EXCERPT
At the core of the novel there is a central question: What do we inherit from our ancestors, and what do we leave behind?
At first glance, Steven Salaita’s Daughter, Son, Assassin could be about any immigrant family in the hinterlands of America’s suburbia. Delving deeper, Salaita covers everything that is at the core of Palestine in 2024, peeling back the layers without ever once mentioning its name.
For Salaita, Palestine is a moral/geographic center, thus it is always absent/present, always inherent in the reader’s conscience, always affecting the world, but nevertheless remains unnamed, dependent on the reader’s imagination to inscribe it.
Better known for his sharp political analyses, Salaita has turned to fiction to construct a path for those who want to be on the right side of history but do not know how to navigate through “Israel’s” hasbara (propaganda). Defined by Mary Turfah as psychological warfare that fabricates an enemy so monstrous as to justify any form of aggression as self-defense, atrocity propaganda is the opposite of atrocity testimonial.
Salaita also charts a blueprint for breaking out of a career that requires civility but lacks a moral code. As director of the Geostrategic Partners Institute, financed by the Kingdom, what Salaita calls a “mishmash” of various Arab potentates, her father’s “work was conventional” (p. 5) but actually required imagination. “It’s not easy,” Nancy learns “to write a paper that’s inoffensive to all sides of a conflict” (p. 5), thus alluding to the “bothsidesism” that afflicts many commentators today.
Source:
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/steven-salaitas-daughter-son-assassin-a-novel-for-these-times/