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AudioBook information:
Author: Tareq Baconi
Narrated by: Tareq Baconi
Release date: November 3, 2026
Audiobook Duration: 5 h 19 min

Summary: A soul-stirring philosophical and political treatise on what liberation for Palestine—and all people—will look like in the twenty-first century, in the vein of Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, and Edward Said.

Palestine is a litmus test for our global future. The ongoing genocide is showcasing what it means for Palestinians to be taken to the brink of extermination. The outcome will have repercussions that will go beyond the Middle East, extending outward across the world, and will determine whether the struggle for decolonization will succeed or fail, whether our world will move toward collective freedom or fascism.

Drawing from Tareq Baconi’s extensive academic and organizing work with Palestinian and international activists, and from decades of long-standing strategies, What Now distills three strategic principles for a free Palestine to guide activists and allies: refuse the prospect of a divided homeland, reclaim the historic revolutionary politics at the heart of the Palestinian struggle, and decompose Zionism.

Imagining a free Palestine is a political act of resistance. This is not the same as turning back the clock to pre-1948, Baconi writes, but a new struggle for a just future. A free Palestine would heal the wounds left in the wake of the Second World War, by challenging and upturning the racism, colonialism, and imperialism that continue to animate global politics. It will tilt the world off its axis, away from annihilatory racism toward justice and peace.

Reviews:

“Gripping and eloquent … It’s a sweeping call for a truly postcolonial world.”
—Publishers Weekly

“At once searing, loving and rousing, this is an acrobatic feat of political leadership from a generational talent. Baconi conjures dazzling levels of intellectual courage and ethical clarity to imagine true freedom in the grips of a genocide, a freedom that flatly refuses to replicate or mirror the oppressor. The result is a propulsive read of unparalleled import.”
—Naomi Klein

“Amidst a flood of books reviewing the wreckage and consequences of the ongoing genocide, Tareq Baconi has chosen to look to the future and the past, to the long struggle for a Free Palestine—a struggle that can, and must, be won. Audacious, honest, visionary Baconi pulls no punches. Liberation is not about a state or recognition or “peace.” It is war by any means, for the land, for the right to return, for the end of Zionism, for decolonization, for global revolution. And how to get there is to be determined in collective struggle—a struggle that can, and must, be one.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

“What kind of world do we wish to inhabit after a genocide? Continuously posing the right questions, Tareq Baconi not only wrests incandescent insight out of overwhelming defeat and despair. He dares to offer that rare thing these days—hope in a better future—and heroically affirms the invincible human determination to strive for liberation and fulfilment. In these bleak times, What Now reminds us of the transformative power of lucid and uncompromising thought.”
—Pankaj Mishra, author of The World After Gaza

“With searing clarity and an unbending commitment to the liberation of Palestine from Zionist domination, Baconi offers us a conjunctural analysis of the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, the expropriation of their land and the historical forces which produce the exterminationist logic of Israel’s settler colonial project. His writing insists that history is not finished and that the fate of the Palestinian people is being determined by their autonomous resistance to annihilation. What Now offers clear and strategic insight for those situated inside the heart of empire – it is a call to critically assess, strengthen and escalate our solidaristic action”
—Lola Olufemi, author of Experiments in Imagining Otherwise

“In this urgent and unflinching book, Tareq Baconi writes with tenderness, ferocity, and clarity at a pivotal moment in Palestinian history. With surgical precision, What Now cuts through despair, disillusionment, and political stagnation to offer a lucid, clear-eyed roadmap to liberation. A manifesto for our movement.”
—Saleem Haddad, author of Floodlines

“An extraordinarily unsettling and bold book, weaving sharp historical and political analysis about the colonial reality with crucial guidelines on what must be done to overcome it.”
—Neve Gordon, author of Human Shields

“Tareq Baconi has written an open letter to his Palestinian siblings entreating us to find strength in our survival, enough to redouble our conviction to struggle until victory. What Now speaks directly to our internal fissures, our quiet doubts, our booming pain, and the rage that threatens to consume us. It boldly calls everything we have known and felt by its name so that we have the fortitude to keep going on. Baconi reminds us that while our liberation is necessary to save ourselves and a global future, it is not inevitable, and instead requires a strategic precision we have yet to develop.”
—Noura Erakat, Professor and author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine and Confronting Zionism

“In the wake of Israel’s genocide, What Now reaches for a politics adequate to the moment. Its diagnosis of 1988 as the strategic rupture that migrated partition into our own political grammar is among the sharpest such accounts in English; its reactivation of the thawabit, its reframing of sumud as latent militancy, and its placing of the decomposition of Zionism alongside the territorial question, give the book an architecture from which the global movement for Palestine can take direction. A welcome and generative intervention.”
—Abdaljawad Omar, Birzeit University

“What Now is one of the most important books written on Palestine in many years. It doesn’t only offer a diagnosis of our present, but a framework to building a different more hopeful future. Every Palestinian and every ally should read it, not merely to understand its arguments, but to grapple with them, carry them forward, and translate them into meaningful action.”
—Ahmed Alnaouq

“What do we do in the aftermath, when there is still no ‘after’? In this compelling manifesto, Tareq Baconi speaks to this paradoxical predicament that Palestinians confront. His lucid political and conceptual interventions provide a rigorous lesson in ethics—a call to action that challenges the very meanings of solidarity, decolonization, and liberation. This is a must-read for all. What Now now!”
—J. Kehaulani Kauanui, author of Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty

“This brilliant little book by Tareq Baconi feels like a conversation with multiple voices working through the most essential questions facing scholars and activists commuted to Palestine today. Reading it gives a sense that the task of liberation is attainable and within reach.”
—Eyal Weizman, author of Investigative Aesthetics

About the Author:

Tareq Baconi is a Palestinian writer, scholar, and activist. He is the grandson of refugees from Jerusalem and Haifa and grew up between Amman and Beirut. His work has appeared in, among others, The New York Times and The Baffler, and he contributes essays to The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. He has also written for film; his award-winning BFI short One Like Him, a queer love story set in Jordan, screened in over thirty festivals. He is the author of What Now, Hamas Contained: A History of Palestinian Resistance, which was shortlisted for the Palestine Book Award, and Fire in Every Direction.