“In this devastating account, journalist Baroud (These Chains Will Be Broken) traces multiple generations of his Palestinian family tree as each confronts the Israeli occupation. He begins with family matriarch Madallah Abdulnabi’s childhood in idyllic Beit Daras, from which she was forcibly expelled during the 1948 Nakba. Baroud depicts the expulsion with haunting imagery—“hundreds of women and children rushed to the southern road where sunflowers were in full bloom”—and harrowing flashes of carnage (“two little sisters shot holding hands”). These vivid descriptions clarify how the Nakba’s trauma continues to resonate through subsequent generations, particularly as Baroud turns toward the Gaza branch of his family. He catalogs their experiences of “imprisonment, torture, and loss,” including those of Madallah’s son, Ehab al-Badrasawi. In 1987, to the dismay of other family members, Ehab, then a “scrawny” 11-year-old, participated in the first intifada, which erupted after “an Israeli had deliberately run over Palestinian[s]… waiting by a bus stop.” Later, Ehab joined Hamas after Israeli forces killed his younger brother Wael. The book hurtles toward October 7 with mounting horror as both Ehab’s son and nephew join the fight, and it comes to seem as if Wael’s death had “sealed the fate… of the al-Badrasawi family.” It’s an indelible depiction of the generational trauma that defines the Palestinian struggle.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Before the Flood is a heart-wrenching and searingly personal chronicle of a homeland and a people. More than a family memoir, it speaks to the soul of Palestine across generations. It dismantles Zionism’s colonial fairytales and lays bare the moral core of our resistance, born, as it is, of profound love for our ancestors and the sacred dignity of home. A moving testament to the power of memory and life’s stubborn impulse for freedom.”
—susan abulhawa, author of Against the Loveless World
”As a historian of colonization, I found this brilliant work clarifying the history that has gone from colonization and land theft to outright attempted genocide. Deeply researched and highly readable, Before the Flood is a must read, leading to action and protest.”
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
”Ramzy Baroud aspires to nothing less than to tell the story of Palestine on Palestine’s own terms. In Before the Flood, form and content realize perfect symmetry in revealing how the individual plight of all Palestinians is emblematic of a broader, collective condition—one of harrowing loss, yes, but also rootedness, joy, and the galvanizing constancy of steadfast defiance that will inevitably stamp out history’s transient oppressors. A poetic genealogy of resistance that transmutes personal loss into communal edification, Before The Flood is a masterpiece of Palestinian revolutionary literature.”
—Omar Zahzah, author of Terms of Servitude
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