Salvaging the truth: documentation and accountability in Palestine

With a media that is often biased, at best, and the overwhelming destruction of Palestinian cultural infrastructure, how will the crimes of this genocide be documented and whose voices will bear witness?

In her book Palestine Revealed, Palestinian-British film-producer Hanan Kattan tells the story of the ongoing Nakba as inherited, generational memory. Memory and legacy are also central to A People’s Literature of Palestine/Israel, a collection of writings by Palestinian and Arab-Jewish intellectuals who, in the 1940s and 50s, joined together to emphatically reject the racist and colonial conflict paradigm presented by official Israeli discourse. The anthology’s editor, Hana Morgenstern, joins Hanan Kattan for a conversation about how we salvage the truth in order to foster accountability - whatever that may look like.

Our speakers:

Hanan Kattan is a Palestinian-British film producer, and author. Her mother was a Nakba-survivor, ethnically-cleansed from West Jerusalem in 1948. Her father’s family is from Bethlehem. Hanan grew up crossing the Allenby Bridge under Israeli military interrogation as a child. Palestine Revealed is a book only she could write — the convergence of lived experience, rigorous research, and an urgent need to give her people’s history back to them. She is also an award-winning feature film producer and podcaster, whose The Enlightenment Podcast discusses Palestine with highly-regarded historians, authors, medics, politicians and artists, from Palestine and the wider world.

Dr Hana Morgenstern is Associate Professor in Global South and Middle Eastern Literatures at Cambridge University and a Fellow at Newnham College. She is a scholar of Middle Eastern literature and cultural histories of the Left, with a specialisation in Palestine and Israel, including Jewish, Hebrew, Palestinian and Arabic literatures and literary cultures. She is the author of Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial Literature and Radical Print, editor of A People’s Literature of Palestine/Israel: An Anthology of Anticolonial and Socialist Writing (both Edinburgh University Press, 2026), and has published articles in in Journal of Levantine Studies, Modernism/modernity and Radical History Review. Morgenstern is co-founder and co-investigator of Revolutionary Papers, a transnational research collaboration on 20th-century anticolonial and anti-imperial periodicals. She is also co-founder of Archives of the Disappeared, an interdisciplinary initiative for the study of communities, social movements, spaces and cultures destroyed through acts of political repression and mass violence.