What We Do
Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) is one organization among a breadth of critical instigators working to expose cultural complicity with Zionism and with American imperialism. As writers (and artists, and teachers, and more), we know that speech can both inform and take the form of action; that struggles for liberation can and must be advanced on discursive terrains; that old oppressive narratives must crumble as new consciousnesses grow. Armed with words, we will keep fighting the narrative war.
Yet words, no matter how weighted and well-aimed, will not suffice. Our duty is ultimately to material transformation. There can be no business as usual, no culture as usual, until Palestine is free. The movement and the moment demand a clear analysis of our tactics and priorities — and more radical forms of intervention. Leveraging our resources as a group of writers, artists, and culture workers in this movement, we will continue to hold Palestine at the center of public attention.
WAWOG comprises several committees and chapters, along with a number of ad hoc working groups. Our four committees, at present, are: Communications, Cultural Boycott, Labor, and Popular Education. Our active chapters are in Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, and Toronto.
Committees
Communications
The communications committee is responsible for all forms of external communication about the actions and activities of WAWOG, as well as, sometimes, those of our movement partners. We document events, rallies, teach-ins, and direct actions in our cities. We agitate for cultural boycott, often campaigning for ‘common-sense’ boycotts of the mainstream media, art, and culture institutions that are not only complicit in but accountable for the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people. We also aim to provide or uplift alternatives to what we critique. The committee seeks to educate our audiences not only about the present reality in Palestine, but also about the history of Palestinian life, struggle, and resistance.
Our broadcast channels include Instagram, Twitter, and the WAWOG Bulletin. We co-created, with NSJP and PYM, the Popular University channel — for all student intifada news — on Telegram.
Labor
The labor movement in the West has been electrified through the massive work of solidarity. Academic workers are heeding calls from Palestinian trade unions to strike for Gaza. Arts workers are forming new unions and putting PACBI on the negotiating table. WAWOG aims to empower workers to coordinate tactics, leverage their bargaining power, and disrupt business as usual. We also seek to arm workers in the spheres nearest our own — media, academia, arts and culture — with the political education required to remain steadfast and strategic. In collaboration with networks such as Labor for Palestine and a number of unions and worker coalitions, we can support broader labor-driven interventions, from pursuing divestment within unions to interrupting the production and shipment of weapons to “Israel.”
Cultural Boycott
“In addition to their financial and reputational effects, boycotts shorten the perceived distance between moral actors.” Inspired by the boycotts that hastened the end of apartheid in South Africa, the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) asserts the role of culture in enabling or resisting structures of oppression. By committing to the boycott’s guidelines, cultural organizations refuse to let “Israel” artwash its reputation through our collective labor. More institutions than ever before are explicitly rejecting Israeli funding, collaborations, and normalization projects, which bring together Palestinians with Israelis without a clear framework of co-resistance to Israel’s apartheid, settler colonialism, and genocide. We look to cultural boycott, including PACBI, as a strategy for material transformation and as a site for important, iterative dialogue within the communities of our institutions. Even in the absence of material ties to Israel, joining the boycott is a means of rejecting the normalization of Israeli violence against Palestinians in any part of life, including our art, literary, and educational communities. The boycott ends when Israel’s regime of settler-colonial apartheid is dismantled, Palestinians can enjoy their inherent and internationally-recognized rights, and Palestinian refugees can return home to their ancestral lands from which they have been ethnically cleansed for decades.
Popular Education
Our newly formed Popular Education committee will work with the broader leftist, anti-Zionist, and anti-imperialist community, as well as with the other committees in WAWOG, to help build a revolutionary cultural front for a free Palestine. A “front,” cultural or otherwise, implies a mass movement both within and beyond institutions. WAWOG must face outward and ask what our communities need from us. Most pressingly, we have been moved by the student intifada to consider how we as an organization can respond to and guide students, young organizers, or people new to participating in struggle. We are building a program of trainings and workshops, which are intended not to shape ideologies but to propagate knowledge.
Much of WAWOG’s current work focuses on pressuring institutions to adopt anti-Zionist stances. The Popular Education committee will complement this work by using our skills as researchers, writers, educators, and advocates to help individuals and organizations — both in and outside traditional educational institutions — develop the curricula and tools necessary to forge the path for successful actions, occupations, and narrative strategies. Our work will focus on education that goes beyond knowledge acquisition, instead helping foster the ability to put knowledge into action in principled and effective ways.