Palestinians attend an exhibit entitled "Homeland Lost" prepared by British photographer Alan Gignoux at Birzeit University in the West Bank. (Fadi Arouri, Maan Images)

Last Saturday at the Festival of Palestinian Literature in Manchester, Salma Khadra Jayyusi walked slowly to a microphone in a large auditorium. Poet, critic, academic and translator, Professor Jayyusi, now frail and a little hard of hearing, is the undisputed doyenne of Palestinian letters. In 1980 she founded the Project for the Translation of Arabic Literature (PROTA) and set about compiling and editing critical anthologies of Arabic poetry and fiction, now the cornerstones of Palestinian and Arabic literature in English. Last week, she read her poems in both languages and spoke with passion of the world's receptivity to Palestinian literature, citing the warm welcome that Mourid Barghouti's memoir, I Saw Ramallah, has received: "The world can never be our enemy," she said, "if it sees that we have a just cause."

Political and economic tracts describe fragmentation and corruption in Palestinian ranks, but the Palestinian people have responded to their threatened position by becoming stronger and more creative, as the amount of their art moving around the globe shows. In the last 12 months, for example, Hani Abu Assad's film Paradise Now won the Golden Globe and was nominated for an Academy Award in March; Made in Palestine, an exhibition spanning three generations of Palestinian artists living in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, parts of Israel, Syria, Jordan and the United States took New York by storm; and Sovereign Threads, a collection of embroidery that ran from July to October at the Craft Museum in LA got rave reviews.

Palestinians are using technology to reach each other in different countries and the rest of the world: a concert in solidarity with Lebanon in September was "headquartered" in Ramallah, but most of the performers were in Cairo, Paris, New York, Dubai and Durban and the whole thing, plus shots of the Ramallah audience, was transmitted live by satellite TV.

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Palestinian organisations, such as the Qattan Foundation, are putting money into art and art education. The Edward Said National Conservatory in Ramallah with Dar al-Nadwa in Bethlehem and Yabous Productions in Jeruslaem has set up an ambitious annual programme of concerts for all three cities. The Sakakini Cultural Centre in Ramallah and the Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art in Jerusalem post detailed weekly programmes. Although they often have to cancel performances because of Israeli closures or curfews, they simply reschedule them.

There is now a vibrant and growing body of work that can be said to be an art "of Palestine". Created by Palestinians and non-Palestinians, it is essentially an art of resistance. This has existed for decades in the Arab world but now it's coming from the west as well. One thinks of Joe Sacco's graphic novel Palestine; graffiti artist Banksy's paintings on Israel's "security" wall; and, of course, the East-West Divan Orchestra, co-founded by Daniel Barenboim and the late Edward Said. The "Palestine" contribution to the Venice Biennale a few years ago took the form of a number of human-sized travel documents that the viewer came across, one by one, stranded between the pavilions of different states. The documents were from different countries but their bearer was always born in Palestine. In contrast, at the British Museum's recent Word into Art exhibition you could find a pocket-sized installation of an open page of a dictionary in which a wall of sturdy black nails imprisoned and bore in upon the word "philistine".

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