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If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE: Essays on Conscience and Witness
Yahia Lababidi wrote the 47 essays for If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE between 2023 and 2026 in response to the ongoing devastation in Gaza, placing this urgent question at its center. These essays are acts of witness shaped by grief, memory, and a refusal to turn away from human suffering.
This is a book of conscience under pressure, written from an Arab American perspective shaped by exile and moral inquiry. It is the work of a poet who could no longer write poems and who feared for his soul if he remained silent. Urgent, searching, and unflinching, If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE asks what fidelity to truth demands when language itself is under siege.
Moving between personal narrative, literary reflection, and cultural critique, the essays consider what it means to speak honestly when the language needed to name violence is contested or constrained. Lababidi reflects on how storytelling can hold experience against erasure, and how public discourse shapes what is seen, acknowledged, or denied. The book remains grounded in the ethical stakes of witnessing and the responsibility of language in moments of collective crisis.
This is a book of conscience under pressure, written from an Arab American perspective shaped by exile and moral inquiry. It is the work of a poet who could no longer write poems and who feared for his soul if he remained silent. Urgent, searching, and unflinching, If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE asks what fidelity to truth demands when language itself is under siege.
Moving between personal narrative, literary reflection, and cultural critique, the essays consider what it means to speak honestly when the language needed to name violence is contested or constrained. Lababidi reflects on how storytelling can hold experience against erasure, and how public discourse shapes what is seen, acknowledged, or denied. The book remains grounded in the ethical stakes of witnessing and the responsibility of language in moments of collective crisis.
256 pages, Hardcover
Published October 6, 2026
About the author
Yahia Lababidi
27 books104 followersYahia Lababidi is an Arab-American writer of Palestinian heritage and the author of sixteen books of poetry, aphorisms, essays, and conversations. His new book, If You Cannot Say Genocide (New Village Press, 2026) received *a starred review from Publishers Weekly* and was named one of "10 Essential Books to Read on Gaza and Israel’s Genocide" by The New Arab. Another collection, Wherever You Are: Essays from East to West is forthcoming (Ayin Press/Aora Books, 2027).
Recent books include On the Contrary: Wilde and Nietzsche (Fomite Press, 2025), a playful meditation on two kindred contrarians, and What Remains to Be Said (Wild Goose Publications, 2025), a gathering of aphorisms written across three decades.
Lababidi’s writing has appeared in Liberties, Salmagundi, The Threepenny Review, Sojourners, World Literature Today, The New Arab, and DAWN, and has been featured on PBS NewsHour, NPR, and On Being. A five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, he has spoken at Oxford University and served as a juror for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund.
His work has been translated into numerous languages and read at literary festivals across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and India.
Recent books include On the Contrary: Wilde and Nietzsche (Fomite Press, 2025), a playful meditation on two kindred contrarians, and What Remains to Be Said (Wild Goose Publications, 2025), a gathering of aphorisms written across three decades.
Lababidi’s writing has appeared in Liberties, Salmagundi, The Threepenny Review, Sojourners, World Literature Today, The New Arab, and DAWN, and has been featured on PBS NewsHour, NPR, and On Being. A five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, he has spoken at Oxford University and served as a juror for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund.
His work has been translated into numerous languages and read at literary festivals across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and India.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 7, 2026
Thank you to New Village Press and NetGalley for the ARC.
Yahia Lababidi writes this collection from the particular position of a Palestinian-descended Arab American poet. The result is a series of essays written between 2023 and 2026 that move between Palestine, literature, theology, politics, memory, journalism, art, and the moral failures that become visible when mass suffering happens in front of us and people still find ways to look away. The premise of the book is probably best captured by Lababidi himself: “Poetry cries out. Prose asks why the cry goes unheard.”
Lababidi is a very, very good writer. His background as a poet is obvious in the prose, particularly in the passages where he writes about memory, faith, exile, art, and the people whose words have become part of the Palestinian literary tradition. Some of the strongest essays for me were the ones concerned with language itself, especially what happens when words are deliberately softened until they can no longer adequately describe the thing happening in front of us. The title is an argument in itself. If you cannot say genocide, then what /can/ you say? If the language available to describe suffering is already compromised by euphemism, political convenience, institutional cowardice, or media framing, then naming becomes part of witnessing.
