Yahia Lababidi, If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE: Essays on Conscience and Witness (New Village Press, distributed by NYU Press, 2026).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Yahia Lababidi (YL): Following the October 7 attacks, I wrote the poetry collection, Palestine Wail, in the first months of the wildly disproportionate assault on Gaza. At that time, poems felt like a kind of seismograph registering the inner and outer tremors. They came unbidden and felt necessary. I hoped they might make some sort of difference. Nearly three years later, something seems to have dried up inside of me. I recalled Adorno’s line about poetry not being possible after Auschwitz as I found that I could not write poetry amid genocide.
What remained to me was prose. At least, I felt I should not turn away and should try to document the atrocities. When your home is on fire, you feel the heat halfway across the world. Distance does not collapse responsibility; if anything, it increases it. The essays here, whether addressing mass murder or mass starvation, kept returning to an older fundamental question: what is the role of a writer in times of political crises?
My grandmother’s key to our family’s lost ancestral home in Jerusalem sits somewhere in these pages, and so does my belief that memory, however battered, outlasts erasure. I wrote because silence, at this hour, felt like a kind of betrayal, and bearing witness, however imperfectly, still counts for something.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
YL: The book moves in three parts, though I experience them as one continuous act of paying attention. The first turns toward my inheritance as an Arab, Muslim, and writer with family ties to Palestine. My paternal grandfather helped direct Palestine Radio’s Arabic music section from Jerusalem until he died in 1943, working alongside the poet Ibrahim Tuqan; he also wrote the lyrics to “Ya Ritni Tir,” the song that first made Farid al-Atrash’s name as a singer. My grandmother, Rabiha Dajani, founded the women’s section of Al-Quds Radio and broadcast there until Jerusalem was lost in 1948. Years earlier, in those same streets, she had collected donations for Palestinian revolutionaries. After 1948, she rebuilt in Kuwait, founding Jeel Al Jadeed, among the country’s earliest private girls’ schools. They are part of an essential place I write from.
The second part reads Palestine through art and testimony: Taha Muhammad Ali’s compassion, Mohammed El-Kurd’s moral clarity, Omar El Akkad’s witness. Jewish writers I hold in real regard are present too: Amichai in conversation with Darwish, Peter Beinart confronting a nationalism dressed as faith, Aurora Levins Morales insisting that this time it is all of us or none. For me, solidarity with Palestine and fidelity to Jewish ethics come from the same root.
The third part turns more directly to power: the language used by British and American media, US labor and Zionism, Muslim American belonging, war and its aftermath. The book ends by returning to Viktor Frankl in the shadow of Gaza.
I must admit this was also a learning process and that writing the book was also an education for me. I sought to create space for voices more deeply versed than I am in history and politics, allowing their knowledge and analysis to enlarge my own understanding. Palestine, of course, is its immediate subject, yet the book also became a literary and spiritual meditation on suffering and what we owe one another.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
YL: Palestine Wail and If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE are two testaments written from the same wound, in different registers. The earlier poems were composed in a kind of trance, overcome with emotion. As I say in one poem, a desperate appeal to mercy: If you cannot say Genocide, say boneyard, say unmarked graves, say pity the children, say humanity under the rubble…
As time went on and I gathered my wits somehow, I tried to examine the importance of narrative and representation, and how the media helps shape foreign policy. In one essay here, I trace how hospitals became “compounds” in Western reporting and the vocabulary of neutrality helps obscure obvious bias. Where Wail tried to honor the dead, GENOCIDE seeks to hold the living to account. I think of them as elegy and indictment, two halves of a single prayer.
Another way of putting it is that poetry cries out and prose asks why the cry goes unheard. My remarkable paternal grandmother, to whom Palestine Wail is dedicated, is reintroduced as a fuller figure here. I present her within her wider cultural context as an activist and educator, as well as explore my family’s wider interfaith significance. The prophetic inspiration that guided my hand in Wail is here given a name: Moses stammering into eloquence and Muhammad trembling before revelation. The difference is, at this stage, I am asking what their example requires of us living through these soul-trying times.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
YL: I wrote for readers wide enough to hold more than one grief at once: Palestinian and Israeli, Jewish, Muslim, and otherwise. Anyone who is willing to let a Qur’anic verse and a line of Simone Weil sit in the same paragraph without feeling they had to choose.
