There is No Life on Other Planets (2ND edition with new interviews)

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In 2014, Conflict Kitchen published “There Is No Life on Other Planets,” a book featuring interviews with Palestinian children living in the West Bank and Gaza. Ten years later, we are republishing those original interviews alongside new conversations with some of those same children, who are now young adults. This edition also includes eight new interviews with young adults currently living in Gaza.

All new interviews were conducted in Gaza in May of 2024, nearly seven months into a humanitarian catastrophe that has displaced over two million and killed more than 40,000 people, including an estimated 16,000 children, to date.

All funds raised from the sale of this book will be donated to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

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Special thanks to all the young Palestinians who agreed to be interviewed in 2014 and 2024. Additional thanks to the interviewers on this project, including Abeer A. (Gaza 2014 and 2024), Lana T. and Mar Senda (West Bank 2014). Photography by Abeer A. (Gaza 2014/2024) and Dania Assaf (West Bank 2014).

Translations by Julie Azzam.

Design by Brett Yasko.

Financial support for this book comes from Kadist, emergentCNY, and Noon at Night. Special thanks to the team at City of Asylum Books for supporting sales and distribution.

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Conflict Kitchen was a restaurant/art project/non-profit that served cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict. In addition to serving hundreds of people each day, we worked with people living in each country we focused on, as well as local expats, to produce everything from publications and performances to film festivals and school curriculum in order to expand the engagement the public has with the culture, politics, and issues at stake within each focus region. The restaurant rotated identities roughly every six months, or in relation to current geopolitical events.

Operating seven days a week in the middle of the city, Conflict Kitchen used the social relations of food and economic exchange to engage the general public in discussions about countries, cultures, and people that they might know little about outside of the polarizing rhetoric of governmental politics and the narrow lens of media headlines.  In this way, the project functioned as a “front-door intervention,” inserting politically challenging counter-narratives into the stream of public life through the commonly understood mechanism of a commercial business. In addition, the restaurant created a constantly changing site for the recognition of ethnic diversity in the post-industrial city of Pittsburgh, as it has presented the only Iranian, Afghan, Venezuelan, North Korean, Haudenosaunne and Palestinian restaurants the city had ever seen.

Collaborators: Afghan, African American, Black, Cuban, Iranian, North Korean, Venezuelan, Palestinian, and Haudenosaunee communities in Pittsburgh and their world-wide diaspora.