Susan Abulhawaâs reply to PEN Americaâs complicity with genocide
Read Susan Abulhawaâs scorching letter to the head of PEN America where she takes a blowtorch to the organizationâs continued complicity with Israelâs genocide in Gaza.
by Susan Abulhawa and Nancy Kricorian, reposted from Mondoweiss, April 2, 2025
Starting in early 2024, a loose coalition of individual writers, ad hoc groups, and Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) started a pressure campaign against PEN America because of the organizationâs tepid response to Israelâs genocidal assault on Gaza. PEN America, which currently styles itself as the leading âfree speechâ organization in the United States, was founded in 1922 as an affiliate of PEN International, an association of writers âpromoting literature and defending freedom of expression worldwide.â
While PEN America had organized a street rally in support of Ukrainian writers imprisoned and killed by Russia and taken a delegation of Ukrainian writers to meet with Congress, it had not organized any public event on behalf of Palestinian writers who have been imprisoned and killed by Israel. PEN International, English PEN, and PEN South Africa called for a ceasefire in Gaza five full months before PEN America did, and PEN Americaâs call came only after over a thousand writers had signed a letter denouncing the organization for its inaction.
Soon thereafter writers withdrew their books from consideration for PEN Americaâs awards and many more pulled out of participating in PENâs flagship World Voices Festival. This resulted in the cancellation of both the awards ceremony and the literary festival. After PEN Americaâs May 2024 Gala, outside of which WAWOG held a protest and a poetry reading, a formal boycott campaign was announced. In November 2024, the organizationâs CEO finally stepped down. This met only the first demand of WAWOGâs boycott call, so the pressure campaign continued.
As it moved forward with this yearâs awards season and its upcoming World Voices Festival, PEN put out a FAQ that seemed to be a point-by-point refutation of WAWOGâs boycott demands. One of the answers generated particular ire.
âWe recognize that there are many in our community who would like PEN America to take a position on whether Israel has committed genocide. However, we believe the role that is most consistent with our mission is to ensure that writers are free to use the word genocideâor to contest it. We will defend the right of writers to speak their conscience without fear.â
This anodyne-seeming âfree speech,â âinstitutional neutralityâ position is an affront at a time when Palestinian writers, journalists, and artists are being targeted for assassination. If PEN is an organization that seeks to protect the rights of writers, one of those rights is the right not to be slaughtered by a genocidal regime.
PEN Americaâs new interim co-CEOs, in an attempt to bring disaffected writers back into the fold, recently began reaching out to Palestinian writers to invite them to private, closed-door, off-the-record meetings. Most of the writers declined the invitations. One other result of this outreach was the below exchange between PEN America and Palestinian novelist Susan Abulhawa last month.
March 13, 2025
Dear Susan,
We hope you will forgive us for reaching out to you once more. Over the past few months, we have heard from many writers, including Palestinian writers, who have shared their frustrations and disappointment with PEN America. Please know that we deeply respect your decision to not participate in the roundtable discussions.
Weâd like to extend another invitation to connect with you one-on-one this time, should you be open to it. If you are interested, weâd be more than happy to arrange a time to meet over Zoom.
Please know that we are fully committed to continuing our efforts to rebuild and strengthen trust with Palestinian writers, and we value the opportunity to engage in dialogue with you.
Sincerely,
XXXX
March 14, 2025
Dear XXXX,
Thank you for reaching out again.
Our community of Palestinian writers and intellectuals have no remaining faith or trust in PEN America at present. Iâm sure I donât need to explain the reasons, which should be self-evident. But if you need clarity, you can get a sense by examining PEN Americaâs response to the war in Ukraine, versus the genocide in Palestine.
I canât speak for others, but my conscience will not allow me to engage in private meetings and talks with an organization that cannot muster the moral courage to simply condemn the wholesale slaughter, starvation, and utter denigration and devastation of an entire society, particularly when said organization purports to uphold such lofty ideals as freedom and liberty to write.
I canât speak for others, but my conscience will not allow me to engage in private meetings and talks with an organization that cannot muster the moral courage to simply condemn the wholesale slaughter, starvation, and utter denigration and devastation of an entire society, particularly when said organization purports to uphold such lofty ideals as freedom and liberty to write.
Iâm sure youâre aware of the multitude of Palestinian writers, journalists, and artists who were killed in clear targeted assassinations, including my dear friend Refaat Alareer. In at least five instances, the Israeli military even admitted they had targeted them. Your persistent silence has been deafening. It is a betrayal of the most vulnerable people in the world at this hour, who should have been able to count on a minimal recognition of their humanity from such institutions as yours.
