“I’d like to publish your book on Gaza refugees,” my new publisher began. “You only need to change one thing: You can’t use the word genocide. There is no genocide. They’re just war crimes. Otherwise, you have a great book.”
Then he told me he was Jewish.
I thought I had done everything right. I met this publisher at the AWP 2023 Writer’s Conference and Bookfair (the nation’s largest marketplace for independent literary presses) and had kept in touch with him over email in hopes that he might be interested in publishing one of my books someday. His publishing house had been around for many years and had a good reputation with a number of titles that I had read and liked. I had begun to get my stories published in literary journals in 2020 and knew I would find somebody to publish a book of mine eventually. Surely I had a shot? I just needed a topic that would fit in with the publisher’s catalogue.
In early 2024, I started talking with Gaza refugees and writing articles about them for various news websites. When I met the publisher by chance at a poetry festival that fall, we talked about a book on Gaza refugees based, in part, on my published stories. “Just send me the manuscript when it’s done,” he told me. I did so in January of 2026, and he told me that he wanted to publish my book by February. We had a face-to-face meeting in March where he praised my writing: “Your stories about Gaza are wonderful. Often, people tell me their ideas for a book and I say ‘Send me a manuscript.’ But when I get it, it’s just not good enough. Yours is different. It’s amazing. It has just the right amount of everything. When I thought you needed one more story about pro-Palestinian Israelis, I turned the page and there was the perfect story.” Then he gave me the book contract to look over, before going into his aforementioned speech about genocide.
Unfortunately, all the excitement about getting my first book contract made me gloss over his comments about genocide. I’ll just deal with it later, I thought. I had titled the book Palestinian Wisdom for Our Genocidal Times—a provocative title for sure, but we could work it out, right? After all, I didn’t consider myself an activist, and my book was about the experiences of Palestinians facing death as well as the Americans and Israelis who wanted to help them, not politics. I only used the word genocide because it was supported by the facts.
Well, my hope faded when he mailed me a copy of the manuscript with his handwritten edits. At first I didn’t notice many changes to the text except for an occasional grammar, spelling or word usage mistake. But then I read his comments in the margins. He highlighted anything that could be used as evidence for a genocide and began listing reasons why the speaker, whether one of the refugees, a pro-Palestinian American or Israeli, or me, was wrong.
For example, in my story “The Women Who Live Between the Barbed Wire and the Sea,” when I wrote about a mother and social worker whose family had been reduced to “a statistic of genocide-induced poverty,” he asked: “If there’s a genocide why isn’t Israel killing Palestinians who live outside of Palestine?” Or, in the story “The Greatest Man in Gaza,” when I wrote: “Corruption and lawlessness grow as the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) deliberately assassinates police and aid workers, part of their plan to cause chaos and strife.” Here he excused the assassinations as “a by-product of the IDF’s wanting to do away with or replace an authority it doesn’t trust.”
At other times he deleted lines related to genocide without telling me why, such as in “Marah’s Story,” when I quoted refugee Marah Kamal speaking about how mothers in Gaza have lost hope because they have been reduced to watching their children die before their very eyes. I had ended her speech with my own lines: “This is how Israel practices birth control on Palestinians. All we worry about is Roe vs. Wade.” A wonderfully creative comparison in my opinion, but one only worthy of a thick red line in his.
Nor did he explain why, in the story “The Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza City,” he deleted the line “They might be dead by the time you read this.” In that case I was referring to babies from the neonatal ICU of Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital. A pediatric nurse told me they had been taken away by the IDF without any disclosure as to where they had been sent—not even to the children’s parents.
Sometimes he just replaced an “offensive” word with one he found more acceptable, such as in the story “A Torturous Truce,” where he crossed out the word ‘murdered’ in the sentence, “In the first month of peace, two hundred and forty-one Gazans were murdered by the IDF [shot or bombed while waiting in line for humanitarian aid],” and replaced it with “killed.”
I finished the book with the definition of genocide from the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide Article II which covers “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” I guess he didn’t like that because in the margin he asked, “How do you know what the IDF intends to do?” deliberately shifting the conversation to my knowledge of the future instead of focusing on Israel’s past and present genocidal behavior.
The whole manuscript was littered with dozens of these dismissive quips, deleted lines and doublespeak blunders. And, after reading all of his gaslighting critiques, I began to regret my decision to publish with his press. So I sent him an email containing a revised text with newly added footnotes that discussed the problem with his edits and gave rebuttals for the comments dismissive of a genocide. He wasn’t happy and told me so in a snippety reply.
He began his litanous tirade by blaming my (nonexistent) “rage” for our falling out. Then he tackled the word “genocide,” explaining that using it would make me come across to readers “as a mere crank.” Furthermore, “If you, as the author, are going to use the word, you have to justify your use.” And: “How does the reader know you are not influencing your [Palestinian] informants to use it to please you?”
Then he claimed that I had changed my book from one about Gaza refugees “to a personal rant that…will create only embarrassment to you later.” Finally, he finished with a warning: “You do not—I repeat, do not (bold in original)—have my permission to use my name or the name of the press, XXXXX XXXXX, or any other identifying information or description, in anything you publish.”
The joy of seeing my first book get published had descended into a job of media manipulation. He had avoided the issue of genocide by making false claims about my character, ignoring the evidence I presented, questioning the integrity of my interactions with Gaza refugees, and trying to shame me before using intimidation to stop me from telling anyone about his behavior.
His words were a far cry from his original email offering to publish the book in which he said: “I think it’s a valuable book and will help to keep the moral issues of the Gaza war alive. I think it’s important, too, that the Palestinians of Gaza are portrayed as human beings no less worthy of life and freedom than the rest of the world is.”
What went wrong? Genocide is a loaded word. I suspect that this publisher, like the majority of Jews, have had the horrors of the Holocaust drilled into them so thoroughly throughout their lives, that they believe their own people are incapable of committing a genocide. To acknowledge that Israel is doing so now is to suggest that they, as well as any Jewish friends and family they have that support Israel, are complicit in genocide. That idea triggers their rage. Even using the word “Jew” is wrought with problems. One writer who read my ideas for this story cringed at seeing it. She was worried that using it in conjunction with my condemnation of the Israeli government and the IDF would lead to charges of antisemitism. It’s a bleak picture when the people responsible for informing the public about a genocide (journalists) do not have the freedom to write about it.
In the meantime, what was I to do? Regardless of the publisher’s threats, I decided to write a story about the situation. I pitched a number of media outlets, including a Jewish one which claimed to be on the side of the Palestinians. They responded with the following ethical word salad: “It is not standard journalistic practice for a reporter to do a story about a topic in which they are the aggrieved party.”
Really? I was tempted to write back and ask: “If someone bought your Jewish magazine and told you to deny the Holocaust, would you not be qualified to write about it?”
But instead I leave you with the words of someone from the truly aggrieved party, the Palestinians.
Farah Kamal, a Gaza refugee who contributed two stories to my book, had this to say about the situation: “Living under the bombardment and siege in Gaza allows us to see things with absolute clarity; the truth here is baptized in blood, leaving no room for compromise. When a publisher attempts to blackmail a writer and force them to deny the genocide whose fire consumes us every single moment, it only proves that the Palestinian narrative shakes them to their core. Your refusal of their offer [of publication] is the honorable stance that every refugee and defender of this cause expects. They [the Israelis] do not wish to merely erase us from the land, but to wipe our footprint from history and books. Keep exposing this censorship. Our free voice from inside Gaza stands with you, and no threats will ever succeed in burying the truth or silencing the agony of the victims.”