Of the ten names on this year’s National Book Award longlist for poetry are two Palestinians: Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and Fady Joudah. To the Palestinian American reader, their nominated collections—published during what Tuffaha has fittingly described as a “livestreamed genocide”—come as close to conveying our collective anguish as the English language will allow. But their searing poems wrest far more than lament from our year of constant mourning.
In them, I read an indictment, not just of Israel’s AI-charged massacres, its willful starvation of more than two million people, or its grotesque enablement by the American press (“The passive voice,” writes Joudah, “is your killer’s voice”). In ways subtle and sometimes more direct, the poets also take aim at a by-now-familiar proclivity of the political left: to view the Palestinian as bereft of agency, a hapless victim to be eulogized and “resuscitated.” Joudah chooses precisely this word to follow another pair of damning lines:
They love you more when you’re dead.
You’re more alive to them dead.
Resuscitated, you enter the tunnel
you’ve been walking toward,
marched toward, expelled into,
dug with your spleen,
the graveyard of your blood.
If our worth can only be measured by our allies’ ability to resurrect us—to “humanize” our dead and dying—what value do we derive from this bloody currency? On the one hand, the constant stream of handheld horrors—from Gaza, the West Bank, and, increasingly, the country of Lebanon—has drawn millions of Americans onto the streets in protest and forced Gaza onto the agenda of this year’s presidential race. On the other hand, the rate of killing remains breakneck and without pause, fueled by a campaign of Palestinian dehumanization that recalls the worst methods of the McCarthy era, when Congressional witch hunts, character assassinations, and campus repression sought to scrub American politics of its dissidents.
Of course, the Red Scare’s reach—to government offices, universities, Hollywood, the labor movement—was considered proportionate to the pitch of anti-Soviet hysteria gripping the country. And like today’s multifront assault on Palestinian activism, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s domestic means served a foreign policy end: The more Americans internalized the imagined threats lurking among them, the more willing they were to cheer on “defensive” wars overseas.
But what makes today’s political climate different is that most people in the United States actually support an end to Israel’s war on Gaza, which has so far killed at least 41,500 Palestinians and wounded nearly 100,000. Instead of forcing a ceasefire, however, this public sentiment has not only gone unheeded by our elected leaders; it has instead been met with a long list of legislation designed explicitly to silence Israel’s critics.
Although there is no single inventory of Congressional, state, and local moves to legislate free speech around Palestine, the Foundation for Middle East Peace publishes a weekly round-up that gives a glimpse of just how apt the McCarthy-era analogy is.
In late September, for example, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, introduced a bill that would amend the 1965 Higher Education Act, along with Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, to include antisemitism among the forms of discrimination that would exclude universities from receiving federal funding. The problem with the bill, the full text of which has yet to be listed on the Congress.gov portal as of this writing, is that it would likely rely on a definition put forward by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which includes “targeting of the state of Israel” among the possible “manifestations” of antisemitism.
In practical terms, conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism has already become de rigueur in the public sphere. Just ask the university students who are still entangled in disciplinary proceedings months after participating in last spring’s peaceful encampments. That these gatherings, which included Jewish allies, prompted Congressional hearings on “campus antisemitism”—and the subsequent resignations of at least four university presidents—helps explain why administrators have all but shut down the right to protest this fall.
Where free speech remains a professed value, its definition has been narrowed to effectively muffle Palestinian voices. Any talk of genocide, for example, rarely makes it past editors or the convenors of public fora, even though the term was applied to Israel’s actions as early as last December and by none other than the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security—whose namesake, the late Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, coined the term in 1942.
Perhaps nowhere have these restrictions seemed more of an affront than in the art world, where Palestinian American Wafa Ghnaim, founder of the Tatreez Institute, has spent much of the past decade. In 2018, she became the first ever Palestinian embroidery instructor at the Smithsonian Museum and has since earned residencies at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City as well as the Museum of the Palestinian People in Washington, D.C..
As a schoolgirl in the northwestern United States, Ghnaim remembers being bullied for her “weird name and big hair,” or for the Palestinian food that her mother would pack, lovingly, for her daily lunch. Once every year, though, Wafa’s mother, Feryal Abbasi-Ghnaim—Nakba survivor, art historian, and peace activist—would come to speak to her daughter’s current social studies class, wowing Wafa’s schoolmates with a show-and-tell on Palestinian embroidery and the rich culture of which it was a part.
“A lot of the kids I grew up with got to know the Palestinian people through my mother,” Ghnaim recalls to The Progressive. “She kind of got to them before the media could destroy their idea of who we are.” Abbasi-Ghnaim’s presence inspired her daughter to wear a traditional Palestinian thobe to school picture days. Since then, Ghnaim has continued to follow in her mother’s footsteps, including by authoring the widely acclaimed Tatreez & Tea: Embroidery and Storytelling in the Palestinian Diaspora, which honors Abbasi-Ghnaim’s legacy.
Despite her success, Ghnaim says the past year has exposed a double standard for Palestinians in the art world. Although she has found support from some of her colleagues, she sees museums treading more carefully around the subject of Palestine than they do around other controversial topics. Challenging this makes representing Palestine in the art world more than a “vanity project,” Ghnaim says.
“I see my role not just as one of cultural preservation,” she explains. “As a Palestinian art historian, particularly in this moment, I think my work is also about preventing cultural erasure.”
After a year in which Israel, with the help of the United States, has destroyed or damaged the preponderance of Gaza’s museums and historic sites, along with homes, hospitals, schools, public utilities, and entire family lineages, the prospect of Palestinian elimination hangs heavier now than at any time in our history. Resisting this erasure will take more than eulogies or epitaphs. Neither should it rely on Americans’ capacity to regard us as human.