WRITERS AGAINST THE WAR ON GAZA

Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) is a coalition of media, cultural, and academic workers who are committed to the horizon of liberation for the Palestinian people. We organize against Zionism and American militarism from within the imperial core.

Join us in building a revolutionary cultural front.

Our Principles of Unity

The Right to Resist

WAWOG holds a political line in support of the Palestinian right to armed resistance as part of the national liberation struggle. We have and will continue to produce and share political education materials on the many heroes of the resistance, including Souha Bechara, Basil al-Araj, Georges Abdallah. We decry the state repression of pro-Palestinian speech that is brought to bear most heavily on those who support the right of the Palestinian people—the right of all occupied peoples—to resist occupation and oppression.

The Right to Return

We affirm the revolutionary aspirations for a unified Palestinian people on unified Palestinian lands. We know that the Nakba never ended. We also know that the Nakba will end. It will end with the return of the Palestinian people to their homes, their land, their homeland. The right of return for all Palestinian refugees will be secured through the complete dismantling of “Israel.”

The Moral Necessity of BDS

Divestment from the Zionist project is key to bringing about its downfall. Since October 2023, WAWOG has helped to secure more that 200 organizational commitments to adhere to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, a significant material win for efforts to end the normalization of Zionism in our cultural spaces. We maintain that boycott and divestment play key roles in materially and culturally isolating and delegitimizing “Israel.”

Multiplicity of Tactics

WAWOG endorses a multiplicity of tactics, from picketing to civil disobedience to event disruption to higher-risk action. We reject the “outside agitator” narrative that seeks to divide and undermine those struggling together for liberation. As Diane DiPrima wrote, “No one way works, it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down.”

Movement Building

Our efforts to build a revolutionary cultural front require the participation of workers and organizers spanning many sector formations, particularly—but not exclusively—in the sectors of media, academia, and the arts. We work alongside and/or in service to several Palestinian-led organizations, as well as with anti-gentrification activists and abolitionists in their linked struggles. We stand firmly with the movement to Stop Cop City and the militant work of the forest defenders. Though we believe in organization and in coalition-building, we also endorse autonomous action against the police, the state, the empire.

Prisoner’s Liberation

Prisoner’s liberation is a central demand of the Palestinian revolutionary movement, shared by all factions of the regional resistance as well as the masses in exile and diaspora. Opposition to the carceral order and its racist logic is key to the longstanding solidarity between Black people and Palestinians. From printing the works of incarcerated rebels such as Ahmed Sa'adat and Khalida Jarrar, to screening the film Fedayeen as part of the campaign to free the Lebanese Marxist Georges Abdallah to supporting incarcerated writers exploited by PEN America. We endeavor towards these Black and Palestinian traditions of struggle, refusal, resistance and abolition, which is to say the world which we are attempting to co-author is a world without prisons.

Organizational Structure

Communications

The communications committee is responsible for all forms of external communication about the actions and activities of WAWOG, as well as, sometimes, those of our movement partners. We document events, rallies, teach-ins, and direct actions in our cities. We agitate for cultural boycott, often campaigning for ‘common-sense’ boycotts of the mainstream media, art, and culture institutions that are not only complicit in but accountable for the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people. We also aim to provide or uplift alternatives to what we critique. The committee seeks to educate our audiences not only about the present reality in Palestine, but also about the history of Palestinian life, struggle, and resistance.

Our broadcast channels include Instagram, Twitter, and the WAWOG Bulletin. We co-created, with NSJP and PYM, the Popular University channel — for all student intifada news — on Telegram.

Labor

The labor movement in the West has been electrified through the massive work of solidarity. Academic workers are heeding calls from Palestinian trade unions to strike for Gaza. Arts workers are forming new unions and putting PACBI on the negotiating table. WAWOG aims to empower workers to coordinate tactics, leverage their bargaining power, and disrupt business as usual. We also seek to arm workers in the spheres nearest our own — media, academia, arts and culture — with the political education required to remain steadfast and strategic. In collaboration with networks such as Labor for Palestine and a number of unions and worker coalitions, we can support broader labor-driven interventions, from pursuing divestment within unions to interrupting the production and shipment of weapons to “Israel.”

Cultural Boycott

“In addition to their financial and reputational effects, boycotts shorten the perceived distance between moral actors.” Inspired by the boycotts that hastened the end of apartheid in South Africa, the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) asserts the role of culture in enabling or resisting structures of oppression. By committing to the boycott’s guidelines, cultural organizations refuse to let “Israel” artwash its reputation through our collective labor. More institutions than ever before are explicitly rejecting Israeli funding, collaborations, and normalization projects, which bring together Palestinians with Israelis without a clear framework of co-resistance to Israel’s apartheid, settler colonialism, and genocide. We look to cultural boycott, including PACBI, as a strategy for material transformation and as a site for important, iterative dialogue within the communities of our institutions. Even in the absence of material ties to Israel, joining the boycott is a means of rejecting the normalization of Israeli violence against Palestinians in any part of life, including our art, literary, and educational communities. The boycott ends when Israel’s regime of settler-colonial apartheid is dismantled, Palestinians can enjoy their inherent and internationally-recognized rights, and Palestinian refugees can return home to their ancestral lands from which they have been ethnically cleansed for decades.

