By Mohammed Omer Almoghayer. New York & London: OR Books, 2025. 288 pp., $19.95 (paperback)

Reviewed by: A.J. Caschetta

Almoghayer’s elegy to Gaza is meant as a sharp juxtaposition of the region pre- and post-October 7. “I write most of the book in the present tense to make Gaza feel alive once more,” he explains, only to conclude that readers ought “to wake up from the dream and see it laid to waste.” He provides 234 pages recounting an idyllic “way of life,” followed by a 23-page epilogue depicting how it is “now destroyed.”

But the author’s rhetorical gamble backfires. A Palestinian and graduate from the Islamic University of Gaza, he inadvertently delivers a death blow to the widespread and pernicious lie that pre-October 7 Gaza was “an open air prison.”

In his opening sentence, Almoghayer (who also goes by the name Mohammed Omer) recounts being “a fresh-faced research fellow at Columbia University.” By the final paragraph he writes, “and now dear reader, I must leave you, as tomorrow I leave Gaza for an exciting opportunity as a research scholar at Harvard University.” Name-dropping aside, his odyssey makes clear that this supposed “inmate” enters and exits the alleged prison at will.

More than that, the book’s depiction of bountiful food, joyous citizenry, feasts, parties, weddings, and all manner of celebrations contradicts the narrative of pre-October 7 Gaza as a place of starving, miserable, helpless people living precariously at the mercy of cruel imperial overlords.

“You are now in Gaza,” Chapter 1 begins, “where the warm embrace of hospitality starts with a humble cup of tea or coffee and an invitation to relax and feel at home.” The chapter closes with a promise the author does not keep: “In the pages that follow, I invite you to partake in a literary banquet.”

What follows is less banquet than self-serve buffet—cold and past its expiration date. It consists of a series of vignettes about Gaza’s “good people,” with “interludes,” as Almoghayer calls them, of a Texas family helping a family in Gaza, and a “sudden interruption,” as he terms it, describing his alleged kidnapping and torture by ISIS.

The “warm embrace of hospitality” trope runs throughout Almoghayer’s portrayal of Gazans as the most hospitable and innocent people on earth. The words “hospitality” and “innocent” recur throughout the book more often than “Hamas”—as celebrations and the joy of living permeate each character sketch: Hassan, proprietor of the Al-Awda Pharmacy; Maher, the quail hunter; Assad, the restaurateur; Domenico, the pizza-maker; Samira, the potato farmer; Nermine, the fashion designer; Amira, the parkour athlete; Ahmed, the underpaid teacher; Karam, the bookshop proprietor; a painter known as “the Picasso of Palestine,” and others. All are depicted as gentle, generous, and, above all, hospitable and innocent, thriving amid crowded cafes, busy stores, and Banksy murals.

The earth too is portrayed as hospitable and fertile, producing the best fruits and vegetables anywhere. “Dutch experts say Gaza strawberries have a richer taste than those imported from Spain and Morocco,” the author asserts. The tea is tastier, the desserts sweeter, and the knafeh cheesier. Nearly every chapter brims with descriptions of the lush native vegetation, the abundant game and fruit, alongside details of Gaza’s versions of virtually every imaginable Arab dish: harira, mutabal, maftool, taboon, musakhan, maqluba, waraq enab, shish kebab, falafel, okra stew, and more.

Almoghayer’s book reads more like a Zagat guide to Middle Eastern cuisine than an ethnographic description of an open-air prison where inmates suffer from food insecurity. He describes the three-day Eid al Fitr holiday as “a foodie’s dream come true, a gastronomic celebration worth traveling across the world to experience.” One scene begins, “In the bustling packing house, brimming with produce ready to be hopefully transported to the Netherlands and sold in other European markets, the sweet abundance is overwhelming.” Karam’s well-stocked store features not only books but also “a variety of gifts and knickknacks: red stuffed teddies, perfume, cologne, engraved items, lingerie, and occasionally fresh flowers.”

While Almoghayer seems unaware that his love-letter to Gaza demolishes his “open air prison” scam, he is painfully aware of the need to downplay Hamas, whose name appears only six times in his book. He prefers to invoke Hamas indirectly and respectfully as the “regime” and the “democratically elected government” while calling its members either by their official titles (workers at the “Gaza-based Palestinian Ministry of Culture” or “the Gaza Ministry of Finance”)—or by even more benign-sounding terms such as “local authorities” and “security officers.”

When he does mention Hamas, Almoghayer blames the United States and Israel for its existence. He claims five times that it controls Gaza because it gained popularity following an alleged failed CIA coup: “the reason Hamas took over in a coup was because Israel and the US tried to violently overthrow the democratic will of the Palestinian people in 2007.” His most outrageous claim appears in a footnote to the epilogue where he ungrammatically asserts: “Even if Hamas ceased to exist, nothing fundamental would change. They are not the root cause of this conflict.”

Readers expecting a serious assessment of Hamas’s underground city, where it stores missiles and keeps hostages, will be disappointed. Subterranean Gaza barely exists in Almoghayer’s book, except in his euphemistic references to the “tunnel economy.” He downplays its purpose, claiming that “Nearly all the animals at Gaza’s South Forest Zoo, including the hyenas, wolves, ostriches, chimpanzees, and the prize lion came through the tunnels. Some wealthy people even managed to smuggle full-sized billiard tables and Jacuzzis.” He also reports that a bank manager told him that in Rafah, “six hundred people have earned at least one million US dollars from the tunnel economy.” Somehow, Almoghayer’s Columbia University journalism training fails to inspire him to investigate how these fortunes were made, by whom, and to what ends. Perhaps he does not want to know.

