HAVING worked on peace and justice initiatives for Palestine and Israel for twenty-five years, and published poetry on the subject, I’ve been devastated in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s assault on Gaza. The former killed about twelve hundred people and took more than two hundred fifty hostages, and the latter, as of this writing, has killed more than thirty thousand people and injured at least seventy thousand. The truth is that I’ve worried I’ve been too temperate in my response. For years I have weighed each word, each sentence of my work, for its impact on readers. I know enough of the trauma and pain of my Palestinian and Jewish friends to try to avoid worsening their hurt and fear. My sister married a Palestinian man twenty years ago, and I’d made a promise to do what I could to educate myself, my students, and readers about the conflict between Israel and Palestine, particularly about what Palestinians have had to endure—the expulsions, the indefinite detentions, the checkpoints, the wall, the expropriation of land. Since 2006 I have taught a course on Palestinian and Israeli literatures, founded on the idea that writers offer a prophetic witness of the depredation of war and oppression as well as a vision of a shared future, something that U.S. politicians and corporate media have failed to do. It has been, I’ve hoped, a way to invite students into seeing themselves as participants in movements, my book of poems on the Palestine-Israel predicament, I had been disappointed by what I’ve called the “Wall of Silence”—the ongoing effort to demonize, ban, or chill speech that is deemed pro-Palestinian. Later, after yet another bombing of Gaza in 2021, I’d written “Remorse for Temperate Speech” (published in and later in my new book, ), an apology to my friend Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian poet, for the times my words had been too measured about the unendurable realities for Palestinians. But my apology wasn’t enough. In October 2023 Mosab’s house in Gaza—along with his lovely library—was destroyed by a bomb. He and his family fled south and finally found shelter in Egypt, but not before Mosab was taken by Israeli soldiers and beaten. Only a massive political effort—online and backdoor—secured his release in November.