Popular Education

Our newly formed Popular Education committee will work with the broader leftist, anti-Zionist, and anti-imperialist community, as well as with the other committees in WAWOG, to help build a revolutionary cultural front for a free Palestine. A “front,” cultural or otherwise, implies a mass movement both within and beyond institutions. WAWOG must face outward and ask what our communities need from us. Most pressingly, we have been moved by the student intifada to consider how we as an organization can respond to and guide students, young organizers, or people new to participating in struggle. We are building a program of trainings and workshops, which are intended not to shape ideologies but to propagate knowledge.

Much of WAWOG’s current work focuses on pressuring institutions to adopt anti-Zionist stances. The Popular Education committee will complement this work by using our skills as researchers, writers, educators, and advocates to help individuals and organizations — both in and outside traditional educational institutions — develop the curricula and tools necessary to forge the path for successful actions, occupations, and narrative strategies. Our work will focus on education that goes beyond knowledge acquisition, instead helping foster the ability to put knowledge into action in principled and effective ways.

Statement of Solidarity With the Palestinian People

October 26, 2023

Israel’s war against Gaza is an attempt to conduct genocide against the Palestinian people. This war did not begin on October 7th. However, in the last 19 days, the Israeli military has killed over 6,500 Palestinians, including more than 2,500 children, and wounded over 17,000. Gaza is the world’s largest open-air prison: its 2 million residents—a majority of whom are refugees, descendants of those whose land was stolen in 1948—have been deprived of basic human rights since the blockade in 2006. We share the assertions of human rights groups, scholars, and, above all, everyday Palestinians: Israel is an apartheid state, designed to privilege Jewish citizens at the expense of Palestinians, heedless of the many Jewish people, both in Israel and across the diaspora, who oppose their own conscription in an ethno-nationalist project.

We come together as writers, journalists, academics, artists, and other culture workers to express our solidarity with the people of Palestine. We stand with their anticolonial struggle for freedom and for self-determination, and with their right to resist occupation. We stand firmly by Gaza’s people, victims of a genocidal war the United States government continues to fund and arm with military aid—a crisis compounded by the illegal settlement and dispossession of the West Bank and the subjugation of Palestinians within the state of Israel.

We stand in opposition to the silencing of dissent and to racist and revisionist media cycles, further perpetuated by Israel’s attempts to bar reporting in Gaza, where journalists have been both denied entry and targeted by Israeli forces. At least 24 journalists in Gaza have now been killed. Internationally, writers and cultural workers have faced severe harassment, workplace retribution, and job loss for expressing solidarity with Palestine, whether by stating facts about their continued occupation, or for amplifying the voices of others. These are instances that mark severe incursions against supposed speech protections. Specious charges of antisemitism are leveled against Zionism’s critics; political repression has been particularly aggressive against the free speech of Muslim, Arab, and Black people living in the US and across the globe. As was the case following the September 11th attacks, Islamophobic political fervor and the widespread circulation of unsubstantiated claims has galvanized a US-led coalition of military support for a brutal campaign of violence.

What can we do to intervene against Israel’s eliminationist assault on the Palestinian people? Words alone cannot stop the onslaught of devastation of Palestinian homes and lives, backed shamelessly and without hesitation by the entire axis of Western power. At the same time, we must reckon with the role words and images play in the war on Gaza and the ferocious support they have engendered: Israel’s defense minister announced the siege as a fight against “human animals”; even as we learned that Israel had rained bombs down on densely populated urban neighborhoods and deployed white phosphorus in Gaza City, the New York Times editorial board wrote that “what Israel is fighting to defend is a society that values human life and the rule of law”; establishment media outlets continue to describe Hamas’s attack on Israel as “unprovoked.” Writers Against the War on Gaza rejects this perversion of meaning, wherein a nuclear state can declare itself a victim in perpetuity while openly enacting genocide. We condemn those in our industries who continue to enable apartheid and genocide. We cannot write a free Palestine into existence, but together we must do all we possibly can to reject narratives that soothe Western complicity in ethnic cleansing.

We act alongside other writers, scholars, and artists who have expressed solidarity with the Palestinian cause, drawing inspiration from the Palestinian spirit of sumud, steadfastness, and resistance. Since 2004, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has advocated for organizations to join a boycott of institutions representing the Israeli state or cultural institutions complicit with its apartheid regime. We call on all our colleagues working in cultural institutions to endorse that boycott. And we invite writers, editors, journalists, scholars, artists, musicians, actors, and anyone in creative and academic work to sign this statement. Join us in building a new cultural front for a free Palestine.

For a full list of signatories, click here.

To sign the letter, in solidarity, click here.