If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE
A book about the moral injury of witnessing the eradication of Palestine, and what it costs the soul when conscience will not look away.
The forthcoming book by Yahia Lababidi.
Yahia Lababidi wrote the 47 essays for If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE between 2023 and 2026 in response to the ongoing devastation in Gaza, placing this urgent question at its center. These essays are 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. Urgent, searching, and unflinching, If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE asks what fidelity to truth demands when language itself is under siege.
“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