“Silence is Not the Way”—Arab Writers Against Israel’s Genocide

Over the past 20 months, many western institutions, including writers organizations and international book festivals, have become centers of controversy, for failing to clearly call out the ethnic cleansing and starvation in Gaza, perpetrated by Israel. Should writers withdraw invitations or boycott — or should they use these platforms to speak out?

Jordan Elgrably

It’s rare that poets make the news, and even rarer when an Arab poet captures the media’s attention. Palestinian American poet Fady Joudah did so when he withdrew from this summer’s Edinburgh International Book Festival. Other notable exceptions during Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the starvation of its people are Refaat Alareer, Mosab Abu Toha and Mohammed El Kurd. Alareer, killed in an IDF airstrike, and Abu Toha, in exile in the US, have become widely read as a result of Israel’s attempt to silence Palestinian voices. El Kurd has been unstinting in his reporting from Sheikh Jarrah and in his recent book Perfect Victims.

Joudah was supposed to be one of numerous Palestinian, Arab and pro-Palestinian speakers who will make themselves heard in Edinburgh next month (the program is extensive and includes Israeli-British new historians Ilan Pappé and Avi Shlaim, Brian Cox, the activist-actress Vanessa Redgrave, the Palestinian Jerusalem poet Najwan Darwish, and human rights lawyer and author Raja Shehadeh). Joudah, an Austin-born and Texas-based physician, is a poet and translator from Arabic. Last year, he toured extensively for his collection of poetry  […] (reviewed in these pages by Eman Quotah). However, he drew the line when Palestinian novelist Randa Jarrar informed him that Edinburgh had also invited Edgar Keret and Anshel Pfeffer — two Israeli writers considered apologists for their government’s policies.

“The festival knew what it was doing when it invited Keret and Pfeffer. A lack of common decency is a genocide’s best friend in a cultural system that continues to endorse the genocide,” he wrote on X. “I will respect my living and my dead…”

Joudah has lost dozens of family members, friends and medical colleagues who were killed in Gaza by Israeli fire. Raja Shehadeh, the Ramallah-based writer and founder of the Palestinian human rights organization Al Haq, completely understands Joudah’s decision to withdraw from Edinburgh. He was distressed, he writes in an email to me, when he saw that Keret had been invited, because the latter had previously travelled to Gaza to entertain the Israeli troops there by reading to them from his books. “This kind of support for a genocidal war does not reflect well on the writer.”

The Israeli novelist has since withdrawn from the book festival, according to the Herald in Edinburgh. Asked about the reason for his withdrawal by the Scottish newspaper, Keret said, “With the mess my country is currently in I feel there are more urgent issues for me to talk about. It is frustrating but compared to what’s going on in my region it feels like discovering a pimple while having a heart attack.”

The British-Israeli writer who will now appear in Edinburgh, Anshel Pffeffer, covers Israel for the Economist. He is also a columnist and senior correspondent reporting on the IDF for Haaretz. In January 2024 he wrote in his newspaper that “Israel is not committing genocide,” and dismissed those who said it was.

But that alone doesn’t deter Shehadeh from participating in Edinburgh. “I don’t believe that the presence of an Israeli journalist should result in silencing the voices of the Palestinian writers and those writing on Gaza and Palestine who are due to participate in the Festival,” he says. “That is primarily why I have decided not to  follow suit and withdraw.” He and his co-author Penny Johnson will present their new book Forgotten: Searching for Palestine’s Hidden Places and Lost Memorials (reviewed in The Markaz Review by Gabriel Polley). Shehadeh and Johnson’s panel, entitled “What We Choose to Remember,” will take place on August 14.

Israel’s War on Gaza Continues Unabated but Many Refuse to Comply

Dozens upon dozens of poets, writers, journalists, doctors and educators have been murdered in Gaza by weapons deployed by Israel, manufactured by the US, the UK, France, Germany, and other arms suppliers. As many have observed, this is the first smart phone genocide; thousands of images and videos of bloodshed, of murdered women and children beamed all over the world on something as personal as an individual’s handheld device, demands a response.

