The present politics of suspicion surrounding Arabs and Muslims as the Palestinians in Gaza continue to struggle with the occupation is an extension of a discourse that started well before 9/11, but was galvanized by its events. Reflecting on what is currently happening in Palestine and the lack of engagement in the world literary debate with Arab women writers calls for a more nuanced engagement with contemporary Arab and Arab American literature. Reconfiguring contemporary Arab women’s writing as powerful locations of creative and political expression, my paper examines Sahar Khalifeh’s The Inheritance (first published in 1997) and Susan Abulhawa’s Against the Loveless World (2019) to show not only how long the Palestinian occupation has been rooted in cultural memory, but also how Arab writers writing in Arabic from the homeland like Khaliefeh imagine Palestine and life under the occupation in comparison with Arab American writers like Abulhawa. Following in the footsteps of Olivia Harrison in Transcolonial Magrhib: Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization (2015), my paper argues that Palestine continues to be deployed as the figure of the colonial for both Arab and Arab American writers. I wish to expand on Harrison’s argument and make a distinction between the various ways Palestine is imagined and the construction of the Palestinian metaphor in the Arab world and in diasporic contexts. I also draw on the work of the Black feminist intellectual Audre Lorde in Sister/Outsider:Essays and Speeches (1984) and what she articulates as “moving toward coalition and effective action” (128). My goal is to not only draw out generative links between Arab women writers in the homeland and in diaspora, but also highlight the differentiation that continues to be lacking in the relatively small body of literary scholarship produced on Arab and Arab American women writers thus far. Beyond post-9/11 racism, I also examine the contestations within the Arab world at large exploring its place within the modern world-system and the implications of Arab politics and social upheavals for literature, especially literature by women which continues to be a gap in the current world literary debate. While writers like Abulhawa and Khalifeh among others, write from vastly different geographical and temporal locations, their works share more similarities than differences, emphasizing “solidarity” as part of retelling the, often neglected, narratives of Arab women.