Asa Winstanley
The Electronic Intifada / August 14, 2026
As genocide continues in Gaza, the pro-Israel lobby in the US is stepping up its campaign against Palestinian cultural expression in the West.
Now, the Anti-Defamation League, one of the world’s most influential anti-Palestinian hate groups, is demanding a major publisher drop Susan Abulhawa, a leading Palestinian novelist.
Earlier in August, one of Simon & Schuster’s subsidiaries announced it would republish two of Abulhawa’s novels. Since then the lobby has piled on the pressure to cancel the books, claiming the author has used “anti-Semitic rhetoric.”
Being a bestselling novelist has never stopped Abulhawa from speaking out against the oppression of her people. She visited Gaza towards the start of the genocide, and has written essays and reports from on the ground for The Electronic Intifada.
Speaking to The Electronic Intifada on Thursday, Abulhawa was defiant, angrily rejecting the Israel lobby’s claims.
“Only Zionism comes wrapped in some inherited claim to the world’s care and tenderness,” she said. “I refuse that. I reject it outright.”
“There was a time in my life when I had to be careful … it was this sort of internalized self-censorship … that version of me is buried somewhere between [the 1982 Israeli-backed] Sabra and Shatila [massacre in Lebanon] and Nasr Hospital, where they let five infants die of starvation alone in the dark, crying and crying and crying.”
Atrocities
Abulhawa was referencing the Israeli army invasion of the northern Gaza Strip’s Al-Nasr Paediatric Hospital in November 2023. The invaders expelled the healthcare workers from the hospital, blocking all access.
“The Israeli military left five Palestinian babies to die in their small beds,” The Electronic Intifada’s Nora Barrows-Friedman reported at the time. “The tiny infants died starving, cold and alone. Their bodies decomposed. They were still connected to ventilation and intravenous tubes.”
The ADL – which spied on US citizens for Israel’s Mossad for decades – this week posted to X insisting that Abulhawa’s books had “no place on a mainstream publisher’s list” and claiming that it was “unacceptable” for Simon & Schuster to lend its “platform and prestige to someone with a documented history of dehumanizing Jews.”
As examples of what it alleged was “anti-Semitism” in Abulhawa’s books, the ADL quoted her novel Mornings in Jenin, in which a character describes Israelis as having no historical connection to Palestine, calling them “lily-skinned foreigners with no attachment to the land” and a “foreign minority.”
The ADL did not contest the factual accuracy of this statement by a fictional character, but merely asserted that it was “anti-Semitic.”
“I reject that wholesale, that I’m an anti-Semite,” Abulhawa responded in her interview with The Electronic Intifada. “This is another layer of colonization … it’s colonization of language itself.”
In the same novel, the ADL complains, “one character tells a Jewish person, ‘you are no different from Nazis’ … another passage claims Palestinians ‘paid the price for the Jewish holocaust’ … a grotesque form of anti-Semitism.”
Once again, the ADL cites no evidence for its claims of “anti-Semitism.”
At the publisher, The Electronic Intifada understands from sources, the ADL has been lobbying hard for Abulhawa’s books to be cancelled. “The executives are discussing it” in closed door sessions, this reporter was told earlier this week.
The lobby’s campaign led chief executive Greg Greeley to send out a company-wide email addressing “concerns” about “this important matter.” The email was obtained by The Electronic Intifada.
Greeley stood by the publication of Abulhawa’s “widely acclaimed” books and said the publisher would continue to print them. But he also condemned Abulhawa’s “comments on social media and elsewhere that have included harmful, dehumanizing, anti-Semitic rhetoric.”
He wrote that: “Being a publisher committed to a broad range of works and perspectives inevitably means that we will sometimes publish authors whose words or actions outside their books we strongly disagree with or even find offensive or hateful. Publishing a work is not an endorsement of every statement made by its author.”
Campaign
The Israel lobby campaign against Abulhawa has been amplified by right-wing media outlets.
The Washington Free Beacon this week smeared her as “a notoriously Jew-hating writer” in a report about the campaign against Simon & Schuster.
And writing for The Free Press this week, Simon & Schuster author Gerald Posner called for writers to boycott his occasional publisher if it did not drop Abulhawa.
Simon & Schuster “should not” publish her, he wrote, implying that the publisher was embracing “hate speech.”
He accused Abulhawa of having an “inflammatory public record,” of writing for The Electronic Intifada – “a radical pro-Palestinian online publication” – and of praising Palestinian resistance.
Posner also attacked X posts by Abulhawa and accused the publisher of “gross negligence” if it has failed to vet her posts. In one such post, he complained, Abulhawa stated that Israel is run by “Jewish supremacist demons.”