The boldest and most dramatic cover Almoghayer provides for Hamas occurs in the supposed recounting his abduction and interrogation by Abu Bakr, Emir of the Islamic State in Gaza. His kidnappers demand that he “aid them in their quest to reclaim Gaza from its current rulers,” to which he responds, “I refuse.”

Readers will decide for themselves whether to believe this abduction story. Of those who do, few are likely to believe that, when threatened with a choice of cooperating with ISIS or decapitation, he said, “I would rather face death than collaborate with creatures of the night. I am a servant of the sun, destined to toil under its warm rays.”

Indeed, the ISIS-kidnapping vignette provides yet another opportunity to portray Hamas as a moderate force. When the author escapes and runs into a “police officer,” informing him that he “was kidnapped by a group of militants,” the Hamas police officer doubts Almoghayer’s story, telling him, “There is no IS … We are the only power here.”

In Almoghayer’s through-the-looking-glass Gaza, Hamas appears as a moderate force, wary of the extremist Emir Abu Bakr. The memoir has moments of unintended humor, such as the story of an Israeli bomb killing a woman “who was 30 months pregnant.” Most readers, however, will find little humor in this fantastical work—only plenty of tone-deaf rhetoric. It took incredible nerve to write, post-October 7, that “Palestinians of all ages are regularly kidnapped by the Israeli military.”

For all his efforts to inspire outrage over Gaza’s “way of life now destroyed,” Almoghayer cannot escape the stark reality that many Gazans—Hamas members and “civilians” alike—participated in the October 7 pogrom. Readers are left to wonder which of his smiling innocents might have been among the marauders who murdered and raped Israelis, hid hostages in their homes, and held jobs in Israel, collecting intelligence to support Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. One fact remains certain—not even one of Almoghayer’s hospitable and amiable Gazans has provided an iota of information on the hostages’ whereabouts.

If Pleasures of Living in Gaza depicts an embarrassment of riches, Almoghayer proves incapable of embarrassment. His turgid, hackneyed prose reeks of clichés and platitudes and does nothing to bolster Columbia’s declining brand.

By Salman Abu Sitta. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2025. 352 pp., $28.99 (paperback), $28.99 (EPUB)

Reviewed by: Martin Sherman

Mapping My Return amounts to a call for the erasure of Israel in its entirety. Tellingly, the author proposes that, since most of Israel’s Jewish population is concentrated in urban hubs, the Palestinian diaspora should return to the rural areas that constitute roughly 90 percent of the territory. This will occur “without major displacement of Jews,” so long as they are “willing to live in peace in a free Palestine.”

Abu Sitta’s description of October 7 reveals his broader outlook:

Of their own volition, some young people in Gaza tried to return home. On October 7, 2023, a small number of young people, the third- or fourth-generation descendants of 1948 refugees, broke through the well-fortified fence of the Gaza concentration camp and started the journey to return home. They reoccupied about 1,500 square kilometers of their homeland in one morning. For a while their dream of returning home almost came true.

Note the total absence of any mention of murder and mutilation, of rapes and ravages. It is simply a lovely “dream of returning home.”

For the most part, Mapping My Return reads like a nostalgic odyssey with a saccharine-coated veneer intended to portray an allegedly idyllic pre-Zionist past rather than the reality of a backward, brutal, misogynistic, homophobic, and repressive society.

Curiously, the author undermines his own pastoral portrayal when he approvingly recounts how his mother, armed with a dagger, assaulted a female intermediary who had come to arrange a polygamous marriage with his father. So much for any parallel with the quaint English countryside.

Peppered with disparaging racist allusions to Jews of European origin as intrusive interlopers and agents of “Western colonial schemes,” Abu Sitta laments: “It is inconceivable that such a precious part of the world as Palestine would be hijacked by East Europeans driven by Western colonial schemes, its history taken as their own, its geography emptied of its people, and its names replaced by newly carved names.”

Abu Sitta’s claim about “European hijackers” imposing “newly carved names” is mistaken. In reality, Zionists restored Biblical names to sites like Hebron, Safed, Beit Shean, and Jerusalem after they had been replaced by Arabic names. Indeed, these ancestral remnants date back long before the advent of Islam. Other names, such as Tiberias and Caesarea, are Roman, also predating by centuries the arrival of Muslims.

Abu Sitta suggests that Israel is an artificial artifact suffocatingly imposed on a tranquil, rustic landscape, and that the country was unscrupulously “carved out” from a pre-existing pre-1948 independent entity rather than from a distant, decrepit vilayet on the fringes of the Ottoman Empire. In reality, of course, only Jews recognized how precious this once-desolate and bleak land was. Drawn to it from all corners of the globe, Jews alone sacrificed and toiled to transform its swamps and deserts into today’s modern marvel.

In sum, then, Mapping My Return is fantasy and fabrication masquerading as historical research. Anyone seeking to learn more about Palestinian life should scrupulously avoid this medley of misleading facts and hopelessly deeply biased analyses.

Martin Sherman
The Israel Institute for Strategic Studies