If You Cannot Say Genocide - by Yahia Lababidi (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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.

Moving between personal narrative, literary reflection, and cultural critique, the essays consider what it means to speak honestly when the language needed to name violence is contested or constrained. Lababidi reflects on how storytelling can hold experience against erasure, and how public discourse shapes what is seen, acknowledged, or denied. The book remains grounded in the ethical stakes of witnessing and the responsibility of language in moments of collective crisis.

Review Quotes

"

Moving between personal reflection, literary criticism, and moral inquiry, Lababidi surveys a wide landscape of writers . . . whose work sustains a tradition of ethical clarity. For Lababidi, literature is not peripheral to events but central to understanding them: a means of preserving memory, resisting erasure, and insisting on accountability.

With a poet's sensitivity to language, he examines how words are censored, distorted, or emptied of meaning in times of mass suffering. At the center of the book is a reckoning with the crimes in Gaza and the broader crisis of Zionism as both ideology and lived reality.

"--Sarah Leah Whitson, "coauthor of From Apartheid to Democracy: A Blueprint for Peace in Israel-Palestine"

"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, Lababidi asks what fidelity to truth demands when language itself is under siege."-- "Islamic Horizons"

"In a time of genocide, dehumanization, and willful blindness, Yahia Lababidi's voice is one of grace, empathy, and perception. In this series of compelling essays--each with its own insights drawn from personal experience--we confront not only the horrors of Gaza, but the frailties of our own humanity that have enabled it and the failings of our societies that obscure the facts and lull us into a false sense of disempowerment."--Josh Paul, "co-founder of A New Policy and former official at the U.S. Department of State"

"In this book, Yahia Lababidi is a Palestinian sentinel to the sense of the sacred. Against the savagery they witness and bear, and with them humanity at large, every single day and every damned night of our and their existence, Palestinians have sublimated their pain and rage into a nocturnal vigil safeguarding what is left of our fragile sense of the sublime. From Ghassan Kanafani to Mahmoud Darwish to Edward Said, now whispering now screaming, are minding Lababidi's words in If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE."--Hamid Dabashi, "author of After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization"

"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."-- "Hossam el-Hamalawy, The New Arab"

About the Author

Yahia Lababidi is an Arab American poet and essayist of Palestinian descent and the acclaimed author of sixteen books. His work, often shaped by moral and spiritual inquiry, has been widely published in leading international outlets, including Liberties, Salmagundi, The New Statesman, Sojourners, World Literature Today, The New Arab, DAWN, and The Threepenny Review, and has been featured on NPR and PBS. His writing has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has reached audiences around the world, and he has appeared at literary festivals internationally.

His recent books include Palestine Wail (Daraja Press, 2024), written during the first months of
Israel's assault on Gaza: What Remains to Be Said (Wild Goose Publications, 2025); and
Wherever You Are: Essays from East to West (Ayin Press, 2026), a sweeping collection reflecting his distinctive voice across cultures and continents.