That idea stayed with me because I think language has always been one of the central battlegrounds of Palestine. Words like “conflict,” “war,” “self-defense,” “security,” “terrorism,” “dispute,” and even “peace” can carry entire political frameworks inside them. Lababidi understands that words do not merely describe reality, but also help construct the reality that other people are permitted to see. One of the most affecting ideas throughout the book is that when language becomes detached from moral reality, people become much more capable of tolerating things they might otherwise find unbearable. The question of what we call violence therefore becomes a question of what kinds of violence we are willing to recognize.
The essays about theology were another major highlight for me. As a Filipino, this part hit especially hard. I come from a country whose history is inseparable from Christianity, colonialism, and the political uses of religion, and I live in a society where biblical language is still regularly brought into conversations about war, nationhood, morality, and who supposedly has God’s blessing. It is genuinely harrowing to watch Christian institutions and individual Christians try to justify what Palestinians are experiencing by reaching for their favorite Bible verses and theological arguments. So when Lababidi writes about faith being used to excuse cruelty, or about what happens when religion becomes an instrument of power, I found myself reading with a very particular kind of recognition.
His discussion of Reverend Munther Isaac and the Palestinian Christian response to Gaza was especially powerful to me. The line “In Gaza today, God is under the rubble” is devastating precisely because it forces Christianity to confront its own theology. If Christians believe that Christ is found among the suffering, then what does it mean to look at Palestinian children beneath rubble and still somehow imagine God standing on the side of the people dropping the bombs? Lababidi’s engagement with this question reminded me why religious criticism matters so much in conversations about Palestine. It is not enough to point out that religion is being misused. We also have to ask what kind of faith allows that misuse to happen in the first place.
And perhaps that is why the book felt particularly relevant to me as a Filipino. We have our own complicated relationship with empire, colonization, Christianity, American power, and the language used to make domination sound benevolent. The Philippines has been colonized, occupied, militarized, economically influenced, culturally shaped, and continually pulled into the geopolitical interests of larger powers. We also continue to exist within systems of neocolonial influence, including from the United States, China, and Israel. Reading this book from here makes the question of conscience feel much less abstract. What does it mean to watch another people experience the kind of structural violence that should be painfully recognizable to those of us whose own history has been shaped by foreign power?
At the same time, I have to be honest about one thing that complicated my reading: some of the essays spend considerable time emphasizing Israeli and Jewish voices that oppose their government’s actions or advocate for coexistence. I understand why Lababidi does this. I actually think it is important to acknowledge that there are Israelis, Jewish writers, activists, religious figures, and ordinary people who oppose Zionism or oppose the actions of the Israeli government, including young Israelis who have rejected military conscription and people who have publicly said “not in our name.” Those people exist, and their resistance matters. Seeing Israelis reject what their government is doing can genuinely give me hope.
But I am not entirely convinced that this is what I personally needed highlighted in a book about Gaza right now. I can believe that Israeli dissent is important while also believing that Palestinian voices should occupy the center of a book about Palestinian genocide. For me, there is a difference between acknowledging that some Israelis oppose the violence and giving that perspective substantial literary space in a collection that I came into specifically looking for Palestinian-centered analysis and testimony. As a non-Palestinian reader who is very firmly pro-Palestine and anti-Zionist, I wanted more of the latter.
This is also where I found Shay’s review useful. Shay points out some of the book’s limitations around its treatment of Jewish intellectual history and, more importantly, its tendency to soften or pacify the political positions of Palestinian writers and activists. I honestly did not enter the book thinking about those questions in enough depth. Maybe that is partly my own lack of familiarity with some of the writers and intellectual traditions being discussed. I recognized names like Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, and Mohammed El-Kurd, but I did not have the same depth of knowledge about every person or tradition Lababidi was placing beside them. Reading Shay’s critique afterward made me reconsider some of what I had taken at face value while reading.
