Majed Kayali’s new book, “A Blog That’s Not Personal… From the Notebooks of the Palestinian-Syrian Era,” has been released by Dar Kanaan in Damascus.

The book consists of 247 pages divided into five sections:

The first section includes: “How I Became Palestinian,” “With Fatah in Jordan,” “A Political Activist in High School,” “In the Critical Current within Fatah,” and “The Storm of the Invasion.”

The second is titled “About My Palestinian Days: From Lydda to Lydda.”

The third deals with “Eulogies for Books, Libraries, and Writing,” followed by reflections on wandering between New York, Istanbul, and Berlin, and returning to Damascus.

The fifth section is titled “Those Who Depart and Those Who Remain.”

In the preface, Kayali writes:

“At seventy, this is a life full of noise, pain, disappointments, losses, and catastrophes… At this age, with my family and friends, I look back on eleven books I have written since I began writing in the late 1980s. I am proud of them, especially my works critiquing the Palestinian national experience—most notably my books ‘Debating the Gun: A Reading in the Dilemmas of the Palestinian Armed Struggle Experience’ and ‘From the Ailaboun Tunnel to the Al-Aqsa Flood: A Debate on the Tragic History of the Palestinian National Movement’—the latter being my most recent publication (2025).

Between these two came ‘The Great Rift: The Ordeal of Politics, Ideology, and Power in the Arab Spring Experience.’

I have also written dozens of studies published in journals such as Palestinian Affairs, Arab Affairs, and The Palestinian Studies Journal, as well as hundreds of weekly articles in Arab newspapers including Al-Hayat, An-Nahar, Al-Mustaqbal, Daraj, Al-Majalla, Al-Bayan, Al-Ayyam, Al-Arab, and As-Safir.

I turn seventy, looking back with sorrow at what has passed and what I failed to accomplish in its time, yet also with hope and longing for what is still to come—for the sake of our children and grandchildren, yours and theirs, and for future generations who may live in a world of freedom, dignity, justice, and peace.

Farewell to the days gone by, with their sweetness and bitterness. Farewell to seventy years that have passed—with their losses, catastrophes, dreams, and hopes.

I dedicate this book to the friends of those days. It represents a distillation of certain collective and personal experiences—political and human, painful and hopeful. I do not present it as an autobiography in the strict sense, but rather as fragments of a personal story shaped by politics.

It is a narrative that intersects with that of many from my generation, attempting to uncover what is personal within the general, and to add to what I have previously written on political matters in my other books.

It is, essentially, a political memoir that stops at the period during which I was directly involved in political activity; what came afterward I left to the books I published, which I consider to be a reflection of who I am.”اضافة اعلان