Palestinian blue humanism: ecocritical ethics and environmental violence in Susan Abulhawa’s The Blue Between Sky and Water

This article advances an ecocritical and ethical interpretation of Susan Abulhawa’s The Blue Between Sky and Water through postcolonial ecocriticism, environmental justice, and the blue humanities. It contends that the novel depicts Gaza not just as a besieged territory but as a deliberately damaged ecological world, where settler-colonial dominance unfolds through the gradual and dramatic destruction of land, sea, infrastructure, and more-than-human life. By highlighting rivers, fisheries, refugee camps, women’s labour, and oceanic imaginaries, the article demonstrates how Abulhawa connects civilian suffering to environmental destruction, challenging humanitarian narratives that separate violence from its material and ecological contexts. Developing the idea of “Palestinian blue humanism”, it proposes an ethics of relational survival rooted in fragile bonds among humans, nonhumans, and Gaza’s blocked coastline. Drawing on Edward Said’s worldly humanism, Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence, Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s oceanic allegories, Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, and critical environmental justice scholarship, the article interprets Abulhawa’s multigenerational, magical realism as a form of ecological witnessing. It repositions Palestinian literature as a vital archive for understanding environmental violence, colonial necropolitics, and ecologically grounded humanism today.