The Mosaic Rooms and Hurst are pleased to present the launch of ‘Gaza as Metaphor’, a selection of essays by journalists, writers, doctors, academics and others, who use metaphor to record and historicise Gaza, to contextualise its everyday realities, interrogate its representations and provide an understanding of its real and symbolic significance.

Edited by Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar the publication offers perspectives from residents and observers, these essays touch on life and survival, the making of the Gaza Strip and its increasing isolation, the discursive and visual tools that have often obscured the real Gaza, and explore what Gaza contributes to our understanding of exception, inequality, dispossession, bio-politics, necro-power and other terms which we rely on to make sense of our world. The contributors reveal the manner of Gaza’s historical and spatial creation, to show that Gaza is more than simply a metaphor for far-away humanitarian disaster, or a location of incomprehensible violence — it is above all an inseparable part of Palestine’s past, present, and future, and of the condition of dispossession.

Editors Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar will be in conversation with contributor Ilan Pappé offering a unique multi-perspective take on the real and symbolic significance of this war-torn exclave — cultural and emotional as well as political.

FREE, rsvp@mosaicrooms.org