Chronicles from Palestine: History, Voices and Resistance of a Stateless People

By Lorenzo Ferri - Omar Khalil

Chronicles from Palestine is a powerful journey through one of the most complex and unresolved conflicts of our time. Combining the voices of an Italian journalist and a Palestinian reporter, the book explores more than seventy years of occupation, resistance, and memory, weaving together history and everyday life.

From the 1948 Nakba to the Six-Day War, from the First Intifada to the present reality of Gaza and the West Bank, these pages offer more than political analysis. They bring to life the stories of refugee camps, the resilience of women, the creativity of poets and artists, and the determination of a new generation using social media as a tool of resistance.

Clear, vivid, and deeply human, Chronicles from Palestine gives voice to a stateless people whose identity has never been erased. It is an essential read for anyone seeking to understand not only the politics but the lived reality of millions who continue to fight for dignity, memory, and hope.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edizioni Savage
• Release date: Sep 13, 2025
• ISBN: 9798232897772

Book preview

Lorenzo Ferri – Omar Khalil

Copyright ©2025 – Lorenzo Ferri – Omar Khalil

All rights reserved

The partial or total reproduction of the content is forbidden without the prior approval of the author.

Index

Introduction

Why tell the story of Palestine today

The method: two voices, two perspectives

Part I – Historical Roots

One land, many peoples: Palestine before the twentieth century

The end of the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate

The birth of Israel and the Nakba of 1948

Six-Day War and the birth of the occupied territories

The Intifada: the resistance of stones

Part II – Voices from the Present

Gaza: Living under siege

West Bank: between checkpoints and settlements

Jerusalem: The Divided City

Refugees and the Palestinian diaspora

Women and resistance: an invisible but central role

Part III – Politics and identity

The PLO and Arafat's dream

Hamas, Fatah and internal divisions

The question of state: a people without a homeland

International diplomacy: UN, USA, Europe

Arab public opinion and Islamic solidarity

Part IV – Cultures, Memories, Hopes

Palestinian literature, poetry and art

The new generations and social media

Daily life between employment and hope

Historical memory: transmitting identity to children

Uncertain future: two peoples, two states, no solution?

Conclusion

Palestine Today: Resistance, Survival, Hope

A look beyond the conflict

Introduction

Why tell the story of Palestine today.

The method: two voices, two perspectives

There are books that arise from the need to analyze documents, archives, diplomatic treatises. And there are others that are born from the living flesh of reality, from the faces met along the streets, from the broken words of those who live every day a conflict that seems to have no end. This book belongs to both categories: it was born from a need for clarity, but also from the urgency to give a voice to those who, too often, have none.

Palestine has been, for over seventy-five years, synonymous with conflict. It is not just a geographical place, but an interweaving of memories, identities, claims, injustices, dreams and rubble. Each name evoked – Jerusalem, Gaza, the West Bank, Ramallah, Hebron – carries with it a stratification of meanings that cannot be understood only by reading external chronicles. For this reason we have chosen a new approach: two voices, two paths, two different gazes that meet in the same pages.

The authors: Lorenzo Ferri

The first author of this book is me, a middle-aged Italian journalist, with more than twenty years of profession on his shoulders. I have collaborated with some of the most important national newspapers – names that do not need to be listed here, but which have made the history of journalism in Italy – and over the years I have reported on wars, economic crises, difficult elections and earthquakes. My training is the classic one of the reporter: learning to observe, to verify sources, to always doubt, to try to distinguish facts from interpretations.

Why then write a book on Palestine? Because for too long this conflict has been told in pieces, with the speed of agency launches and the brevity of breaking news. But agency launches, we know, never restore the humanity of the people involved. Palestine is an open wound in the heart of the Middle East, and telling it means not only explaining the geopolitical balances, but also describing daily lives: mothers crossing checkpoints with their children, children growing up between resignation and hope, the elderly remembering villages now erased from the map.

The authors: Omar Khalil

Alongside my voice, in this book there is another, perhaps even more necessary: that of Omar Khalil (a name we have chosen to use to protect his identity, since journalists have become a primary target of Israel), a Palestinian reporter in his early thirties, who grew up between the Gaza Strip and Ramallah. At a very young age, Omar began collaborating with local newspapers, but his talent led him to work with major Arab channels, including Al Jazeera, for which he made several reports from the front. Over the years he has learned to move among the rubble and censorship, to tell the story of life under bombing, to give space to the voices of ordinary people. Omar is not an academic, he is not a historian, he is not a television studio analyst. He is a street reporter. His pen is soaked in smoke, dust and blood. It brings with it the fatigue of those who have to choose every day whether to write a piece or protect their family. There is no pretense in him: his voice is that of someone who cannot afford the luxury of distance.

Two voices, one story

An Italian journalist and a Palestinian reporter: two paths that intertwine. We don't always agree, and maybe that's right. I look at the conflict with the eye of the Western reporter, accustomed to weighing his words, to giving balance between sources, to avoiding imbalances that could seem like propaganda. Omar, on the other hand, lives it on his own skin: for him every wall, every siren, every curfew is not a given, but a lived experience.

This difference is not a limit, but a value. It allows us to build a more authentic mosaic: the facts, but also the emotions; The official history, but also the personal stories.

Telling the story of Palestine today

Why today? Because never before has the Israeli-Palestinian conflict turned into a global issue as in recent years. Social networks have multiplied images and narratives, but often without critical filters. On the one hand there is talk of Israel's right to security, on the other of freedom of the Palestinian people. Two formulas that, if taken alone, risk being reduced to slogans.

Writing this book means removing Palestine from rhetoric and bringing it back into the realm of reality. It means restoring complexity, giving space to historical memory without forgetting the present, and above all bringing people back to the center.

The method

We have chosen a simple structure: twenty chapters, each dedicated to a historical, political, social or cultural aspect of the Palestinian story. Some