As genocide continues in Gaza, the pro-Israel lobby in the US is stepping up its campaign against Palestinian cultural expression in the West.

 The Electronic Intifada

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As genocide continues in Gaza, the pro-Israel lobby in the US is stepping up its campaign against Palestinian cultural expression in the West.

Now, the Anti-Defamation League, one of the world’s most influential anti-Palestinian hate groups, is demanding a major publisher drop susan abulhawa, a leading Palestinian novelist.

Earlier in August, one of Simon & Schuster’s subsidiaries announced it would republish two of abulhawa’s novels. Since then the lobby has piled on the pressure to cancel the books, claiming the author has used “anti-Semitic rhetoric.”

Being a bestselling novelist has never stopped abulhawa from speaking out against the oppression of her people. She visited Gaza towards the start of the genocide, and has written essays and reports from on the ground for The Electronic Intifada.

Speaking to The Electronic Intifada on Thursday, abulhawa was defiant, angrily rejecting the Israel lobby’s claims.

“Only Zionism comes wrapped in some inherited claim to the world’s care and tenderness,” she said. “I refuse that. I reject it outright.”

“There was a time in my life when I had to be careful … it was this sort of internalized self censorship … that version of me is buried somewhere between [the 1982 Israeli-backed] Sabra and Shatila [massacre in Lebanon] and Nasr Hospital, where they let five infants die of starvation alone in the dark, crying and crying and crying.”

(Joe Piette/Flickr/Creative Commons, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Excerpt from "The ADL wants to cancel susan abulhawa” by @AsaWinstanley. Read the article at electronicintifada.net.

https://electronicintifada.net/.../adl-wants-cancel-susan...