And I think that is worth mentioning for anyone considering this book. I came into it somewhat bare, politically certain but academically less equipped to assess every literary and intellectual genealogy being presented. I know where I stand on Palestine, I want Palestine to be free. I believe Palestinians deserve liberation, dignity, safety, self-determination, and the right to exist without occupation and apartheid. I oppose Zionism as a political ideology that has enabled Palestinian dispossession and I do not believe Palestinian liberation should have to be made palatable through endless appeals to Israeli comfort. But having a clear political position does not automatically mean I have enough knowledge to evaluate every scholarly argument in a book like this. Shay’s review reminded me of that, and I think that is a useful part of reading politically too: being willing to have your own reading complicated by someone who noticed something you did not.
Because of that, I think this book may work particularly well for readers who feel a deep ethical responsibility toward confronting systemic injustice and who already believe that speaking truth to power is part of what literature can do. I also think it could be useful for readers who are still trying to understand why language, storytelling, religion, and cultural memory matter so much in political struggles. For someone who is completely new to Palestine, though, I would probably read this alongside more explicitly Palestinian-centered histories, memoirs, criticism, and literature rather than treating Lababidi’s collection as a complete account of the issue.
Still, there are passages here that I found genuinely beautiful. Lababidi’s reflections on Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish, Refaat Alareer, Palestinian exile, and the role of the artist reminded me of something I have been thinking about a lot lately: what does art actually owe the world when the world is falling apart? His answer seems to be that art cannot stop a bomb, but it can stop the bomb from becoming the only story. It can preserve a name, preserve a memory, it can make a person who has been reduced to a statistic become human again.
That reminded me strongly of Songs My Mother Taught Me by Saul Williams, another ARC I read recently. Williams argues that artists have a responsibility to take sides because art is never as politically innocent as we like to pretend it is. Lababidi arrives at a similar place from a different direction. Both books made me think about the artist not simply as someone who produces beautiful things, but as someone who participates in shaping what other people are capable of imagining. If you write about a people being erased, you are participating in the question of whether the world remembers them. If you photograph a war, you are deciding which image becomes part of collective memory. If you write a poem about someone who died, you are refusing to let their entire existence be reduced to the circumstances of their death.
That is probably why the strongest parts of this collection are the ones where Lababidi talks about Palestinian artists. Refaat Alareer appears not merely as a murdered poet, but as someone whose work continues to travel after his death. Ghassan Kanafani becomes an example of what it means for literature and political commitment to be inseparable. Mahmoud Darwish becomes part of a much larger tradition of writing as an attempt to keep home alive after displacement. Mohammed El-Kurd’s work enters the conversation as a reminder that Palestinians should not have to perform the perfect kind of suffering in order to deserve sympathy.
There is also something I found interesting about Lababidi’s insistence on ordinary human decency. I understand why he keeps returning to it, although I sometimes found myself wanting the book to push harder into structures rather than individual morality. His encounters with ordinary people, immigrants, religious communities, artists, strangers, and people across political divides are meant to show that compassion still exists even while governments commit atrocities. I think that is true, and I appreciate the reminder. At the same time, compassion between individuals cannot substitute for political action. A kind stranger can make the world feel more bearable, but kindness alone does not dismantle occupation, apartheid, militarization, or the structures that make mass violence possible. The book is at its best when it holds those two truths together rather than allowing one to replace the other.
And then there is the question at the heart of the entire collection: what does it mean to remain a human being while watching other human beings suffer?
I kept thinking about the line from the book that asks, in essence, what we sanctify with our silence. I think that is the question that stayed with me most. We talk so much about political allegiance, religion, nationality, identity, and ideology, but beneath all of those things is the much more uncomfortable question of what we are willing to tolerate when the victims do not belong to us. What happens to our morality when the dead have a different passport? What happens to our compassion when the suffering person speaks another language, belongs to another religion, lives somewhere we have never visited, or has been turned into a political abstraction?
I think If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE is worth reading, especially if you are interested in the relationship between literature, political conscience, religion, and the ethics of witnessing. I would just recommend going into it knowing that this is not necessarily the singularly Palestinian-centered analysis I initially hoped it would be. For me, that distinction matters. I wanted Palestine at the center, and there were moments when I felt the book’s universalist approach pulled attention elsewhere.
Still, I finished it wanting to read more Palestinian writers, more Palestinian history, more political theory, more poetry, more theology, and more of the people whose work Lababidi brought into the conversation. I think that is one of the better things a book can do.
