If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE: Essays on Conscience and Witness
by Yahia Lababidi
Yahia Lababidi wrote 47 essays between 2023 and 2026 in response to the ongoing devastation in Gaza. His acts of witness shaped by grief, memory, and a refusal to turn away from human suffering. This is a book of conscience under pressure, written from an Arab American perspective shaped by exile and moral inquiry. It is the work of a poet who could no longer write poems and who feared for his soul if he remained silent. If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE asks what fidelity to truth demands when language itself is under siege. A book about the moral injury of witnessing the eradication of Palestine, and what it costs the soul when conscience will not look away.
Forthcoming
Published by New Village Press
Distributed by NYU Press
Available October 6, 2026
256 pages, 5.50 x 8.50 inches
Cover illustration by Malak Mattar
Available in jacketed hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-61332-304-5
Hardcover price: $30.00
Primary edition: jacketed hardcover
Also available in ebook
About Yahia Lababidi
Yahia Lababidi is an Arab American poet and essayist of Palestinian descent. If You Cannot Say Genocide will be his sixteenth book. Other recent books include Palestine Wail, written in the first months of Israel’s assault on Gaza; What Remains to Be Said; and forthcoming Wherever You Are: Essays from East to West (Ayin Press, 2027).His work appears in Liberties, Salmagundi, The Threepenny Review, The New Statesman, Sojourners, World Literature Today, The New Arab, and DAWN. He has reached audiences through NPR, PBS, ABC Radio National, and On Being, and his work has been translated into more than a dozen languages.
“At the 1963 March on Washington, Joachim Prinz, reflecting on his experience as a rabbi in Nazi Germany, declared that ‘The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.’ In hauntingly beautiful poetry and prose, Yahia Lababidi offers a similar message. Centuries and continents separate that genocide from this one, but humanity’s moral challenge remains the same. In this new age of evil, If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE calls us to meet it.”
— Peter Beinart, author of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza
“When the necessary cataloguing of statistical evidence of genocide becomes numbing, Yahia Lababidi’s skill in sculpting our understanding steps in.”
— Daniel Levy, President, US/Middle East Project