If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE: Yahia Lababidi on Gaza, language and the politics of silence

The loudest word in Yahia Lababidi's title is sounded rather than printed. GENOCIDE arrives in capitals, a shout across a public language trained, he argues, to murmur.

Around Gaza lies a bureaucratic fog: 'conflict', 'security response', 'tragic incident', the demand for 'balance'.

Lababidi’s purpose is to burn this fog away. If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE is not a history of Palestine, a legal brief or a work of reportage. It is a book about the moral injury of watching from a safe distance, as words are crafted to conceal what the pictures reveal.

Lababidi is a warm-hearted Arab American poet, essayist, and aphorist with Palestinian roots.

Growing up in Cairo, he penned speeches for the United Nations, gaining insight into how institutions sometimes sanitise language, hiding offence and truth.

His sixteenth book follows Palestine Wail, a heartfelt collection from the early days of Israel's assault on Gaza. He reflects that poetry seemed to fade from his life afterwards.

Poetry cries out. Prose asks why the cry goes unheard captures the essence and sadness of his work. Written over the years 2023 to 2026, these writings are the prose of a poet longing for song but missing its melody.

An early essay on the NXIVM cult, believed to be located far from Palestine, fits here. Raniere perversely redefines 'empowerment' as a form of slavery, reducing political corruption to a small scale: atrocities begin when words meant to oppose evil are hijacked.

"Literature serves as sustenance, illumination, and memory, protecting a people from being eradicated twice, physically and culturally"

This flawed analogy reflects Lababidi's core belief that language is not just commentary on reality but an integral part of its moral fabric.

Silence, euphemisms, and passive voice do more than misrepresent violence; they create an environment where violence can occur undisturbed.

Literature and resistance

The middle section of the book features a gathering of artists and dissenters. Mahmoud Darwish and Taha Muhammad Ali convey a homeland through their rhythm; Sliman Mansour and Oswaldo Guayasamín give physical form to suffering; Edward Said views exile as a crucial perspective.

He also examines literature written since October 2023: Mohammed El-Kurd on Palestinians needing to portray perfect victimhood; Omar El Akkad on losing faith in Western liberalism; Hamid Dabashi on Gaza revealing the colonial roots of ‘civilisation’; Peter Beinart on reclaiming Jewish ethics from state worship.

Literature serves as sustenance, illumination, and memory, protecting a people from being eradicated twice, physically and culturally.

Gaza and Western language

In these political essays, the arguments grow even more compelling. Lababidi thoughtfully critiques British broadcasting's language, pointing out how Israeli statements are often presented as facts, while Palestinian voices are sometimes dismissed as mere claims.

He explores American imperialist language, the careful tone of official Muslim discourse, and labour movements whose internationalism seems limited to Palestine.

He suggests that liberal language still lingers within institutions and beliefs that once championed it. Phrases like 'rules-based order' and 'self-defence' act as symbolic expressions, often used when rules and civilian lives are overlooked.

The title is more than just a diagnosis. It's a challenge: what are we truly defending when we refuse to name it?

Lababidi's words are powerful when he avoids oversimplifying moral issues.

In his Open Letter to Israel, he recognises Jewish suffering and sees Jewish tradition as a vibrant force that challenges supremacy.

Figures like Buber, Arendt, Butler, and Beinart are presented not as excuses but as guardians of a prophetic Judaism that cannot be fully captured by nationalism.

The book emphasises that Palestinian freedom and Jewish safety are interconnected and essential. While it expresses genuine anger, it also firmly rejects hatred.

For Lababidi, showing solidarity isn’t just a political stance; it's a spiritual practice, reminding us that every stranger might be one of the quiet righteous keeping the world going.

Limits of witness

This extensive collection features some of its best moments.

Lababidi's aphorisms blend scripture, memoir, and criticism; a shared key unlocks a theory of memory, while a line of poetry reveals an ethics of attention.

His gentle prose emphasises art, substituting the overwhelming scale of mass death with the unique power of individual voice. He recognises that while statistics need evidence, grief demands form. In an era dominated by scrolling images, his emphasis on taking time is especially meaningful.

The book's sense of urgency tends to lessen its own severity, leading to repetition across forty-seven essays: recurring prophets, persistent themes of witness versus silence, and consistent metaphors like mirrors, wounds, lanterns, and veils.

Several chapters tend to be reverent overviews of recent works rather than transformative or resistant encounters.

Lababidi's collection feels like a choir, with each writer echoing his own arguments. Art is valued mainly for its ethical role; its opacity, humour, and resistance are given less emphasis. While prophetic critique calls for thunder, literary critique also needs to embrace friction.

The documentary foundation varies, too. Some essays offer detailed notes, while others make sweeping statements about media, Zionism, or Western complicity without much regard for opposing evidence.

If you're looking for in-depth history, legal insights, or political strategies, you will want to check out other books. Lababidi's perspective is somewhat distant: he writes from the United States, relying on news reports and others' work, whereas Palestinians in Gaza speak from experience, faced with hunger, loss, and bombardment. He acknowledges this gap honestly, but it's something he can’t completely bridge.

The meaning of witness

This is significant as a new body of work on Palestine emerges, comprising histories, diaries, polemics, anthologies, prison memoirs, and writings by the deceased.

While Pankaj Mishra's analytical depth, El-Kurd's controlled anger, or El Akkad's powerful intimacy stand out, Lababidi's work can seem scattered.

However, scattering is also central to his theme: exploring how distant suffering impacts conscience and disrupts all stored within. His book functions less as an authoritative account of Gaza and more as a spiritual commonplace book of the catastrophe, capturing what one reader could no longer passively ignore.

The likely audience is already sympathetic; capitals often fail to convert the stubborn euphemist. However, transformation might be too limited a goal.

Books of witness also support the hesitant, give voice to the censored, and preserve truths that respectable discourse prefers to ignore.

Lababidi concludes with a lesson from Muslim and Jewish traditions: if the final hour approaches while you hold a sapling, plant it. 

Saying 'GENOCIDE' repeatedly can seem monotonous, exposed, and sometimes inadequate. Yet it remains a form of planting, a deliberate act undertaken without the certainty of shade, because the alternative is leaving the ground bare.

Hossam el-Hamalawy is an Egyptian scholar-activist in Germany, focusing on the military, policing, and labour

Follow him on Instagram: @countermaspero