Yahia Lababidi writes this collection from the particular position of a Palestinian-descended Arab American poet. The result is a series of essays written between 2023 and 2026 that move between Palestine, literature, theology, politics, memory, journalism, art, and the moral failures that become visible when mass suffering happens in front of us and people still find ways to look away. The premise of the book is probably best captured by Lababidi himself: “Poetry cries out. Prose asks why the cry goes unheard.”
Lababidi is a very, very good writer. His background as a poet is obvious in the prose, particularly in the passages where he writes about memory, faith, exile, art, and the people whose words have become part of the Palestinian literary tradition. Some of the strongest essays for me were the ones concerned with language itself, especially what happens when words are deliberately softened until they can no longer adequately describe the thing happening in front of us. The title is an argument in itself. If you cannot say genocide, then what /can/ you say? If the language available to describe suffering is already compromised by euphemism, political convenience, institutional cowardice, or media framing, then naming becomes part of witnessing.
That idea stayed with me because I think language has always been one of the central battlegrounds of Palestine. Words like “conflict,” “war,” “self-defense,” “security,” “terrorism,” “dispute,” and even “peace” can carry entire political frameworks inside them. Lababidi understands that words do not merely describe reality, but also help construct the reality that other people are permitted to see. One of the most affecting ideas throughout the book is that when language becomes detached from moral reality, people become much more capable of tolerating things they might otherwise find unbearable. The question of what we call violence therefore becomes a question of what kinds of violence we are willing to recognize.
The essays about theology were another major highlight for me. As a Filipino, this part hit especially hard. I come from a country whose history is inseparable from Christianity, colonialism, and the political uses of religion, and I live in a society where biblical language is still regularly brought into conversations about war, nationhood, morality, and who supposedly has God’s blessing. It is genuinely harrowing to watch Christian institutions and individual Christians try to justify what Palestinians are experiencing by reaching for their favorite Bible verses and theological arguments. So when Lababidi writes about faith being used to excuse cruelty, or about what happens when religion becomes an instrument of power, I found myself reading with a very particular kind of recognition.
His discussion of Reverend Munther Isaac and the Palestinian Christian response to Gaza was especially powerful to me. The line “In Gaza today, God is under the rubble” is devastating precisely because it forces Christianity to confront its own theology. If Christians believe that Christ is found among the suffering, then what does it mean to look at Palestinian children beneath rubble and still somehow imagine God standing on the side of the people dropping the bombs? Lababidi’s engagement with this question reminded me why religious criticism matters so much in conversations about Palestine. It is not enough to point out that religion is being misused. We also have to ask what kind of faith allows that misuse to happen in the first place.
And perhaps that is why the book felt particularly relevant to me as a Filipino. We have our own complicated relationship with empire, colonization, Christianity, American power, and the language used to make domination sound benevolent. The Philippines has been colonized, occupied, militarized, economically influenced, culturally shaped, and continually pulled into the geopolitical interests of larger powers. We also continue to exist within systems of neocolonial influence, including from the United States, China, and Israel. Reading this book from here makes the question of conscience feel much less abstract. What does it mean to watch another people experience the kind of structural violence that should be painfully recognizable to those of us whose own history has been shaped by foreign power?
At the same time, I have to be honest about one thing that complicated my reading: some of the essays spend considerable time emphasizing Israeli and Jewish voices that oppose their government’s actions or advocate for coexistence. I understand why Lababidi does this. I actually think it is important to acknowledge that there are Israelis, Jewish writers, activists, religious figures, and ordinary people who oppose Zionism or oppose the actions of the Israeli government, including young Israelis who have rejected military conscription and people who have publicly said “not in our name.” Those people exist, and their resistance matters. Seeing Israelis reject what their government is doing can genuinely give me hope.
But I am not entirely convinced that this is what I personally needed highlighted in a book about Gaza right now. I can believe that Israeli dissent is important while also believing that Palestinian voices should occupy the center of a book about Palestinian genocide. For me, there is a difference between acknowledging that some Israelis oppose the violence and giving that perspective substantial literary space in a collection that I came into specifically looking for Palestinian-centered analysis and testimony. As a non-Palestinian reader who is very firmly pro-Palestine and anti-Zionist, I wanted more of the latter.
