But if there’s one thing the Palestinians have in spades it’s boundless optimism, and never was it more evident than in the aftermath of the United Nations General Assembly vote on the statehood of Palestine.

I watched the vote with my husband, on TV in our hotel room in Tel Aviv with a distinct sense that we were missing the party. A couple of doors down, our Palestinian colleagues were on Facebook attempting to celebrate as best they could.

For six days we had been hosted in turn by the Jordanian, Palestinian and now Israeli offices of the environmental organisation Friends of the Earth-Middle East, and taken to see environmental and heritage sites in their respective countries. All three offices were converging on Tel Aviv the night of the vote, to attend a meeting scheduled the next day.

After a meeting at the Friends of the Earth Israeli office, the various factions disbanded, and we headed back to Bethlehem with the Palestinian organisation.

With the General Assembly vote in hand, the world now braced itself for the inevitable repercussions that would no doubt be born by the newly anointed state.

Meanwhile, the Palestinians accompanying us were in a more buoyant mood and planning for the future. It was during that journey that I learnt the true significance of the vote.

News media identified the immediate benefit of the vote as paving the way for membership to the International Criminal Court, which in turn would allow Palestine to seize the court with claims of war crimes against Israel.

My Palestinian friends in the meanwhile had more laudable ambitions; ones which had more to do with a functioning state than the knee-jerk reaction to immediately confront their oppressor.

Apart from the suggestion to shelve the shekel for a national currency, the possibility of an international airport was also put forward, which struck a chord with me, having encountered the capriciousness of Israeli immigration days earlier.

In fact, since returning from Palestine, I’ve been inundated with queries from Pakistanis as to how I made it into the occupied territories, and I’m afraid the foreign passport I possess was the key to my entry, but not my guarantee.

Israeli immigration seems to welcome only two flavours of tourist: Jewish and Christian evangelical. The rest are likely to receive a grilling, which may vary in intensity.

Needless to say it’s the main impediment to travelling to Palestine, and increases manifold if you’re Palestinian and becomes impossible if you have a passport “not valid for travel in Israel”.

Now consider how an international airport in the West Bank would no longer be subject to Israeli immigration control and visits to Palestine whether for tourism, business or otherwise could become a distinct reality, even for Pakistani passport holders. Admittedly, the Israeli military force destroyed Palestine’s Yasser Arafat International Airport in Gaza in 2001, but control over your airspace (and territorial waters) is a legal right conferred through statehood, and Palestine is now entitled to exercise it.

Israeli restrictions on movement of Palestinians are key to the occupation and one envisages ample resistance to the notion of an international airport in the occupied area. If an international airport is to come, it will come as a response to international pressure.

The General Assembly vote signals a new weariness towards the continuing occupation, and a volatile Middle East in the wake of the Arab Spring has made it harder to predict responses to Israeli excess.

Whilst one may argue that our decision not to recognise Israel prevents Pakistanis from interacting and extending material assistance, the same could also be said of Malaysia, whom the Palestinians hold in far greater esteem for their commitment to the Palestinian cause.

It was embarrassing to note that our being Pakistani held no greater significance in Palestine than the novelty of being the first many had met in the West Bank.

This is an opportunity for Pakistani foreign policy to go beyond claiming the Palestinians as brothers in name, and contribute through gestures of goodwill to the comity of nations.

Leading diplomatic efforts for an international airport would be welcomed by a majority of countries. And though it would not yield the immediate financial rewards Pakistan has grown accustomed to in the form of aid and assistance, it will benefit both economies in the long run in areas such as trade, tourism and education.

After all peace is only achievable if you can imagine new realities.

Never having suffered occupation I don’t think I will ever truly understand how deep the wounds go, but the resolve to build and progress in spite of the numerous challenges brings into stark relief how most of us view Palestinians solely through the prism of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

For those with a less charitable disposition who might view the pursuit for normalcy as naïve, or worse, as facilitating the occupation, I rely on the words of poetess Rafeef Ziadah who movingly responds to a journalist’s stock question: “Don’t you think that everything would be resolved if you would stop teaching so much hate to your children?”

“We Palestinians wake up every morning to teach the rest of the world life, sir” (from We Teach Life, Sir).

The writer is the owner of The Last Word bookshop and co-founder of The Life’s Too Short Short Story Prize.

This summer, in addition to ferreting out new titles for the upcoming season (as a bookseller is wont to do), I conducted a cursory survey of sales of Pakistani fiction in the local market.