Posner works for the so-called “Jordan Peterson Academy,” an unaccredited online video streaming service founded by the eponymous manosphere influencer. The annual fee for the service is $499, Slate reported.
But as well as anti-Palestinian motives, Posner’s calls to boycott Simon & Schuster may also be motivated by the fact that the publisher no longer seems to be interested in his books anyway.
‘My words are not the atrocity’
In his op-ed for The Free Press, he admitted that “in recent years” his editor at the publisher had declined two of his book proposals: one which it seems would inveigh against gender-affirming medical treatment and another which looks like it would smear Palestinians as Nazis.
For decades, Posner has also been one of the leading promoters of the official government narrative around the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, claiming – despite all the evidence to the contrary, including a second government investigation which admitted that JFK was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy” – that CIA-asset Lee Harvey Oswald acted as the lone gunman.
Posner’s 1993 book on the subject has been extensively debunked by independent JFK researchers, including by the well-respected scholar Peter Dale Scott.
Abulhawa said in her interview that no colonized people in all of history has ever been required “to mind their manners so they don’t offend the people who are responsible.”
She expressed her frustration with “the idea that Palestine is going to be liberated on manners while Israel is conducting an extermination campaign” as “beyond belief.”
“My words are not the atrocity,” she said. “Genocide is the atrocity and I will continue to speak as I do, regardless of what the cost is, because I want people to be emboldened to not hold back anymore.”
“I have my words. I have language. I am a writer. And that’s all. That’s the only power I can wield, and if it hurts their feelings, then that’s all the better.”
ADL spies
Between the 1960s and the 1990s, the ADL employed an undercover agent named Roy Bullock to infiltrate and sabotage the Palestine solidarity movement and other causes in the United States. Bullock compiled files on thousands of progressive, left-wing and Arab groups and individuals.
Bullock even infamously tried to smear the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee by planting the group’s literature on tables at the convention of the Holocaust-denying Journal of Historical Review.
According to the Village Voice’s late investigative reporter Robert I. Friedman, writing in 1993: “Police confiscated ADL files on hundreds of mainstream groups ranging from ACT UP to Peace Now.”
According to Friedman: “Investigations by the FBI and police in San Francisco have revealed that the ADL has shared at least some of its spy-gathering material with Israeli government officials. What’s more, Israel apparently used tips from the ADL to detain Palestinian Americans who traveled there.”
Civil suits against Bullock and the ADL in the 1990s were eventually settled out of court in 2002 for $178,000.
But the ADL never admitted to doing anything wrong, and never had to face any serious penalty.
Palestine solidarity activists may well wonder what the ADL is doing in secret today.
“Gaza has altered our collective DNA,” susan Abulhawa wrote in an article for The Electronic Intifada in 2024. “We are united in our love and pain and resolve to resist and escalate until Palestine is liberated and these genocidal Zionists are held to account in the same manner Nazis were.”
In November 2024 she appeared in the UK at the Oxford Union debating society, and gave a much acclaimed speech.
Addressing Zionists everywhere, Abulhawa was defiant: “You will not erase us, no matter how many of us you kill and kill and kill, all day every day. We are not the rocks Chaim Weizmann thought you could clear from the land,” she said, referencing Israel’s first president.
“We are its very soil. We are her rivers and her trees and her stories, because all of that was nurtured by our bodies and our lives over millennia of continuous, uninterrupted habitation of that patch of earth between the Jordan and Mediterranean waters, from our Canaanite, our Hebrew, our Philistine, and our Phoenician ancestors, to every conqueror or pilgrim who came and went, who married or raped, loved, enslaved, converted between religions, settled or prayed in our land, leaving pieces of themselves in our bodies and our heritage.”
She continued: “The fabled, tumultuous stories of that land are quite literally in our DNA. You cannot kill or propagandize that away, no matter what death technology you use or what Hollywood and corporate media arsenals you deploy.”
“Someday, your impunity and arrogance will end. Palestine will be free.”
The debating society – which upholds itself as some sort of bastion of free speech – censored the video of her talk on their YouTube channel, at first deleting it, and later re-uploading it with over two minutes of her remarks removed, despite having promised to respect her right to free speech.
The censored comments included historically accurate statements about Israeli forces planting South Lebanon with booby-trapped toys, as well as other factual statements about how Israel has been systematically raping and sexually assaulting Palestinian men, women and children – including tortured prisoner Dr. Adnan al-Bursh – who may have been literally raped to death.
You can watch her full, uncensored, speech in the video HERE
Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist who lives in London; he is an associate editor of The Electronic Intifada and the author of the bestselling book Weaponizing Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2023)