This is also where I found Shay’s review useful. Shay points out some of the book’s limitations around its treatment of Jewish intellectual history and, more importantly, its tendency to soften or pacify the political positions of Palestinian writers and activists. I honestly did not enter the book thinking about those questions in enough depth. Maybe that is partly my own lack of familiarity with some of the writers and intellectual traditions being discussed. I recognized names like Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, and Mohammed El-Kurd, but I did not have the same depth of knowledge about every person or tradition Lababidi was placing beside them. Reading Shay’s critique afterward made me reconsider some of what I had taken at face value while reading.
And I think that is worth mentioning for anyone considering this book. I came into it somewhat bare, politically certain but academically less equipped to assess every literary and intellectual genealogy being presented. I know where I stand on Palestine, I want Palestine to be free. I believe Palestinians deserve liberation, dignity, safety, self-determination, and the right to exist without occupation and apartheid. I oppose Zionism as a political ideology that has enabled Palestinian dispossession and I do not believe Palestinian liberation should have to be made palatable through endless appeals to Israeli comfort. But having a clear political position does not automatically mean I have enough knowledge to evaluate every scholarly argument in a book like this. Shay’s review reminded me of that, and I think that is a useful part of reading politically too: being willing to have your own reading complicated by someone who noticed something you did not.
Because of that, I think this book may work particularly well for readers who feel a deep ethical responsibility toward confronting systemic injustice and who already believe that speaking truth to power is part of what literature can do. I also think it could be useful for readers who are still trying to understand why language, storytelling, religion, and cultural memory matter so much in political struggles. For someone who is completely new to Palestine, though, I would probably read this alongside more explicitly Palestinian-centered histories, memoirs, criticism, and literature rather than treating Lababidi’s collection as a complete account of the issue.
Still, there are passages here that I found genuinely beautiful. Lababidi’s reflections on Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish, Refaat Alareer, Palestinian exile, and the role of the artist reminded me of something I have been thinking about a lot lately: what does art actually owe the world when the world is falling apart? His answer seems to be that art cannot stop a bomb, but it can stop the bomb from becoming the only story. It can preserve a name, preserve a memory, it can make a person who has been reduced to a statistic become human again.
That reminded me strongly of Songs My Mother Taught Me by Saul Williams, another ARC I read recently. Williams argues that artists have a responsibility to take sides because art is never as politically innocent as we like to pretend it is. Lababidi arrives at a similar place from a different direction. Both books made me think about the artist not simply as someone who produces beautiful things, but as someone who participates in shaping what other people are capable of imagining. If you write about a people being erased, you are participating in the question of whether the world remembers them. If you photograph a war, you are deciding which image becomes part of collective memory. If you write a poem about someone who died, you are refusing to let their entire existence be reduced to the circumstances of their death.
That is probably why the strongest parts of this collection are the ones where Lababidi talks about Palestinian artists. Refaat Alareer appears not merely as a murdered poet, but as someone whose work continues to travel after his death. Ghassan Kanafani becomes an example of what it means for literature and political commitment to be inseparable. Mahmoud Darwish becomes part of a much larger tradition of writing as an attempt to keep home alive after displacement. Mohammed El-Kurd’s work enters the conversation as a reminder that Palestinians should not have to perform the perfect kind of suffering in order to deserve sympathy.
There is also something I found interesting about Lababidi’s insistence on ordinary human decency. I understand why he keeps returning to it, although I sometimes found myself wanting the book to push harder into structures rather than individual morality. His encounters with ordinary people, immigrants, religious communities, artists, strangers, and people across political divides are meant to show that compassion still exists even while governments commit atrocities. I think that is true, and I appreciate the reminder. At the same time, compassion between individuals cannot substitute for political action. A kind stranger can make the world feel more bearable, but kindness alone does not dismantle occupation, apartheid, militarization, or the structures that make mass violence possible. The book is at its best when it holds those two truths together rather than allowing one to replace the other.
And then there is the question at the heart of the entire collection: what does it mean to remain a human being while watching other human beings suffer?
I kept thinking about the line from the book that asks, in essence, what we sanctify with our silence. I think that is the question that stayed with me most. We talk so much about political allegiance, religion, nationality, identity, and ideology, but beneath all of those things is the much more uncomfortable question of what we are willing to tolerate when the victims do not belong to us. What happens to our morality when the dead have a different passport? What happens to our compassion when the suffering person speaks another language, belongs to another religion, lives somewhere we have never visited, or has been turned into a political abstraction?
