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The essay investigates the intense appearance of ghosts in contemporary Palestinian cultural production in relation to the settler-colonial project in Palestine/Israel. Integral to this colonial project is a process of producing Palestinian absence – predominantly, Palestinians’ physical absence from their native lands, but also rendering discursive invisibility and cancellation of Indigenous futures. An examination of Raed Andoni’s film Ghost Hunting (2017) in the first section of analysis suggests that this violent process inscribes itself onto Palestinian life in severity that shapes Palestinian bodies into ghost figures and Palestinian temporality as haunting, i.e. a repetitive continuation of the past in the present and a disbelief in an alternative future. Nevertheless, the ghosts in contemporary Palestinian cultural production are not only a sign of the violent attempts to produce absence but also an artistic figure of resistance to the conditions that forge it. The subsequent section thus begins to unfold the potential ghosts’ hold for imagining resistance to settler colonialism by inquiring into two short stories, Mazen Maarouf’s “The Curse of the Mud Ball Kid” (2019) and Anwar Hamed’s “The Key” (2019). This inquiry demonstrates the potential of ghosts’ features – chiefly absence, haunting, and returning – that make these figures relevant for imagining forms of Palestinian resistance. The last section explores two more trajectories of artistic applications of ghost figures as an act of resistance – Dima Srouji’s art exhibition Ghosts (2019) and Isabella Hamad’s novel Enter Ghost (2023). The two cultural products not only feature ghosts, but also imagine the artistic action as ghostly. Hence, ultimately, the essay argues that the extensive appearance of ghosts in contemporary Palestinian art is both an artistic reflection of the Palestinian experience under violent settler-colonial conditions and an artistic figuration of a form that wishes to breach these oppressive conditions.

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