Crossing a Line

"Crossing a Line tells a story of connection and fragmentation, of joy and grief, and of Palestine and its impossible geographies. With a penetrating ethnographic eye and elegant prose, Amahl Bishara gives us an account of Palestinian political expression across barriers that should be widely read."—Ilana Feldman, George Washington University
"This riveting and remarkable book transforms our understanding of the fragility and perseverance of Palestinian collectivities separated by the violence of Israeli settler colonialism. Amahl Bishara's eloquent ethnography examines political and expressive relationships between communities affected differentially by 1948 and by 1967, and in the diaspora."—Lisa Lowe, Yale University
"In this deeply engaged ethnography, Amahl Bishara traces the varying modes and expressions of embodied protest among Palestinians fragmented across Israel's colonial geography. Offering a sensitive reading of Palestinian peoplehood and political difference, Crossing a Line brings social movement theory into critical engagement with settler colonial and native studies." —Rema Hammami, Birzeit University
"This critical examination of Palestinian life in Israel and under occupation is accessible to a wide audience and deeply revealing of the relationship between place, people, and politics. Recommended."—P. Rowe, CHOICE
"The very structure of occupation promotes atomization, which severely undermines the Palestinian cause. Bridging the divide among Palestinians, as Bishara and many others seek to do, is a necessary step in the way to a freer Palestine."—Marc Martorell Junyent, Informed Comment
"Crossing a Line serves as a reminder for those committed to anti-imperialism to look beyond the corporate window-dressing version of sovereignty, to unearth alternative and emergent projects for liberation that are more firmly rooted in lived experience."—Leila Kawar, Against the Current
"Bishara's ethnographic research, stretching over nearly two decades, has produced a meticulous study of Israel's continuing domination and steady appropriation through multiple forms of fragmentation, immobilisation, ghettoisation and violence.... Crossing a Line is an extraordinarily multi-layered and nuanced book in which she probes the particulars of the Palestinian experience and relates them to broader contexts of colonisation, dispossession, racism and violence within the USA and elsewhere."—Nancy Murray, Race and Class
"Bishara's ultimate gift to the reader is a comprehensive story of Palestinian life. To the Palestinian reader, it grows faith in our cause and fortitude. To others, it is an invitation to witness...: not in the hope of an immediate departures, but to stay with us long enough to learn how to traverse the colonial situation—the thing that makes reality unlivable—and find life again in the company of the joys and pains of others."—Eman Ghanayem, Public Books