I think If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE is worth reading, especially if you are interested in the relationship between literature, political conscience, religion, and the ethics of witnessing. I would just recommend going into it knowing that this is not necessarily the singularly Palestinian-centered analysis I initially hoped it would be. For me, that distinction matters. I wanted Palestine at the center, and there were moments when I felt the book’s universalist approach pulled attention elsewhere.
Still, I finished it wanting to read more Palestinian writers, more Palestinian history, more political theory, more poetry, more theology, and more of the people whose work Lababidi brought into the conversation. I think that is one of the better things a book can do.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
This is a tough read which I found took me longer to read as I chose to explore some of the other works (pictures, poems etc) which were referenced and discussed in the book. I found that looking at these helped me better understand the points the author was making and also provoked my own thinkjng further.
The topic of Gaza is uncomfortable and this book made me feel increasingly unsettled and concerned about our ability to tell events in a manner to suit our own consciences. The author demonstrates the inflexibility of numerous governments in continuing to support Israel in spite of their actions in Gaza and other countries. The author uses a variety of sources to raise questions about ethics and demonstrates the importance of the Arts to draw attention and to accurately report the situation in Gaza. It feels as though the use of poetry, essays and stories can help foster a collective conscience. The book is well structured with "Personal Witness", "Literary Witness" and "Political Witness" thereby enabling exploration at both the micro and macro level. It also definitely explores the importance of personal conscience in a world of denial whether intentionally or unintentionally.
I have not read "Palestine Wail" by the author but this feels like it would be appropriate as it is referenced often within this book.
The subtitle of this book "Essays on Conscience and Witness" is entirely what this book is about and it definitely left me with searching questions of myself and others in this respect.
I was gifted a complimentary copy of this book in return for an objective review.
The topic of Gaza is uncomfortable and this book made me feel increasingly unsettled and concerned about our ability to tell events in a manner to suit our own consciences. The author demonstrates the inflexibility of numerous governments in continuing to support Israel in spite of their actions in Gaza and other countries. The author uses a variety of sources to raise questions about ethics and demonstrates the importance of the Arts to draw attention and to accurately report the situation in Gaza. It feels as though the use of poetry, essays and stories can help foster a collective conscience. The book is well structured with "Personal Witness", "Literary Witness" and "Political Witness" thereby enabling exploration at both the micro and macro level. It also definitely explores the importance of personal conscience in a world of denial whether intentionally or unintentionally.
I have not read "Palestine Wail" by the author but this feels like it would be appropriate as it is referenced often within this book.
The subtitle of this book "Essays on Conscience and Witness" is entirely what this book is about and it definitely left me with searching questions of myself and others in this respect.
I was gifted a complimentary copy of this book in return for an objective review.
Review of advance copy received from Author
As a descendant of Palestinian refugees and a successful poet, Lababidi is well-qualified to speak and shed light on the unfolding horrors of war in Gaza. But in writing this book, he seeks to build a coalition of artists and humanitarians who can span the divisions of nationality or religion. He aims to draw on shared traditions and to form coalitions—for example his collaboration on a song with the Israeli band the Hazelnuts, or the collaboration between Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. He highlights the shared concerns and insights of Muslim and Jewish poets or intellectuals such as Ghassan Kanafani, Yehuda Amichai, Omar El Akkad, Aurora Levins Morales, Refaat Alareer, Rachel Tzvia Back, Mahmoud Darwish, Peter Beinart, Mohammad El-Kurd, Simone Weil, Muhammed Abu Labda, Edward Said, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Viktor Frankl, and the Christian Rev. Munther Isaac, minister for the Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem, and author of Christ in the Rubble: Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza.
Let me give a few quotes from the book that suggest its power to link minds, affirm humanity, and overcome hatred.
“Poetry cannot stop bombs, yet it can keep a soul from consenting to murder. Poetry can train attention and protect tenderness. Amid mass numbness, attention and tenderness are forms of courage."