Fady Joudah was slated to participate in a panel on August 16 with novelist Omar El Akkad, entitled “Not Looking Away.” Inasmuch as Joudah has attempted to articulate the unspeakable in the poetry that he composed after October 7th, 2023, El Akkad produced a compact hybrid memoir and critique of the western response to the genocide, in his latest book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Now neither Joudah nor Akkad will have that conversation together (the latter has also decided not to attend). There is, however, a passage in One Day that stays with this reader, where El Akkad writes: “What art does is meet us at the site of our insanity, our derangement, the plainly irrational mechanics of what it means to be human. There comes from this, then, at least a working definition of a soul: one’s capacity to sit with the mysteries of a thing that cannot in any rational way be understood — only felt, only moved through. And sometimes that thing is so grotesque — what we do to one another is so grotesque — that sitting with it feels an affront to the notion of art as a conduit of beauty.”

After his last novel, What Strange Paradise, El Akkad could not write fiction as the horror of Gaza began to unfold. He considered the hypocrisy of the west to be the ultimate betrayal. He has said that by cheerleading for, and supporting Israel’s war in Gaza, the US and its allies were sacrificing international humanitarian law on the altar of Israel’s “right to exist,” justifying its every move as an an act of self-defense against Hamas terrorists.

Yasmina Jraissati is a literary agent at the Raya Agency, which represents such prominent Arab authors as Samar Yazbek, the late Khaled Khalifa, and the estate of Elias Khoury. Jraissati, who wrote about reading and books for TMR’s 2025 summer literary issue, admits that dropping out of a book festival is “a very difficult decision, and ultimately a personal one. It depends on the author’s personal journey and experiences,” she explained in an email, “in how capable he or she feels they can clearly express their thoughts in a tense context, or when confronted. It also depends on peer pressure, and on so many other factors. Ultimately, in my opinion what matters is to make ourselves heard, and to make sure we are not misunderstood.”

The question is, should Arab authors withdraw to make a statement; should they rely on boycotting institutions and events that insist on including Israeli authors considered complicit with Israel’s policies?

Jraissati has mixed feelings. “Ultimately, I think withdrawing and boycotting is not sustainable. Why are we, I mean Arabs in general, or Palestinians in particular, always the ones to withdraw? Why don’t defenders of the IDF’s actions withdraw when Palestinian authors are invited? We have so many times given up platforms in the past, where we could have made ourselves heard.”

When in 2023, the Frankfurt Book Fair decided to cancel the prize ceremony for Adania Shibli’s Minor Details, Yasmina Jraissati opted to cancel her participation in the FBF entirely. “As a professional, I was not going to speak at a panel, or give interviews, and I needed to express my deep concern, disappointment, and disagreement. It was important to me, to make it clear that I disagreed, and that for me, FBF wasn’t business as usual. This allowed me to send a newsletter to my publishing network explaining my gesture, and the gesture itself expressed how grave this was for me. But it also resulted in loss for my authors who are all Arabs. It resulted in them losing their presence at the fair. And for a whole year, it felt like I was catching up on the lack of exposure that missing Frankfurt caused to my authors.

“Was it worth it? That year, within a couple of weeks of the start of the war, certainly the absence of many Arab and Asian publishers was felt throughout the fair. So perhaps it was. But if this keeps happening, as it does, and we keep boycotting, will people still take notice or care?”

At the end of the day, there is no blueprint for deciding to boycott, withdraw, or stay on and speak out. As Yasmina Jraissati says, “After 20 months of war, after so much unspeakable atrocity, silence is not the way. With the Palestinian narrative having the upper hand, for once, with large parts of the population in the world, it is more meaningful to take part, and be there to talk with the readers who came specifically to listen.”