Susan Abulhawa’s response to PEN America’s complicity with genocide

 

Read Susan Abulhawa’s scorching letter to the head of PEN America where she takes a blowtorch to the organization’s continued complicity with Israel's genocide in Gaza.

By Susan Abulhawa 

and Nancy Kricorian  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 organization’s tepid response to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. PEN America, which currently styles itself as the leading “free speech” organization in the United States, was founded in 1922 as an affiliate of PEN International, an association of writers “promoting literature and defending freedom of expression worldwide.”

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 America’s 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 America’s awards and many more pulled out of participating in PEN’s flagship World Voices Festival. This resulted in the cancellation of both the awards ceremony and the literary festival. After PEN America’s May 2024 Gala, outside of which WAWOG held a protest and a poetry reading, a formal boycott campaign was announced. In November 2024, the organization’s CEO finally stepped down. This met only the first demand of WAWOG’s boycott call, so the pressure campaign continued.

As it moved forward with this year’s awards season and its upcoming World Voices Festival, PEN put out a FAQ that seemed to be a point-by-point refutation of WAWOG’s boycott demands. One of the answers generated particular ire.

“We 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 genocide–or to contest it. We will defend the right of writers to speak their conscience without fear.”

This anodyne-seeming “free speech,” “institutional neutrality” 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 America’s 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.

We’d like to extend another invitation to connect with you one-on-one this time, should you be open to it. If you are interested, we’d 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. I’m sure I don’t need to explain the reasons, which should be self-evident. But if you need clarity, you can get a sense by examining PEN America’s response to the war in Ukraine, versus the genocide in Palestine. 

I can’t 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 can’t 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’m sure you’re 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—still to this day—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 “quadcopter” 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 you’ve had a year and a half watching the equivalent of SEVEN nuclear bombs being dropped on the most densely populated place in the world—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—mind-blowing, really, even if not surprising—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—mind-blowing, really, even if not surprising—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 didn’t copy them in full view because I don’t 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

https://mondoweiss.net/2025/04/susan-abulhawas-response-to-pen-americas-complicity-with-genocide/