The presumption was that since the publication of A Case of Exploding Mangoes, a slew of critically acclaimed Pakistani novels had spurred book sales and together registered a steady growth within the market. It’s a fairly simple proposition to look into, since almost the entirety of Pakistani fiction writing in English is published by major publishing houses in India and imported across.

After tabulating the numbers I was humbled to find that though sales were sturdy, there was no perceptible shift upwards. While the benchmark for a bestseller has shifted in India during the last five years from 5,000-10,000 to 15,000-25,000 copies, we’re still floundering at about 6,000.

Now I realise the foolishness of comparing markets in two starkly contrasting economies (one having an oft-cited ‘exploding English-speaking middle class’), but that should not stand in as an excuse for our own market’s stagnation.

India’s most recent literary renaissance is commonly thought to have come on the heels of Midnight’s Children (1980), with the likes of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993) and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) sending the market into hyperdrive. In 1985, Penguin, emboldened by Rushdie’s success, took the unprecedented step of setting up an office in India that celebrates its 25th anniversary this year.

We’ve similarly received such favourable attention in the wake of our own so-called literary renaissance, when John Makinson, the CEO of the Penguin Group, personally met with writers, editors, publishers and booksellers in Lahore with a view to perhaps setting up office. Within weeks of his visit Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer was assassinated, bringing all probable plans to an abrupt end.

It can easily be argued that the security challenges and economic slowdown do not augur well for book sales, and leave it at that. But I fear we will ultimately arrest our own literary development if we let things be.

Considering our skewed national priorities, it is nothing short of providence that we boast a crop of world-class authors who represent us in the landscape of international literature. It should never be taken for granted that these authors wrote and found publishers abroad, and there is little to suggest that this is a viable trend rather than a happy coincidence.

In recognition of this, many of our established writers have begun to contribute beyond their works of fiction by judging home-grown short story competitions, holding workshops for aspiring authors or participating in writers’ circles.

All our literary rock stars, weary of putting the cart before the horse, have repeated the mantra ‘read, read and read’, though I get the impression that their words have fallen on the deaf ears of their starry-eyed onlookers. It’s common to come across puzzled young writers who bristle when you point out their scribblings are uninformed by literature.

So what makes us believe that we can get by without reading? If I were to hazard a guess, I would say it’s the wholesale debasing of the intellect. It struck me first when a college graduate attributed the intellect to ‘intellectuals’, as if to imply that only a small class of people should be called upon to read and think. The rest, if I were to extrapolate, remain to work, build businesses, design lawn and raise kids.

By contrast, our national preoccupation with news and politics continues unabated, with a 2010 Unesco survey revealing Pakistan to have the 10th highest circulation of newspapers in the world. I remember the horror I felt upon asking an ‘educationalist’ if she read, only to be told, “Yes, newspapers.”

The rise of ‘stupid’ may be a global phenomena when you consider how the blog post has replaced the 500-year-old essay form, but as with the economy and the security situation we have no choice but to counter these challenges for a better future.

Our nation desperately needs to be weaned off its appetite for information delivered by a new generation of hysterical illiterates, and put on a diet of knowledge. It simply takes a redressing of priorities and the realisation that we will make better statespersons, professionals, teachers, journalists and entrepreneurs if we are steeped in learning. Consider how liberating it would be to inform our decisions with knowledge, rather than stumbling through life using someone else’s ill-conceived convictions without a thought in our own heads. As citizens we would be less likely to be led down the garden path by politicians and commentators and more able to develop and articulate our needs.

It is imperative that every parent realises this duty and makes reading a priority for their children. The simple act of reading to a child gives rise to the first flushes of a love for literature, and must continue up to and beyond the point when a child learns to read. It should become instinctive for parents, on their first visit to a school, to demand to see a well-stocked library and ensure that it remains so.

This is not a unique sentiment and is probably best conveyed by the woefully underfunded National Book Foundation’s pledge on National Book Day:

“On the auspicious occasion of National Book Day, I promise with sincerity that in the future I will spend some part of my free time reading books. I will dedicate some part of my savings to buying books. On any occasion or moment of happiness, I will give preference to giving or receiving books as gifts. I will always celebrate the happiness of books and will consider books to be valuable items.” Ameen.

The writer is owner of The Last Word bookshop, co-founder of The Life’s Too Short Short Story Prize and a judge of the 2012 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.