Aisha Gawad and Lisa Ko on What Really Happened at the Albany Book Festival

“In a time of genocide, who gets to be outraged? Who gets to be indulged, listened to, humanized, validated?”

I recently wrote this piece for LitHub about the shocking and disgusting ways writers Aisha Gawad and Lisa Ko were slandered by the Albany Book Festival a couple of months back. They were harassed and called anti-Semitic because Aisha privately pulled out of a festival after she read the tweets of Elisa Albert, the writer who openly called anyone pro-Palestinian, “terror apologists,” and shared Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian things on her page. Albert was supposed to “moderate” the panel that both Gawad and Ko were on, about “girls coming of age,” but when they both asked for answers about how the festival was allowing this kind of open discrimination, they were dismissed, and the event was eventually canceled.

The two writers were then slandered in the media with false accusations of their anti-Semitism—from everywhere from the NYT to The Atlantic. This interview is the first time they’re both speaking out. I’m really lucky I got a chance to speak to them.

Reporting this piece made me realize that while actual anti-Semitism (like, I don’t know, the Nazi salute by Elon Musk for example) is protected by Netanyahu himself, accusations of supposed anti-Semitism (interestingly always by Arabs and Muslims, even though the latter have always been historically allied with Jewish peoples) perpetuates the Islamophobia, anti Arab and anti-Palestinian bias that motivates the insanity of our times. People don’t even see their Islamophobia because they’ve normalized fascism, racism, and hatred as facets of Western society. But if you don’t see it or reckon with it that’s probably because you either perpetuate this kind of hatred or benefit from it.

I just want to say that I respect Aisha and Lisa so much. I respect all the writers, students academics and people of moral consciousness who stand up and express what they believe to be honest and right.

May we all continue to be this brave.

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artwork sticker by Fabliha Yeaqub, famous quote by June Jordan

When Aisha Gawad first Googled Elisa Albert, she immediately noticed the author’s public Instagram page. Gawad was researching who the moderator would be for her upcoming panel at the Albany Book Festival, a natural curiosity for any writer ahead of a group event. What Gawad wasn’t expecting was to find dozens of Instagram posts and stories mocking anyone who expressed grief over the loss of Palestinian lives. Then there was the sheer level of vitriol in Albert’s professional writing. In a November 2023 essay for Tablet magazine, Albert called anyone who questioned or condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza a “terror apologist.”

Gawad told me how deeply uncomfortable this made her: “It suggested that no one can even begin to speak about the war, let alone question or criticize it, until it is over on Israel’s terms. But at the current rate of killing, if we wait to speak until the war is over, there will be no Palestinians left to defend.”

To ensure that Palestinian death is never given the same weight as Israeli death, the latter must be elevated and the former erased.

According to a July report in the Lancet, one of the world’s oldest peer-reviewed medical journals, the true death toll in Gaza is likely greater than 186,000 people. This mirrors the findings of writer Susan Abulhawa, who, after two visits to the besieged enclave in June of last year, determined that the death toll is closer to 200,000 than 40,000 (the stagnant figure which has been presented to the public since the summer, even though hundreds of Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces every single week since).

This suppression of truth and the proliferation of misinformation is part of Israel’s greater propaganda strategy. To ensure that Palestinian death is never given the same weight as Israeli death, the latter must be elevated and the former erased. It’s why no foreign reporters have been allowed to enter Gaza since October 2023. It’s why the IDF continues to threaten and murder Palestinian journalists, whose positions are protected by international law.

Occupying forces always use terror to maintain control. It’s the nature of the beast. In his essay “In tune with their time,” Nasser Abourahme writes: “‘Gaza’ as a lesson in total obliteration has to be mediatised and displayed on every screen. The scale and reach of destruction has to be so severe, so total, and so visible that it reimposes the fact of the untouchability of the colonial sovereign in the very consciousness of the objects of its violence.”

But this violence can only be accepted by obscuring the truth in the public consciousness. If the truth is always obfuscated, then it can’t be contested, right? Yet, we don’t live in a world of complete abstraction; we live in a world where Palestinians have spent decades documenting their own erasure. A world where IDF soldiers have spent the past fifteen months peacocking their war crimes on social media, all while Israeli TikTokers mock Palestinian grief, Israeli and American politicians call for the mass murder of Gazans, and West Bank settlers commit pogroms while insisting that all they want is to live in peace. “This process rewires discursive associations to identify resistance to Zionism as the breeder of violence,” writes Ghina Abi-Ghannam. “As opposed to the very structure of the Zionist project in Palestine as an aggressive establishment that requires existentially eliminating Palestinian presence to ensure its survival.”

This is all to say that Elisa Albert’s social media posts and Tablet essay occur in a media landscape that elevates, and even valorizes, anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim sentiment.

“My whole book [the novel Between Two Moons] is a story about Arab-American girls coming of age in a time when Arabs and Muslims are intimidated into silence with the threat of being labeled a terrorist,” said Gawad. As the scheduled Albany Book Festival panel was about coming of age, Gawad felt it was necessary to express her concerns to the festival’s director. As she pointed out, “Based on the violence advocated for in the moderator’s public writing, there would be no future in which many girls in Gaza could come of age.”

That Albert’s post-October 7 writing wasn’t perceived as threatening, or even racist, made the conversation feel that much more necessary. As an Arab and Muslim American woman, Gawad approached the organizers with these specific concerns. “I asked them, ‘How am I, a person who wrote a book that critiques the very rhetoric that the moderator uses, supposed to engage in a good faith conversation?’”

