This is Not a Border Quotes

“In Palestine almost every situation you can be in is layered. Nothing, not a single thing, is free of the occupation, its instruments, its outcomes.”
― Ahdaf Soueif, This is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature

“Two populations in the same place under two different legal systems determined by their ethnicity. Clearly this fulfils the very definition of apartheid.”
― Ahdaf Soueif, This is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature

“There is an Israeli law that land ‘abandoned’ for seven years becomes the property of the state. The inhabitants of Bethlehem wait powerlessly for the land they have farmed continuously for centuries to be taken from them.”
― Ahdaf Soueif, This is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature

“learned this in Bethlehem, where the experience of being in Palestine started to intensify, to cause pain.”
― Ahdaf Soueif, This is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature

“For the first time since the Roman period Jews were once again allowed to live and worship freely in Jerusalem.”
― Ahdaf Soueif, This is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature

“Israel uses Bible stories to destroy Palestinian lives.”
― Ahdaf Soueif, This is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature

“Within its walls and its eight hundred metres of cloistered galleries, al-Aqsa has seven individual mosques, four minarets, twenty-six terraces, ten domes, twenty-five wells, fourteen fountains, eight colonnaded arches, as well as museums, libraries, archives and court registers and twelve schools.”
― Ahdaf Soueif, This is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature

“One dome is Mahd 3eesa, Jesus’ Cradle, other domes are named for Solomon, for Joseph, for the Prophet’s Night Journey and for the Scales of Judgement. With Mi7rab Maryam, Mary’s Chamber, the Sanctuary embraces the story of the Virgin’s seclusion as she awaits her confinement. The Prophet David gives his name to a gateway. The multiple narratives of Jerusalem are accommodated here, made room for, honoured.”
― Ahdaf Soueif, This is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature

“One of the most pleasant features of the al-Aqsa Sanctuary is that wherever a person sits within it, they will feel that they have found the best position with the best view,’ the Baghdadi encyclopaedist, Yaqoot al-Hamawi observed.”
― Ahdaf Soueif, This is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature

“When a house gets demolished in East Jerusalem, does it stop being Palestine? When, in which moment? When the first brick drops or when the last is cleared?”
― Ahdaf Soueif, This is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature

“When the Palestinian Authority arrests teenagers days after the Israelis have released them, do they leave the same absence?”
― Ahdaf Soueif, This is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature

“This war that Israel wages against us is not a war to defend its existence, but a war to obliterate ours.”
― Ahdaf Soueif, This is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature