To our comrades,

“Racism is not an acquired trait of the Zionist settler-state,” wrote the Syrian-Palestinian scholar Fayez Sayegh in his 1965 treatise, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine. “Nor is it an accidental, passing feature of the “Israeli” scene. It is congenial, essential, and permanent.” 

Sayegh used documents from the First Zionist Congress, held at Basel in August 1897, to construct the character of the ideology behind the Israeli occupation, which he said was defined by three features: (1) its racial complexion and racist conduct pattern; (2) its addiction to violence; and (3) its expansionist nature. 

Writing just two years before the Naksa, in which the Zionist entity seized the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Syrian Golan Heights, Sayegh named plainly the original sins that liberal journalists and intellectuals elide in their portrayals of an “embattled” “Israel,” fighting for its “soul.” Today, even as “Israeli” expansionism continues under the cover of war, we encounter incessant, defensive attempts to revise — indeed, to normalize — the founding history of the terrorist settler-state.  

In the Guardian this week, a “former IDF soldier and historian of genocide” named Omer Bartov detailed a recent trip home that left him “disturbed” by the lack of empathy his fellow citizens had for Palestinians in Gaza. Bertov, apparently unfamiliar with the blood-soaked history of the Zionist militias who spawned the “Israeli” occupying forces, plaintively asks if the fatherland will “ever be able to reimagine itself as its founders envisioned it – as a nation based on freedom, justice and peace?” 

Apologia guised as confession is the most we can expect from Bartov and his American counterparts, liberal Zionist writers like the New York Times’s Masha Gessen and the New Yorker’s David Remnick. Acknowledgments are made, after many paragraphs of handwringing, of the Zionist entity’s atrocities, but analyses of the causes never come. There is a failure to follow the violence down to its root. 

We reject colonial narratives that place the foundation of Palestinian unfreedom on any date after the 1948 Nakba. Not a wayward democracy, not a struggling young nation, Israel is a racist settler colony that must, and will, fall.

Boycott PEN America!

After months of PEN America’s genocide apologia, empty rhetoric, and the downright refusal of any accountability, enough is enough. We have officially launched a boycott of the organization.

We will not submit writing to their awards. We refuse to attend, participate in, or publicize their events, galas, panels, publications, and readings. And we won’t accept their prizes. 

Our boycott will not end until the following demands are met:

1. Commit material, financial, and political support for Palestinian writers and publishers with the full weight of PEN America’s organization reach, as has been done for writers in other contexts such as Ukraine and China;

2. Publicly sign on the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and refuse to normalize the genocidal ideology of Zionism

3. Immediately remove Suzanne Nossel and senior leadership, and rewrite organizational bylaws to prevent despots like Nossel from using their position to abuse and silence staff or advance their own political agenda;

4. Impose term limits on board members, reduce the size of the board, and require all new board members be writing professionals nominated by PEN membership in order to ensure the board’s independence from the director;

5. Open a comprehensive, independent audit of PEN America’s finances, including grants, awards, endowments and external partnerships, to be made full transparent and available to members and staff 

Join us and let PEN America know that you are boycotting them until they stand for a free Palestine.

A 10,000-word profile that will teach you nothing

Every week, we are confronted with new writing that flouts its legitimacy through mild disapprobation of “Israeli” right-wing policy while deriving most of its content through collaboration with the IOF.

The latest in the genre is David Remnick’s racist, ahistoric profile of Yahya Sinwar, who has succeeded Ismail Haniyeh as Hamas’s political chief after Haniyeh’s assassination last month. Our sources report that Remnick’s Sinwar profile was neither solicited nor discussed among the staff: “He just felt like writing it,” and so, as the magazine’s editor-in-chief, he just did. 

Sinwar, who was born in Khan Younis refugee camp and is one of the architects of Al-Aqsa Flood, has survived several assassination attempts. The world saw him sitting in an armchair amid the rubble of his home, which Israel bombed in 2021. Remnick, for whom the Palestinian cause is tragic, not liberatory, paints Sinwar as a black-hearted opportunist whose unthinkable popularity among otherwise sympathetic Palestinians can be (mis)understood as a kind of trauma response.

In classic Orientalist style, Remnick projects backwardness onto Sinwar by foregrounding his subject’s more extreme violations of Western civilizational norms. He renders barbaric the means deployed by the Palestinian resistance while affording rationale to the occupation that necessitates those means. So, long before you learn that Sinwar’s parents fled the Nakba, you hear — in the third paragraph! — that Sinwar, while in Zionist prison, ordered the killing of a Hamas member’s sister because the man said she was “dishonoring the family” by having an affair. (If you have read Lila Abu-Lughod, you will also hear echoes of her famous question: “Do Muslim women need saving?) Or, you hear that Sinwar earned a reputation for sociopathy by ruthlessly eliminating anyone believed to have collaborated with the occupying forces. (You learn nothing of how “Israel” blackmails Palestinians into collaborating.)

Remnick allows Zionist jailers to do the hardest parts of his job for him. Recorded interrogations — material extracted through torture and presented as raw, exclusive truth — give us our first, second, and tenth impressions of Sinwar. You have to read through thirty-three paragraphs of the profile before encountering a) a Palestinian source; b) a source who actually knows Sinwar. (These two sources are, unsurprisingly, one and the same.)

While Remnick traipses through occupied territory collecting IOF “evidence” and the opinions of “Israeli” “peace” “activists,” the journalists of Gaza are picked off one by one in IOF strikes that Western newsrooms have decided not to report on. Anas al-Sharif is Al Jazeera’s last correspondent in northern Gaza, after his colleagues Ismail al-Ghoul and Rami al-Rifi were martyred in a drone strike earlier this month. Even the Committee to Project Journalists, which, since October 7th, has struggled to live up to its name, is saying that al-Sharif’s life is endangered by the Zionist entity’s latest incitements. Why doesn’t Remnick just feel like writing a profile of al-Sharif?

We remember when the New Yorker boss called the IOF to demand they release from detention his sole Palestinian contributor, Mosab Abu Toha. If David Remnick wants to contribute to the West’s understanding of what is happening in Gaza, he should put down the pen and pick up the phone.

Study the history of resistance

The Palestine Resistance Bulletin appeared monthly-ish from September 1970, when Jordan’s reactionary Hashemite monarchy began violently suppressing Palestinian revolutionaries, until March 1972. Published out of Boston by American sympathizers, it carried the tagline: “In Solidarity with the Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.” The editions included a mixture of original analysis and translated pieces, on subjects such as political prisoners, the class character of Israeli society, and the rebellion against Oman’s sultanate. One issue carried an essay about feminism by a DFLP member: “We can see that women in China and Cuba remain women, but they are no longer playthings.” An introduction noted that the author, college student Nada El-Karmy, was killed fighting against King Hussein’s forces during the Black September conflict.

You can read all twelve issues of the Palestine Resistance Bulletin online.

Read with us

Our Philadelphia chapter is reading “Like a Bag Trying to Empty” by Kaleem Hawa, Orisanmi Burton’s Tip of the Spear, Steven Salaita’s newly published novel, Daughter, Son, Assassin, Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba’s Let This Radicalize You, Prentis Hemphill’s What It Takes to Heal, and Mohammed El-Kurd’s Rifqa. Our Los Angeles chapter is also reading Hawa’s essay, alongside You Have Not Yet Been Defeated by Alaa Abd El-Fattah and Decolonial Marxism: Essays from the Pan-African Revolution by Walter Rodney. Our New York chapter is reading essays by Eqbal Ahmad — a clue as to the contents of the next issue of the New York War Crimes. Our Toronto chapter is reading new writing for another soon-to-be published newspaper, which includes a critique of The Globe and Mail’s manufacturing consent for genocide and a dispatch from the York University encampment. They’re also reading Night-Vision: Illuminating War & Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain by Butch Lee and Red Rover. 

Our Communications committee is reading Workshop of the World: Essays in People’s History by Raphael Samuel, the Palestine Resistance Bulletin from the early 1970s, Etel Adnan’s novel Sitt Marie Rose (translated by Georgina Kleege), George Jackson’s Blood in My Eye, Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin, Assata Shakur’s autobiography, “The real reason Israel is assassinating Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, and why it won’t stop the resistance” by Abdaljawad Omar, Psychoanalysis under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine by Lara and Stephen Sheehi, Fayez Sayegh’s Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, and “Moving Towards Life” by Marina Magloire. Our PACBI committee is also reading Steve Salaita’s new novel, as well as Jake Romm’s essay “Elements of Anti-Semitism.” Our Popular Education committee is reading A Taste of Power by Elaine Brown, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle by Katherine McKittrick, Fayez Sayegh's Zionist Propaganda in the U.S., We Want Everything by Nanni Balestini and The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire by Erica Edwards.

We end as we began, with Sayegh’s words:

“Only in the liberation of Palestine, spearheaded by Palestinians prepared to pay the price, can the supreme sacrifices of past generations of Palestinians be vindicated, and the visions and hopes of living Palestinians be transformed into reality.”