I did not want to preach to an already-convinced choir. I would be especially grateful if the book reached people who sense that something is terribly wrong yet have not found the language for their unease.
What I hope for is to wear away the reflex that keeps us tribal even in mourning. Palestinians should not have to prove their humanity before they are permitted their anguish. Nor should anyone’s historical pain confer permission to inflict fresh agony upon another people.
If a reader closes this book a little less likely to look away and a little more likely to speak up on behalf of the wounded human family, I will have done my work.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
YL: I have another essay collection forthcoming, Wherever You Are: Essays from East to West, from Ayin Press in 2027. It is more broadly cultural and moves across art and the moral imagination, exploring artists and thinkers who have accompanied me over the decades.
There is a direct thread between that book and this one. After the initial publisher of Palestine Wail lost their nerve to publish my book, the Jewish Puerto Rican poet Aurora Levins Morales carried those poems into her own circle and helped them find readers, including among rabbis and Jewish friends. I remain indebted to her courage and am grateful to her for the introduction to Ayin Press, an independent Jewish publisher.
I am also working on a more personal project, Custodians of the Unseen, a devotional-literary book rooted in Qur’anic meditation and Sufi thought. It surveys the disciplines of the inner life as ways of preserving the soul amid the pressures of the modern world.
J: Your Palestinian family history is bound up with a Muslim custodianship of the Tomb of the Prophet David in Jerusalem. How has that inheritance shaped the way you understand Palestine, faith, and belonging?
YL: My grandmother came from the old Dajani family of Jerusalem. In our family memory, the Sufi sheikh Ahmad al-Dajani was called to Jerusalem by a waking vision of the Prophet David, whose tomb on Mount Zion had fallen into neglect and dispute. Sultan Suleiman is said to have entrusted Sheikh Ahmad and his descendants with its care, and for generations the Dajani Daoudis served as custodians of that shrine.
I grew up with this sense that the sacred is something entrusted to us. It cannot truly be possessed.
That inheritance also made the prophets feel closer. I was raised Muslim and taught, through the Qur’an, to honor Moses and Jesus alongside Muhammad. I continue to feel a kinship with the Jewish prophetic tradition, its moral intensity, and its mystical understanding that the world is sustained by hidden righteous souls.
This matters deeply to me, especially now, because religion is so easily conscripted into nationalism. Some of the Jewish voices that have sustained me during the destruction of Gaza are those willing to speak against what is being done in their name, precisely because they take their spiritual inheritance seriously.
The prophets I love belong to us all. They stand at the gates of cities and weep. They remind us that our highest allegiance is to conscience, and that whatever is genuinely sacred enlarges our sense of responsibility toward one another.
Excerpt from the book (from the book, Part 2: Literary Witness — Palestine: Voices and Visions. Essay 2.7, “Why Care About Gaza?”, pages 70 to 73)
Why Care About Gaza?
There is a gifted young Gazan poet and translator named Mohammed Abu Lebda. Still in his twenties, he first reached out to me around two years ago and, since then, has continued to send fragments from his shattered world. One evening, through WhatsApp, he shared videos of the ruins where his home once stood. A bomb had destroyed the house beside his family’s, forcing them to flee. Watching those images, I could hardly breathe . . .
After hearing Mohammed’s voice and witnessing the hardship surrounding him, I felt bound to tell his story. Each day brought a new fear for his life. Like so many others, he had lost a place to shelter and was weakened by illness made worse by deprivation, with no tent that kept out the rain, no privacy, and no steady access to medicine. One evening, around six o’clock, he sent a series of alarming messages. I was in my apartment in Florida, standing by the kitchen counter, transfixed by his voice notes and video footage. The contrast was unbearable: my still, secure space and his precarious existence. I stood in silence, torn between helplessness and responsibility. That same month, I wrote the poem “Why Care About Gaza?”
“Because you did not have to run out to hunt / for a spare tent in the middle of the night / chest-constricted and frantic / Because you and your family / were not obliterated / by the raining bombs / Demolishing your home / snatching your childhood memories / replacing them with the unholy stench / of burning human flesh.”
