Women Who Submit joins the Palestinian-led Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel
Literature cannot be separated from the world.
Our founders created Women Who Submit because writing is a vital tool with which we make change and assert our humanity. We uplift marginalized voices because we know what happens when some voices are privileged and others are silenced.
On January 7, 2025, Women Who Submit leaders and members gathered on Zoom to discuss the Palestinian-led Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, a part of the larger Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS). It was the 15 month anniversary of Israel’s genocide against Palestine, the latest escalation in 77 years of occupation and ethnic cleansing. While we met, record-breaking winds and fires raged through our communities, leveling the homes of thousands of people, including several WWS members. The wind and fire were fueled by accelerating climate change on a planet overheated by fossil fuels, including those emitted by the 100,000 tons of U.S.-made explosives Israel has dropped on Gaza in the last 600 days.
Literature cannot be separated from the world.
For over 600 days, the United States and Israel have murdered Palestinian men, women and children in the world’s first live-streamed genocide. The official, recorded death toll is 57,000, but researchers estimate that the number could actually be as high as 186,000. That estimate was made over a year ago. Over 10,000 people are missing under the rubble of bombed buildings, presumed dead. Thousands more are projected to die due to forced starvation and disease caused by Israel’s brutal blockade on food, water, and medicine. 127,000 people have been injured, sometimes permanently disabled. Gaza is now home to the largest cohort of pediatric amputees in history. 43,000 children have been orphaned. 4,700 people have been “detained” or forcibly disappeared into Israel’s nightmarish prison system with documented evidence of torture. The total number of imprisoned Palestinian hostages is nearly 10,000.
For over 600 days, the Israeli Occupation Forces have decimated Gaza’s schools, universities, and libraries, attacking the nerve centers of Palestinian knowledge and culture. They have assassinated over 200 journalists, 115 civil defense workers, and over 1,200 healthcare workers. They have partially or wholly destroyed nearly every hospital in Gaza. They have displaced 2 million people. Along with the crime of genocide, the IOF have committed domicide (the destruction of homes), scholasticide (the destruction of schools) and epistemicide (the destruction of archives, libraries and other sites of knowledge production). The United Nations has recently said that Israel is guilty of the crime of extermination.
For over 600 days, we have watched in horror as the settler colony occupying Palestine attempts to annihilate an entire people, their land, and their culture, with the unconditional support of this settler colony called The United States. We have also been shielded from fully knowing the truth of that horror– by a media that silences the voices of the people trying to survive the genocide, and a government that criminalizes those who speak out in dissent. The authoritarian attacks on immigrant communities in the U.S. are linked to state repression of the movement for a free Palestine. I.C.E has terrorized and kidnapped several immigrants for their anti-genocide activism. Mahmoud Kahlil was prevented from experiencing the first three months of his child’s life.
We know what happens when some voices are silenced. Genocide silences voices. It cuts short lives and robs people of their future.
Genocide requires the complicity of cultural institutions to manufacture consent. While the bombs are dropped on hospitals and schools, while elders are burned alive in their tents, while parents watch helplessly as their children perish from forced starvation, there is an organized effort to neutralize any opposition to these horrors. We have seen literary organizations, journals, universities and newspapers do the soft work of making genocide acceptable. By doubting the death toll, by dehumanizing the victims, by dismissing the critics.
In early February, after input from our members, the Women Who Submit Board voted to affirm our commitment to PACBI. As an organization, we will:
- Boycott all cultural products and events that are funded, commissioned, or sponsored by an official Israeli body
- Boycott complicit Israeli institutions
- Boycott normalization projects
The key demands of PACBI are:
- End the occupation
- Dismantle the apartheid regime
- Let Palestinians return home
By committing to PACBI, we are, in the words of BDS organizers, “rejecting the normalization of Israeli violence against Palestinians in any part of life, including our art, literary, and educational communities” and “joining a worldwide anti-Zionist cultural front that can stand up to and help bring an end to Israel’s regime of occupation, apartheid and death.”
It is our duty as a socially conscious literary organization to oppose genocide not only in our words but in our actions. Women Who Submit stands in solidarity with the Palestinian people’s struggle for liberation against the settler colonial occupation that aims to destroy their land and culture. We commit to follow the principles of PACBI. We know that none of us are free if Palestine is not free.
Resources
Activism and Advocacy
Palestinian Feminist Collective
Information and Statistics
Aid for Gaza