At a certain point, Gawad also reached out to novelist Lisa Ko, who was scheduled to appear on the same panel. The two had met each other before so there was some familiarity, and Gawad shared her concerns about what Albert had written and published. That anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic rhetoric, Ko explained, led her to reach out to the festival organizers in support of Gawad. The festival director seemed indignant, confused by their concerns, but neither Gawad nor Ko could understand how, one year into an extremely well-documented genocide, these discussions were still happening.

All of this begs the question: in a time of genocide, who gets to be outraged? Who gets to be indulged, listened to, humanized, validated?

Gawad decided to withdraw from the panel, albeit with some sorrow about how things transpired. “I was angry,” she said. “Here was an Arab who didn’t get a seat at the table, and I was sad about it, but I assumed that the event would continue. I was surprised to hear that they had decided to cancel it.” Ko said she supported Gawad’s decision to not participate. “I was surprised and saddened when the director informed me that they were canceling the panel,” she told me. “He said that I would no longer be required to attend the festival. Then, the next day, I woke up to all these media requests and learned that the assistant director had written an email to [Albert] that said we had refused to be on a panel with her because she was a Zionist. Albert then made that email public, even though what the director wrote was not what had happened.”

Ko said it was a misrepresentation—that she neither withdrew from the panel nor said the word “Zionist.” The next thing they both knew, Gawad and Ko were being vilified in the news and harassed on social media. The harassment was based on a lie, but that didn’t matter. The charge of antisemitism was enough. By the time Zibby Owens, the prominent “bookfluencer” and daughter of billionaire Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, picked up the story, things had spiraled out of control. Bari Weiss’s indiscreet involvement didn’t help either. “Other authors, including people I’ve met professionally, were sending us hate mail,” said Ko. “Hundreds of abusive messages on every possible platform.”

All because Gawad privately decided to withdraw from a literary festival.

“In recent years, we’ve seen how powerful misinformation can be and how quickly it can spread. Even within the context of the past year, media and other institutions have been working to manufacture consent for genocide because the war is so deeply unpopular,” Ko explains, adding, “But people are drawing connections and are speaking out.”

Ko wanted the festival organizers and director to take ownership of what was done—the lying about her withdrawal and the mischaracterizing of her and Gawad’s intentions—but they’ve refused to do so. Their outrage, though based on falsehoods, trumped Gawad and Ko’s legitimate grievances. All of this begs the question: in a time of genocide, who gets to be outraged? Who gets to be indulged, listened to, humanized, validated?

Forcing you to participate in a never-ending debate about the nature of genocide or the meaning of Zionism is a way to keep the spotlight off the genocide itself.

At a certain point in our conversation, Gawad brought up Toni Morrison and how the great writer once wrote that distraction is one of racism’s most potent weapons. She paraphrases Morrison, “It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again your reason for being.”

A respected genocide scholar like Israeli historian Raz Segal (who wrote “A Textbook Case of Genocide” for Jewish Currents in October 2023) can detail how “the assault on Gaza is a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes,” yet someone like Albert crudely dismisses that assessment, and is then protected in that denial of objective truth by not just one but many literary organizations and institutions across the United States—organizations whose leaders would prefer to treat the US-sponsored annihilation of a people as either a “complex situation,” best not dwelled upon, or an opportunity for endless semantic arguments.

This is the deliberate distraction tactic at work. Forcing you to participate in a never-ending debate about the nature of genocide or the meaning of Zionism is a way to keep the spotlight off the genocide itself. “And that’s exactly what I’ve been caught up in for over a month,” says Gawad. “Explaining and justifying over and over again my reason for being, my reason for existing as an Arab and Muslim woman. But in all the hysteria over my withdrawal from this literary panel, those people in Palestine, in Lebanon, across the region, they have never come up. So, this distraction has worked. We made those people invisible. They die while we’re busy arguing through smoke.”

When asked what this time has revealed to her, Ko shared the following: “First and foremost, the real horrors of genocide and war should remain the focus. This is just one small incident in a far broader wave of censorship and repression. It has also been clarifying. What does it say when institutions are this invested in trying to mischaracterize writers, going so far as to fabricate lies to create a certain narrative—to what purpose, and to what end? Why is solidarity during this time so dangerous that they are working this hard to stop it?”

Every day, more and more people are coming to the realization that there’s a greater world worth fighting for, one where historical fact is esteemed, and where every person’s humanity is cherished and memorialized.

Gawad and Ko were both shown what happens when you dare to question the dominant narrative. When you no longer behave like a good immigrant, a silent immigrant, your character is assassinated, and your career is threatened. There’s a deeply insidious aspect to this kind of reality distortion—it shows how liberalism makes space for both institutions and individuals to legitimize, and manufacture consent for, state violence.

But how do you counter this reality distortion? How do you stay sane and stave off despair? Gawad tells me that what she’s leaning into is the core principle of justice at the heart of Islam. “I want to be a writer who is a part of an intellectual and principled community. And I know that community is out there.”

She shares how this time has given her clarity and perspective. Listening to her, I am moved by the courage it takes to remain steadfast, to look toward what is right and to act accordingly. There is something hopeful here. As brutal as the attacks against Gawad and Ko have been, they both remain dedicated to the practice of writing and of activism that is motivated by truth, honesty, and morality. There is a shift happening societally. Every day, more and more people are coming to the realization that there’s a greater world worth fighting for, one where historical fact is esteemed, and where every person’s humanity is cherished and memorialized.

Gawad and Ko remind us that our resistance is getting louder, and that very soon, those in positions of power will have no choice but to listen. That’s the power of speaking the truth. You’re protected by it because, eventually, it always comes out.

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