My brother and my land, a story from Palestine

Author: Sami Hormuz, Sirin Sawalha

The book "My Brother and My Land: A Tale from Palestine" powerfully challenges all attempts to marginalize Palestinians and reduce them to the role of helpless victims. This personal account of Palestinian history since the Nakba highlights how forced displacement and systematic oppression can be met not only with anger or resignation, but also with solidarity, kindness, and above all, love. Despite the pain of exile and the harshness of reality, this story keeps the flame of hope alive, as the struggle continues tirelessly until the dream of complete liberation is realized.

Ilan Pappe, historian and academic

The book “My Brother and My Land: A Tale from Palestine” is the fruit of literary and human collaboration between Sirine Sawalha and Sami Hormuz, through which they recounted the story of the Palestinian Sawalha family, starting from the Nakba of 1948 up to the present time, within a framework that embodies a deep and comprehensive vision of the Palestinian cause.

The text is distinguished by its complex narrative techniques, ranging from personal memory narrative to research documentation, where issues of identity, exile, and belonging are explored in an act of resistance against attempts to erase the Palestinian narrative from collective memory.

In 1999, when Sireen visited her brother Iyad, who was imprisoned in Ashkelon prison, he called out to her before she left the prison: “For God’s sake, Sireen, don’t forget me.”

This book is living proof that Sirine has not forgotten.

Quotes from the book "The Heretic of Baghdad"
Rather, it is in the heart, and because it is in the heart, you think it is everywhere.
I often wonder whether this religion truly came to save humanity or to justify humanity's ugly deeds.
It is love, my friend, that overflowed from the first cause of this universe, so the celestial bodies and moons, the earth, the sky, the mountains, the rivers, the rains, the flowers, and (Saba), the most delicate of the world’s creatures, are an overflow from that first that is before everything, and they are more beautiful than everything.