Yahia Lababidi is an Arab-American writer of Palestinian background. He is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry and prose, including most recently On the Contrary (2025), a study of the lives and literature of Friedrich Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde. Lababidi’s acclaimed collection, Palestine Wail, is available from Daraja Press.
I grew up believing that fidelity to language is fidelity to truth. Scripture taught me that truth is a form of prayer, and that naming is part of justice. Then I learned how language is trained to look away. In the American conversation about the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza and Palestine, words are rinsed until they shine with neutrality, while the bodies they describe grow dim. The result is a strange theology of news, where grief must pass an examination before it is shared, and where power writes the glossary.
In the weeks after Oct. 7, anchors found an ease of speech they rarely grant Palestinians. Faces from southern Israel filled our screens: named, profiled and mourned. By mid-October, Israel killed thousands in Gaza—many of them children. The camera kept its distance. The word that leapt to the teleprompter was "caution." Images blurred and numbers hedged, context was treated as suspicion rather than care.
The grief of one people became a national ceremony; the grief of another, a footnote.
If language is a vessel for conscience, these choices matter. A hospital becomes a "compound," bombardment becomes an "operation," a family under rubble becomes "collateral." Such phrasing allows atrocity to appear as policy, and policy to pass as inevitability. We are told this is balanced when, in reality, it scolds both the arsonist and the burning house.
If language is a vessel for conscience, these choices matter. A hospital becomes a "compound," bombardment becomes an "operation," a family under rubble becomes "collateral."
- Yahia Lababidi
What we call balance often conceals allegiance. The United States supplies weapons, funding, diplomatic cover and ideological shelter to Israel. Washington fast-tracks munitions while vetoing ceasefire resolutions at the United Nations, demanding the press describe the result as a "cycle." Institutions obey through habits as much as manufactured consent because the script already exists.
Editors learn which nouns invite trouble. Reporters understand which verbs are preferred. Freelancers discover the cost of clarity.
The money is not incidental. Contracts enrich the usual firms as careers rise in their shadow. The casualties are an afterthought. The ledger sits backstage, while the performance onstage defines itself as neutrality. The empire supplies language and weapons, while it is language that returns the favor by laundering intent.
Every culture keeps a book of sorrows. In ours, some sorrows earn public sympathy more readily than others. When Israel kills a Palestinian journalist, headlines bend into the passive voice, and the subject disappears. When a Palestinian-American is beaten at a checkpoint or murdered by Israeli security forces, procedure replaces justice. Families who bury their children must clear a test of civility, then defend the right to weep without a preface.
To mourn openly is treated as a provocation. To ask for equal mourning is mistaken for politics.
This dynamic is not an accident of tone. It is how imperial culture protects itself. If Palestinian grief is marginalized, policy can proceed without reckoning. The audience is soothed by the idea that tragedy has no author, that rubble is a natural event and that history began yesterday. In such a world, the right dead receive sympathy, while the living must demonstrate moderation.
I do not write to police the language of others. I write to examine mine. I want a Western vocabulary that does not reduce Palestinians to a problem or political question in need of management.
- Yahia Lababidi
We were told that social media would democratize speech. Instead, many Palestinians and their allies discovered another border regime. Posts vanish without explanation and archives dissolve, as certain words trigger shadow bans. Meanwhile, coordinated networks flood platforms with talking points until the algorithm mistakes noise for truth.
People adapt. They speak in code. They smuggle testimony through poetry. They post with patience. The work continues because memory continues. Forgetting is the most dangerous technology.
Before my essays, I wrote sanctioned paragraphs for large institutions. I learned how official speech is constructed, and how clarity is stripped from a sentence. Words like "occupation" return with red ink. Adjectives such as "disproportionate" are deemed inflammatory. One is encouraged to prefer symmetry over accuracy.
The effect is spiritual and does violence to one's soul. Conscience is taught to whisper. The room grows quiet when it should sound an alarm.
Why is our grief mistrusted? Why must we condemn ourselves to be heard? Why is Palestinian life translated into numbers—not names? Empires do not only hold territory; they hold vocabulary. As such, recovering our speech is part of regaining our dignity.
The phrase "U.S. imperialism" may sound antique, but the reality is current. It lives in supply chains, military aid, diplomatic vetoes and the expectation that our media will avoid language that might complicate partnership. It governs which deaths are described and which are rendered abstract. It shapes curriculum, philanthropy and the scope of respectable debate. Above all, it trains the public to treat Palestinian life as a question—not a fact.
Imperial culture does not announce itself with banners. It moves through euphemism. It borrows the aura of reason while pruning history. It requests deference in the name of complexity, and it rewards those who provide it with access.
Say "occupation" where there is an occupation. Say "siege" where there is a siege. If a journalist is killed, name the bullet and the chain of command. If a neighborhood is erased, name the policy permitting erasure. Then, listen to survivors.
Such speech is not fury; it is repair. It gives words back to the people who have lived under them. It restores trust between the public and the page.
There are journalists in the United States who begin from testimony rather than spectacle; who respect context over an alibi; who resist the symmetry that mistakes management for justice. Chris Hedges and Moustafa Bayoumi are among them. Their work does not flatter power. It honors the living by telling the truth about the dead. It remembers that language can also be occupied, and that freeing it is part of the same struggle.
To name is a civic and spiritual duty. Will you reflect? Will you testify? Will you remember the stranger? These are not abstract pieties but disciplines of attention. When we choose "compound" for a hospital, or "incident" for a massacre, we are answering those questions in the negative. When we centralize accurate names, we widen the circle of humanity.
I do not write to police the language of others. I write to examine mine. I want a Western vocabulary that does not reduce Palestinians to a problem or political question in need of management. I want a common speech that lets readers feel that a child pulled from rubble requires no preface.
Empire teaches us to treat reality as talking points. Faith teaches the opposite. If the prophets have any lesson for journalism, it is this: Speak without fear where the truth is plain. Refuse to wrap cruelty in fine phrases. Follow the flame of conscience, even when it threatens comfort.
I offer these lines in the name of tenderness and law—memory and justice—which belong together when language is healthy. Violence is asymmetrical, just like truth. The world deserves words that admit as much.
Support journalists who center Palestinian testimony with patience and respect. Hold editors to their standards. Resist euphemism when it appears on your screen. Share stories that restore names and faces. Each act strengthens the possibility of a public language that does not betray the people who must live under it.
This is the work of citizens and of writers. It is the work of the heart. Conscience, once awakened, has no flag.
