arna’s death to see how the children she mentored turned out.
“My Land” gives voice to old Palestinian refugees who fled in 1948 without ever returning to their land, and who have been living in camps in Lebanon for more than 60 years.
A Palestinian artist tells a Jewish-American poet how he was tortured by a failed Israeli artist who wanted to run him into an informant.
The movie begins at the height of the second Palestinian Uprising in 2002 with Tareq, an enigmatic man bearing fresh wounds. He is tended to by local nuns and a priest who help him escape.
It’s a dark comedy short film directed by Basil Khalil. Set in the West Bank, it follows a group of silent Catholic nuns whose peaceful routine is disrupted when a loud, argumentative Israeli settler family crashes their car outside the convent just before the Sabbath. Bounded by religious restrictions, neither side can act without breaking their respective religious rules. The film humorously explores themes of faith, cultural clashes, and human connection, all within a tightly written and cleverly staged 15-minute narrative. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film in 2016.
It’s a Palestinian drama directed by Annemarie Jacir, starring Suheir Hammad and Saleh Bakri. It follows Soraya, a Brooklyn-born Palestinian-American who travels to the West Bank for the first time, seeking to reclaim her late grandfather’s confiscated savings from a Jaffa bank that was lost due to the 1948 Nakba.
When bureaucracy and political barriers prevent her from accessing the money, Soraya teams up with Emad, a disillusioned young Palestinian man, and together they embark on a rebellious journey across Palestine and into Israel. Their quest becomes a symbolic and literal struggle against displacement, occupation, and identity erasure.
The film blends personal and political themes, highlighting the consequences of exile, the right of return, and the complexities of Palestinian life under occupation. Shot on location in the West Bank, “Salt of This Sea” is poignant, poetic, and politically charged.
It was nominated at Cannes (Un Certain Regard, Caméra d’Or) and selected as Palestine’s entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 81st Academy Awards. It won the FIPRESCI Prize, Best Screenplay at the Dubai International Film Festival, and awards at the Carthage and San Sebastián film festivals.
Abu Ahmad and his family are forced to leave the city of Haifa to find a safe shelter during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. However, they face tragic conditions and struggle with displacement.
Chronicles of a Refugee looks at the plight of Palestinian refugees all over the world over the last 60+ years.
https://vimeo.com/channels/chroniclesenglish
“The Nakba did not begin in 1948. Its origins lie over two centuries ago….” So begins this four-part series on the ‘nakba’, meaning the ‘catastrophe’, about the history of the Palestinian exodus that led to the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, and the establishment of the state of Israel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7FML0wzJ6A
This video by refugee rights group, Badil, features interviews with refugees and experts and scenes of the lands from which Palestinians are exiled.
During 2018, a group of Israelis took part in a learning workshop about the return of Palestinian refugees. This workshop is part of Zochrot’s activity to promote the discourse on the realization of return and the understanding of its spatial implications. The workshop focused on the Zochrot area, and included tours among the ruins of the Palestinian villages of Dayr Aban (H. Mahseya), Zakariyya (Zekharia), Bayt Nattif (Netiv HaLamed-Heh), and Bayt Jibrin (Beit Guvrin), where Palestinians used to live until uprooted by the newly established State of Israel in 1948. Many of the Palestinians still live in refugee camps in the Bethlehem area. During the tours, the participants were interviewed, knowing that their statements will be presented publicly. This included refugees who used to live in the villages and their family members.
Resource in Hebrew, Arabic, and English
Christ at the Checkpoint is a biennial (every two years) international Christian conference held in Bethlehem, organized by Bethlehem Bible College. It brings together Palestinian and international evangelical Christians—pastors, scholars, activists—to engage in theological reflection, dialogue, and action around issues of justice, peace, and reconciliation in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Its aims include elevating the voices of Palestinian Christians, critiquing theological positions that justify the occupation or exclude Palestinians, and challenging participants to consider how Christian faith calls for advocacy, compassion, and nonviolent resistance. One of our Board Members, Dr. Yara Borbara and along with many other Musalaha staff can be seen taking place in these lectures.
Salman H. Abu Sitta is a Palestinian researcher who writes about Palestinian refugees and the Palestinian Right of Return. Abu Sitta is a former member of the Palestinian National Council, the founder and President of the Palestine Land Society and is the general coordinator of the Right of Return Congress. He has written over 300 articles and papers on Palestinian refugees and the Right of Return.
