Making history

Poet and essayist Mosab Abu Toha has many firsts in his short life. He is the first Arab and first Palestinian to win one of the prestigious 23 Pulitzer Prizes awarded this month by Columbia University for excellence in writing in the US. The awards were set up in 1917 by wealthy newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer. Abu Toha won in in the Commentary category. Each winner receives a document and $15,000 in cash.

In essays published in the “New Yorker,” he has described the lives, trials and terrors of Palestinians in Gaza where he was born, raised, founded a family and built an English language library in honour of Palestinian author, academic and activist Edward Said.

Abu Toha’s New Yorker essay of Nov. 6, 2023, “The Agony of Waiting for a Ceasefire that Never Comes,” tells the story of all Gazans still in the battered and bloodied strip as well as those who escaped to the nightmare of being homeless and stateless and the ordeal of “travelling while Palestinian.”

In November 2023, he, his wife and three children left their home in Beit Lahia in northern Gaza for Jabaliya refugee camp. In the Nov. 6 article, Toha wrote that he had ridden his bicycle to Beit Lahiya in an attempt to retrieve books from home but found the family house and the Edward Said library flattened. When Jabaliya was bombed, they realised there was no safety anywhere in Gaza and decided to cross into Egypt to escape the carnage and privation inflicted by Israel. As his son was born in the US, it was expected they could find long-term refuge there.

En route within Gaza they were paused by an Israeli military checkpoint where Abu Toha was forced to leave the queue, arrested, ordered to strip naked, assaulted, blindfolded, and pushed onto a truck. He was held for two days in a Negev prison and interrogated before being released when his captors admitted mistaken identity. His wife had contacted friends outside Gaza who exerted pressure for his freedom. Unlike most Gazans who have no influential outside options but are confined to the narrow coastal strip, Abu Toha is a published poet and Harvard scholar.

Abu Toha was born in 1992 in Al-Shati refugee camp. He took a BA decree from the Islamic University in Gaza and married in 2015. From 2016-2019 he taught English at UNRWA schools. In 2017 he established the Edward Said library in Beit Lahia. Between 2019-2020 he was at Harvard after being deemed a scholar at risk. He earned an MA in fine arts and creative writing from Syracuse University in 2023.

In 2022, he published his first book of poetry, “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear,” which won the Palestine Book Award and an American Book Award. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Walcott Poetry Prize.

The two other writers focusing on Palestine to win the Pulitzer Prize in recent years are both Jewish. “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy” by Nathan Thrall was published in 2024. This is a story of a desperate Abed Salama after his five-year old son goes on a school outing on a bus which was hit by a heavy lorry. Abed hurries to the site where he finds surviving children have been taken to different hospitals in the West Bank, some are missing, some unidentifiable. While Abed tries to find his son he must travel through Israeli the occupied West Bank, clearing checkpoints, entering Jerusalem without a permit, and interacting with Israelis and Palestinians. Nathan Thrall is a US author, essayist, and journalist who was based in Jerusalem. He formerly served as director of the Arab-Israeli Project at the International Crisis Group. Since November 2023 Thrall is a professor at Bard College, a private liberal arts college in the US.

“Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land,” by David Shipler won the prize in 1987. Having served from 1979-1984 as Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times, Shipler describes difficult relationships between two communities after the 1967 Israeli occupation. He has written several books about the US, describing the lives of the poor.

Arabs have largely been excluded from the major literary awards. The only Arab and Arabic writer to win a Nobel Prize for Literature was Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006). He was an Egyptian novelist film writer, who was given the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. Mahfouz is not the only Arab author writing In Arabic to achieve distinction. There are many more, including Yusuf Idris, Tewfik Al-Hakim, Mahmoud Darwish, Leila Baalbaki, ands Ghassan Kanafani to name a few.

Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972) is regarded as one of the greatest Palestinian novelists, whose books “Men in the Sun” and “Returning to Haifa” retailed the terrors of war and occupation. A leading political activist and advocate for Palestinian resistance to Israel, he was assassinated by a car bomb outside his home in Beirut. After his death, Kanafani was awarded The Afro-Asia Writers’ Conference’s Lotus Prize for Literature in 1975. The Ghassan Kanafani Cultural Foundation, set up by his wife Anni, has established kindergartens for disabled children of Palestinian refugees and libraries and promoted art.

Last July, the Palestinian Ministry of Culture announced that Kuwaiti novelist Abdullah al- Husseini’s book “Tattoo Remains” won the Ghassan Kanafani Prize for Arabic fiction.

In an exceptional move by the deeply conservative Nobel Prize committee, Yemeni journalist, and civil society activist Tawakkol Karman Won the Peace Prize awarded during revolutionary 2011 for promoting “non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.” She is the first Arab woman to become a Nobel Laureate. The earlier winners were Arab men: Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for making peace deals with Israel and Egyptian diplomat Mohammed El Baradei who headed the International Atomic Energy Agency.