What Now
On sale
5th November 2026
Price: £24.99
A stunning, soul-stirring, philosophical, and political treatise on what liberation for Palestine and our world will look like in the twenty-first century.
‘At once searing, loving and rousing, this is an acrobatic feat of political leadership from a generational talent’
Naomi Klein
Palestine is a litmus test – the repercussions of which will go beyond the Middle East, extending outward across the world, argues writer Tareq Baconi. There are only two possible outcomes to the ongoing apartheid and genocide: justice or annihilation.
Drawing from Baconi’s extensive academic and organizing work with Palestinian and international activists, and from decades of long-standing principles, What Now distils three strategic priorities for a free Palestine to guide activists and allies: refuse the prospect of a divided homeland, resuscitate the revolutionary politics of the Palestinian commitment to freedom and justice, and decompose Zionism.
Imagining a Free Palestine is not the same as turning back the clock to pre-1948, Baconi writes, but a new struggle for a just future in the aftermath of Zionism-not by fighting Jewish presence in Palestine, but by ending Jewish political exclusivity. A free Palestine would heal the wounds left in the wake of the second world war, by challenging and upturning the colonial and genocidal mindsets that continue to animate Western thought-the ramifications of justice would therefore extend far beyond the shores of Palestine.
Praise for Tareq Baconi’s Fire in Every Direction:
‘In stunning detail – both physical and emotional – Baconi traces a story of personal and communal alienation, longing, and liberation’
Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
‘Moving and generous’
Isabella Hammad, author of Enter Ghost
‘Luminous, moving, and achingly beautiful’
Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King
‘At once searing, loving and rousing, this is an acrobatic feat of political leadership from a generational talent’
Naomi Klein
Palestine is a litmus test – the repercussions of which will go beyond the Middle East, extending outward across the world, argues writer Tareq Baconi. There are only two possible outcomes to the ongoing apartheid and genocide: justice or annihilation.
Drawing from Baconi’s extensive academic and organizing work with Palestinian and international activists, and from decades of long-standing principles, What Now distils three strategic priorities for a free Palestine to guide activists and allies: refuse the prospect of a divided homeland, resuscitate the revolutionary politics of the Palestinian commitment to freedom and justice, and decompose Zionism.
Imagining a Free Palestine is not the same as turning back the clock to pre-1948, Baconi writes, but a new struggle for a just future in the aftermath of Zionism-not by fighting Jewish presence in Palestine, but by ending Jewish political exclusivity. A free Palestine would heal the wounds left in the wake of the second world war, by challenging and upturning the colonial and genocidal mindsets that continue to animate Western thought-the ramifications of justice would therefore extend far beyond the shores of Palestine.
Praise for Tareq Baconi’s Fire in Every Direction:
‘In stunning detail – both physical and emotional – Baconi traces a story of personal and communal alienation, longing, and liberation’
Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
‘Moving and generous’
Isabella Hammad, author of Enter Ghost
‘Luminous, moving, and achingly beautiful’
Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King
Reviews
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
In this moment of utter despair, where the Palestinian people have faced perhaps the darkest moment in their collective history, Tareq Baconi manages to write with rare clarity about the Palestinian struggle - cutting through the noise and despair to show us exactly where we stand and what comes next. Written more as a love letter to our struggle than a conventional analysis, this book offers insight, rigor, and, above all, hope - hope that liberation is not out of reach, but requires a strategic recalibration of the movement to achieve it
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 thawābit, 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.
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