If You Cannot Say Genocide: Essays on Conscience and Witness

“What task is left to art when words are turned into weapons?” Yahia Lababidi’s If you Cannot Say Genocide: Essays of Conscience and Witness explores the depth of this question impressed upon the reader in the preface. For the author, who is a Muslim of Palestinian descent, the question is pondered from a position of distance as an “inheritor of family dispossession”. 

Written between 2023 and 2026, this collection of essays leans upon memory, literature, experiences, observation and reflection, through which disillusion exposes reality. While there is no chronology in Lababidi’s reflections, the preoccupation with words and meaning is persistent. For example, Lababidi writes of his posting as a speechwriter for the UN office in Cairo, where he encounters the politics of language. “I came to see that neutrality, posing as diplomacy, was a form of cowardice that did violence to my nature,” he writes. 

Language shapes the rest of Lababidi’s reflections, exposing a world where meaning is determined by the politics of violence. Alongside language, Lababidi shares his own experiences, his awareness of living in the US as the government wields its power elsewhere in the world. But there are other nuances that Lababidi weaves in his essays. 

“Memory is still alive, and it asks for responsibility. Distance has a way of laundering conscience. The longer we wait, the easier it becomes to confuse explanation with absolution. We need historians willing to write while the record is still unsettled, while consequences are still unfolding, guided by moral orientation,” Lababidi notes. 

Many voices have practiced what Lababidi is insisting upon. The book makes many references to Palestinian writers, from Mahmoud Darwish, Edward Said and Ghassan Kanafani, to contemporary writes such as Omar El Akkad, Munther Isaac and Mohammed El-Kurd. In a way, these voices, particularly Kanafani and El-Kurd, stand in sharp contrast to the rest and even the author’s own reflections at times, who muses about the possibility of sustaining dialogue through cultural endeavours. 

As the book continues, however, it becomes clearer that despite an ideal, colonialism is a brutal reality for Palestinians. The author’s distance from Palestine, not having experienced Palestine as Palestinians have experienced it throughout the decades until now, may account for the belief that art transcends. It makes for an uncomfortable read when one keeps in mind the brutality of Israeli colonial violence. But as the book continues, drawing upon Palestinian authors and their struggle from within, or from experience, the author’s voice emerges stronger. Palestinian voices speak through the pages of Lababidi’s essays, bringing a kaleidoscope of memories from artists, poets, writer and revolutionaries. Some stories relating to the Nakba are brought to the helm, and the Palestinian people’s resistance and endurance is shaped through the voices of those who survived the colonial atrocities. In this way, Lababidi’s reflections are accompanying slivers of history, such as when he states, “In our tradition, patience is greater than resignation.”

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Written during the genocide, Lababidi’s essays also convey what the media conceals.  “Numbers cannot contain this loss; they hide faces and extinguish stories,” he writes. Remaining conscious of language, Lababidi notes the importance of portraying the brutal reality as it is. There is more determination than anger, which suits a book that is dissecting language and what it conveys or seeks to hide. For Lababidi, contrary to the imperialist exploitation, language can convey humanity. It can also view the oppressor, in this case Israel, in its most basic form. “The jailer is never free,” he writes, while noting that colonialism depends upon control. “To normalise such injustice requires ethical numbing, which is another form of imprisonment.” The difference is that Israel has military might on its side. 

On the other side of Israel normalising its colonial violence, Lababidi notes that the tools of surveillance and oppression translate into “tools of a structure that systematically erode psychological resilience.” This is a reality which, while acknowledged, is not talked about as much as Palestinian resistance and resilience. 

Meanwhile, Lababidi also reflects on how Israel’s genocide in Gaza is managed through language: “The substitution is rarely defended. It happens mid-sentence, as though the speaker felt, in the act of naming, a resistance he could not sustain.” The erasure does not stop there. Lababidi continues, “Reconciliation is invoked before there has been agreement about what has taken place. The conversation advances beyond the wound, as if the wound were already understood.” But genocide has yet to be mentioned, instead of conflict and the multitude of futile synonyms used to conceal what Israel is exposing in plain sight. 

And yet, as Lababidi writes, “what we are witnessing in Gaza is the collapse of that illusion.” Language can no longer sustain the deception of the oppressor; the oppression has revealed too much. “To name this genocide is to be honest. To call for Palestinian liberation is to insist that no people should live behind walls, under drones or under occupation,” the author insists. Language fails gradually and eventually the divide is unsurmountable. That space, however, provides opportunity to make language meaningful rather than employ the neutrality of both sides, for example, which the author names as “the purest expression of this invisibility.”

The book proceeds to a graceful conclusion when it gradually moves to criticising imperialism through exposing its own exploitation of language, as well as shedding the author’s own ideals. “Those beliefs lie in ashes,” Lababidi says, when he reflects on an earlier belief that “Israeli leaders sought an end to Palestinian resistance out of existential fear, not imperial ambition.” And yet, there is a bigger realisation – imperialism expects our desensitisation. How does one remain spiritually intact, Lababidi asks. The answer, perhaps, lies in language, in reclaiming its truth when one speaks. 

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