There were many details I could not bring myself to write, things that remain with me. I wanted, at the very least, to place side by side our security and their peril. I hoped the pairing might stir readers from numbness and awaken their mercy. How would it feel to live so, without cause or reprieve, while the world looked on for months, for years, for generations? I wanted readers of this poem to feel pity, compassion, and outrage, the same impulse that drove my book Palestine Wail, written mostly in real time as the genocide and ethnic cleansing were unfolding. Around 75,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Lancet Gaza mortality survey and international reporting, with civilians making up the vast majority of the dead. Nearly two million people, more than four-fifths of Gaza’s population, have been displaced. Whole neighborhoods lie in rubble: schools, hospitals, mosques, churches. This is the devastation Mohammed described when speaking of his family’s flight.
Numbers cannot contain this loss; they hide faces and extinguish stories. Each statistic masks a life, with its own laughter, its own remembered light.
One writer in Gaza, with whom I am in correspondence, once told me that his greatest fear was dying “as only a number,” vanishing even from the margins of the news. He writes in languages beyond Arabic, knowing this makes him more visible and therefore more vulnerable. Poets, journalists, and activists, he said, have already been killed with their families for having spoken at all. His deepest anxiety is for those who might be harmed because of him.
Bearing witness: The hardest line for me to write was the last one: “of burning human flesh.” I hesitated before setting it down, knowing its brutality. Yet to omit it would have been false. To speak of Gaza in softened language would be another kind of erasure. That is the smell now in the streets where children once played. Poetry cannot wash it away. Poems are small vessels; they cannot halt bombs or open borders, yet they preserve the trace of conscience. They say only, We saw, we heard, and we refused silence.
When I am asked why I write about Gaza, I recall Thomas Merton’s warning about the guilt of silence. To fall silent before cruelty is to side with it, for silence can wound as surely as speech can heal. I wrote from a place of rupture, between the safety of my life in the United States, whose power underwrites this war, and Mohammed’s uncertain existence amid the ruins.
That distance became overwhelming. It compelled me to write, to seek some coherence between comfort and catastrophe. Early in our correspondence, Mohammed sent words that haunted me, a mingling of gratitude and urgency. “I read your poems, and this is why I followed you here. Thank you, because you didn’t choose hell. I believe in what Dante Alighieri said in the Divine Comedy: The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in the times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” His raw testimony haunted me. Despair mixed with clarity.
If his lived reality demanded poetry from me, his own poems demanded that I help them reach the world. “For me,” he confided, “I can’t write what I’m living, because no words can describe it. I’m a survivor of five wars, and I never witnessed such fear. Death here lost its value, because death value depends on its rarity, and we are facing it every day. I believe that poetry can’t describe that.”
It was in this spirit that I was asked to write a foreword to a new zine dedicated to Mohammed Abu Lebda’s work, as a way to share his talent more widely and help raise support for his family. Poets are our conscience, holding us to our shared claims on one another. What poetry can offer is more enduring than news.
With Palestine under siege, in the midst of relentless destruction, Mohammed’s work reads as spiritual journalism. He offers a record of what we have become; for the living and the dead, his lines are a “Voice of the Lost Souls.” He is a witness to our shameful historical moment, holding up a mirror to reflect our crimes: collective punishment, occupation, and worse. The mystical aspect of his work arrests me most; it addresses our shared humanity, as does his questioning philosophical spirit. In his poem “To Be a Gazan,” this spiritual dimension speaks of miracles every Gazan is expected to perform: staying alive, while keeping their hearts free of hatred toward those who seek their annihilation. In achieving the impossible daily, every soul must be God incarnate, he suggests:
“Every soul in Gaza is a Christ, / bearing others’ sins, / judged for their shortcomings / without complaint, / performing miracles, / walking on water, / yet drowning on dry land . . .”
His metaphorical thinking lifts us beyond politics into something universal: human dignity. “To Be a Gazan” should be required reading in schools. To turn away from another’s humiliation is to injure our own humanity. The sorrow of his lines, their hard-won wisdom and intimacy with death, are why I continue to share his work wherever I can. I regard Mohammed as a necessary voice, one speaking what many cannot, revealing the wounds of our age, and bearing witness to what even history must one day confront.