Who We Are
Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) is a coalition of media, cultural, and academic workers who are committed to the horizon of liberation for the Palestinian people, and who organize against Zionism and American empire from within the imperial core.
Our namesake is the 1960s anti-war group American Writers Against the Vietnam War, an “umbrella organization” of (mostly) poets that, like our group, came together somewhat informally.
Since our first meeting in October 2023 — attended by a dozen of us — our numbers have swelled. Our vision, too, expands beyond the present moment of crisis. We are being continually transformed through participation in the movement to free Palestine, and we plan to continue the work of solidarity, shared struggle, and social transformation until liberation and return.
Our Principles of Unity
The Right to Resist
WAWOG holds a political line in support of the Palestinian right to armed resistance as part of the national liberation struggle. We have and will continue to produce and share political education materials on the many heroes of the resistance, including Souha Bechara, Basil al-Araj, Georges Abdallah. We decry the state repression of pro-Palestinian speech that is brought to bear most heavily on those who support the right of the Palestinian people—the right of all occupied peoples—to resist occupation and oppression.
The Right to Return
We affirm the revolutionary aspirations for a unified Palestinian people on unified Palestinian lands. We know that the Nakba never ended. We also know that the Nakba will end. It will end with the return of the Palestinian people to their homes, their land, their homeland. The right of return for all Palestinian refugees will be secured through the complete dismantling of “Israel.”
The Moral Necessity of BDS
Divestment from the Zionist project is key to bringing about its downfall. Since October 2023, WAWOG has helped to secure more that 200 organizational commitments to adhere to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, a significant material win for efforts to end the normalization of Zionism in our cultural spaces. We maintain that boycott and divestment play key roles in materially and culturally isolating and delegitimizing “Israel.”
Multiplicity of Tactics
WAWOG endorses a multiplicity of tactics, from picketing to civil disobedience to event disruption to higher-risk action. We reject the “outside agitator” narrative that seeks to divide and undermine those struggling together for liberation. As Diane DiPrima wrote, “No one way works, it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down.”
Movement Building
Our efforts to build a revolutionary cultural front require the participation of workers and organizers spanning many sector formations, particularly—but not exclusively—in the sectors of media, academia, and the arts. We work alongside and/or in service to several Palestinian-led organizations, as well as with anti-gentrification activists and abolitionists in their linked struggles. We stand firmly with the movement to Stop Cop City and the militant work of the forest defenders. Though we believe in organization and in coalition-building, we also endorse autonomous action against the police, the state, the empire.
Prisoner’s Liberation
Prisoner’s liberation is a central demand of the Palestinian revolutionary movement, shared by all factions of the regional resistance as well as the masses in exile and diaspora. Opposition to the carceral order and its racist logic is key to the longstanding solidarity between Black people and Palestinians. From printing the works of incarcerated rebels such as Ahmed Sa'adat and Khalida Jarrar, to screening the film Fedayeen as part of the campaign to free the Lebanese Marxist Georges Abdallah to supporting incarcerated writers exploited by PEN America. We endeavor towards these Black and Palestinian traditions of struggle, refusal, resistance and abolition, which is to say the world which we are attempting to co-author is a world without prisons.