“… the deepest indictment of fanaticism is not merely that it kills. It kills while praying. It kills while claiming to defend the sacred. It kills while speaking the language of purification. That is why it wounds more than bodies. It wounds the moral imagination. It teaches ordinary people to view brutality as redemptive and mercy as weakness.”
“To address centuries of strife, we must ask ourselves if we are willing now to remember what faith at its most essential requires: that we answer cruelty with conscience. That we cease asking who is worthy of mercy, and begin asking how we might be worthy of mercy ourselves.”
Let me give a few quotes from the book that suggest its power to link minds, affirm humanity, and overcome hatred.
“Poetry cannot stop bombs, yet it can keep a soul from consenting to murder. Poetry can train attention and protect tenderness. Amid mass numbness, attention and tenderness are forms of courage."
“… the deepest indictment of fanaticism is not merely that it kills. It kills while praying. It kills while claiming to defend the sacred. It kills while speaking the language of purification. That is why it wounds more than bodies. It wounds the moral imagination. It teaches ordinary people to view brutality as redemptive and mercy as weakness.”
“To address centuries of strife, we must ask ourselves if we are willing now to remember what faith at its most essential requires: that we answer cruelty with conscience. That we cease asking who is worthy of mercy, and begin asking how we might be worthy of mercy ourselves.”
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
ARC from NetGalley
Lababidi's roots in both poetry and the UN show in his prose style; fierce, unflinching, and incisive, it is impossible to not be moved by his writing. The strongest essays in this collection are those that focus on theology and language; his masterful weaving together of various theological traditions and teachings is a compelling case for the power that faith can hold in times of such great moral reckoning. Nevertheless, the moral force of the book is weakened by shoddy Jewish intellectual history (which I suspect is less Lababidi's fault than that of Peter Beinart, who seems to be a friend and likely the source of Lababidi's Jewish reading list) and by a disappointing defanging of Palestinian activists. The intellectual genealogy of Jewish anti-Zionism is not to be found in Ahad Ha'am, Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, and Peter Beinart, all of whom are/were Zionists. More important, however, was the pacification of the views of authors like Mohammed El-Kurd and Ghassan Kanafani, whose approaches to politics, literature, and resistance are both essential to their writing and sharply divergent from Lababidi's argument for coexistence and universalist poetry even at the expense of initiatives like BDS. Those who draw hard lines with regards to issues like normalization and boycotts, as well as those who seek books focused less on Jewish/Israeli perspectives, may want to steer clear, or at least skip some of the essays.
Lababidi's roots in both poetry and the UN show in his prose style; fierce, unflinching, and incisive, it is impossible to not be moved by his writing. The strongest essays in this collection are those that focus on theology and language; his masterful weaving together of various theological traditions and teachings is a compelling case for the power that faith can hold in times of such great moral reckoning. Nevertheless, the moral force of the book is weakened by shoddy Jewish intellectual history (which I suspect is less Lababidi's fault than that of Peter Beinart, who seems to be a friend and likely the source of Lababidi's Jewish reading list) and by a disappointing defanging of Palestinian activists. The intellectual genealogy of Jewish anti-Zionism is not to be found in Ahad Ha'am, Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, and Peter Beinart, all of whom are/were Zionists. More important, however, was the pacification of the views of authors like Mohammed El-Kurd and Ghassan Kanafani, whose approaches to politics, literature, and resistance are both essential to their writing and sharply divergent from Lababidi's argument for coexistence and universalist poetry even at the expense of initiatives like BDS. Those who draw hard lines with regards to issues like normalization and boycotts, as well as those who seek books focused less on Jewish/Israeli perspectives, may want to steer clear, or at least skip some of the essays.
October 20, 2026
Yahia Lababidi can WRITE. Holy wow. This is a stunning essay collection on Palestine and its diasporic communities, with reflections on the region's history, Palestinian writers and artists, and the role of art during a genocide. The essay on the Stanford prison experiment particularly stuck with me. Some of Lababidi's sentences are so stunning that I had to stop and reread them several times. I'll be recommending this book far and wide.
Read
September 14, 2026Having received an ARC from the author, I viewed reading the book as a practice in facing what can feel unfaceable. With poetic moments, the essays turn to other authors, art, analysis, faith and more in an effort to do and say something to resist the horrors of the genocide in Gaza.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews