A Rebel in Gaza: Behind the Lines of the Arab Spring, One Woman's Story

Gaza has always been rebellious . . . stubborn, addictive. I’m her daughter, and I look like her.

A Palestinian journalist who grew up in the Rafah refugee camp in Gaza, Asmaa al-Ghoul offers a rare view of a young woman coming into her own political and secular beliefs amidst the region’s relentless violence and under Israeli occupation. She has been called “too strong minded,” frequently criticized for not covering her hair and for being outspoken. As a journalist and activist, she has led demonstrations and been vocal in her opposition to Hamas and Fatah, which has led her to family strife, imprisonment, brutal interrogations, death threats and attacks.

A Rebel in Gaza is Asmaa’s story as told to Franco-Lebanese writer Selim Nassib over the course of the “Arab Spring” through meetings, phone calls, Skype, and even texts during the siege of Gaza in 2014, when Israel conducted Operation Cast Lead in response to several rocket attacks by Hamas and she was locked in the “open air prison” that her homeland had become. Both determined and dedicated to its liberation through writing, education and culture, she paints the sensory portrait of the native country she passionately loves, which over years has become a cauldron of wars and fundamentalism.

Asmaa al-Ghoul (b. 1982) was given the prestigious Courage in Journalism Award by the International Women’s Media Foundation and is described by The New York Times as a woman “known for her defiant stance against the violations of civil rights in Gaza."

Selim Nassib (b. 1946), journalist for Libération and novelist is the author of I Loved You for Your Voice and The Palestinian Lover (Europa Editions).

Asmaa al-Ghoul was born in 1982 in Rafah, in a Palestinian refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip. A regular contributor to Al-Monitor, an information site that deals with news from the Middle East, she currently lives in France where she is writing her next book. She has won numerous international awards, including the Human Rights Watch Hellman / Hammett Award, the Dubai Press Club prize for journalism, and the International Women's Media Foundation Journalism Award.

Selim Nassib was born in Beirut in 1946. He is a journalist for the publication Libération in France. A connoisseur of the Middle East, he is the author of the novels Oum (Balland) and A Lover in Palestine (Robert Laffont).

Mike Mitchell is an award-winning translator of French and German. He is the recipient of the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for translations of German works published in Britain and has won the British Comparative Literature Association translation competition twice for translations from German. He has been shortlisted for many awards including the Weidenfeld prize, the Aristeion prize, and the Kurt Wolff prize. In 2012, the Austrian Ministry of Education, Art and Culture, awarded him a lifetime achievement award as a translator of literary works.