I go to sleep every night â still to this day â with the image of a little boy, maybe ten or younger, whose entire jaw was hanging off his face. He was still alive, and doctors could do very little for him. I saw the burned bodies of men, women, children, and elders strewn on dirty floors in barely functioning hospitals when I was in Gaza. I listened to young people talk about their lives and dreams being blown up when Israel intentionally detonated and razed Every. Single. University. I conducted writing workshops with aspiring writers, who produced short stories that should make the whole of humanity weep for itself. In fact, one of those writers just two days ago barely escaped a so-called âquadcopterâ drone exploding in her shelter. Her brother is in critical condition and is not likely to survive. But what is that to PEN America?
In what moral universe do you think I would ever speak with an organization that cannot bring itself to stand against such horror? What self-righteous chutzpah makes you think your request is sufficiently reasonable to write to me, not once but twice?
We are an indigenous people literally being erased from our lands and from existence. We are hunted everywhere we go if we dare to speak up for our families in Palestine. You have had nearly 80 years of witnessing a violent, anachronistic settler colonial, supremacist project to speak up. And now youâve had a year and a half watching the equivalent of SEVEN nuclear bombs being dropped on the most densely populated place in the world â a tiny strip of land with nowhere for people to run, no nutrition or clean water to consume, no walls or roofs for refuge. This is to say nothing of the carnage currently being waged in the West Bank, or that in Southern Lebanon, or the decimation of Syrian defenses and theft of vital Syrian land. It is to say nothing of the rape camps, like Sde Teiman, where our doctors, writers, and laborers have literally been raped to death, like Dr Adnan alBursh. It is to say nothing of the shocking methods of torture our people are enduring in Israeli gulags. It is to say nothing of the trauma of hundreds of thousands of children forced from their schools into the streets now without adequate clothes to forage for leaves to eat and dirty water to drink.
It is stunning â mind-blowing, really, even if not surprising â that you cannot fathom your responsibility to speak publicly against such purposeful and massive devastation of life. You are complicit in your silence, and we all hear that loud and clear.
It is stunning â mind-blowing, really, even if not surprising â that you cannot fathom your responsibility to speak publicly against such purposeful and massive devastation of life. You are complicit in your silence, and we all hear that loud and clear.
That said, every society has its careerist Uncle Toms; so you might find a few here and there to gather around your table, out of view, of course, lest you offend our tormentors, until they are needed as tokens to launder your tarnished image. I will not be one of them.
In full disclosure, I have blind copied several of my fellow Palestinian writers. I didnât copy them in full view because I donât have their permission.
Your fear of retribution from the powerful (or perhaps your ideological congruity with zionism) has made you myopic. But history will not be kind to you, for you are firmly on the side of power, greed, colonialism, expansionism, and the unleashing of the most sophisticated death and suppression technology on the most defenseless. But there is still time to do the right thing, and I hope you will.
Sincerely,
Susan Abulhawa
[Editorâs note: PEN Deputy CEO, Chief Legal Officer, and former Interim Chief Operating Officer Eileen Hershenov served most recently for five years as a Senior Vice President for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an Israel advocacy organization.]
Susan Abulhawa is novelist, poet, essayist, scientist, human and animal rights activist, and mother. Her debut novel, Mornings in Jenin, was translated into 30 languages and is considered a classic in Palestinian literature. Her most recent, Against the Loveless World, likewise received literary acclaim and was lauded as a âmasterpiece.â The number of books sold and linguistic reach of her books have made abulhawa the most widely read Palestinian author of all time. In 2001, abulhawa founded Playgrounds for Palestine, an international childrenâs NGO upholding the Right to Play for Palestinian children. She is also the Executive Director of the âPalestine Writes Literature Festival.â
Nancy Kricorian is the author of four novels about post-genocide Armenian diaspora experience, including Zabelle, which was translated into seven languages, was adapted as a play, and has been continuously in print since 1998. Her new novel, The Burning Heart of the World, about Armenians in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War, will be published in April 2025. Her essays and poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Guernica, Parnassus, Minnesota Review, The Mississippi Review, and other journals. She has taught at Barnard, Columbia, Yale, and New York University, and has been a mentor with We Are Not Numbers since 2015. She has been the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Gold Medal from the Writers Union of Armenia, and the Anahid Literary Award, among other honors.
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