Susan Abulhawa On Gaza, Rage, And The Right to Resist

WATCH Susan remind us how grief becomes resistance — and why rage without action curdles into shame.

This week on Out Loud with Ahmed Eldin, I sat with novelist, poet, and organizer Susan Abulhawa—author of Mornings in Jenin.

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In this searing episode of Out Loud with Ahmed Eldin, I sit with Palestinian novelist, poet, and activist Susan Abulhawa who speaks with brutal clarity, refusing half-truths to confront the genocide in Gaza, the complicity of global powers, and the power of righteous rage. This isn’t just a conversation—it’s a reckoning.

I invited Susan because so many of us—Palestinian or not—carry a rage we’re told to cool: an instinct to resist oppression that keeps getting policed while people in Palestine are being erased daily in plain sight. I wanted to know how to channel it.

“It’s unnatural to be polite in the face of extermination,
Anger is honest. Let it be fuel.”

Susan rejects silencing herself amid extermination. “I absolutely reject the policing of my speech when we’re being exterminated. I don’t give a shit about anybody’s feelings,” she says, dismissing decorum while children are “shredded” and “burned alive.”

Anger isn’t irrational—it’s power: “The thing that oppressors fear the most is the anger of the masses... It is a fuel.” Her loyalty to truth over politeness is a call to harness rage for resistance.

But Gaza isn’t just about survival. In Susan’s framing, it is the hinge upon which the future swings. She argues that a ruling Western elite is testing a model of domination in plain view: commit the unthinkable on camera, weather the outrage, escalate, repeat—until the public accepts helplessness. Iraq, Libya, Gaza: the cycle is the strategy.

You don’t have to agree with every detail to feel the chill. How many times in the last two years have you felt your ability to act shrink as the horror grew? That is not a personal failure, she insists. That is the point.

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Breaking the psychology of paralysis

Susan pointed to three patterns that keep people passive:

• Learned helplessness: shocks train you to believe nothing you do matters.

• The boiling frog: gradual escalation makes the unacceptable seem normal.

• The bystander effect: the more people watching, the easier it is to assume someone else will act.

Antidotes exist. Frantz Fanon’s call for de-alienation: reclaiming stories and traditions that make a people whole. The “first follower” principle: how one brave act sparks movements. And above all, escalation: not reckless, but deliberate—choosing action proportionate to your risk tolerance. Whether it’s boycotts, protest, legal defense, or direct action, the throughline is the same: advance, don’t retreat.

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Refusing euphemism

Susan calls what she witnessed in Gaza a “holocaust”—slaughter, starvation, deliberate erasure. She knows the cost of naming it. But she rejects the decorum that makes politeness our highest virtue while truth is inconvenient.

She calls Israel’s actions “demonic,” insisting it “should be wiped from the map” like Nazism or apartheid—not through genocide, but by ending supremacy. “People who want to stay there and live as equals are welcome,” she clarifies, demanding justice without apology. Zionism’s fragility shows in its “epic forgery,” like claiming falafel as ancient cuisine. Susan shares a 1930s story: Winston Churchill saw uprooted Palestinian trees collapse in Tel Aviv, remarking, “If you don’t have roots, things will fall down.”

“I’m loyal to the truth,” she said. “And to our ancestors.”

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Roots versus “death technology”

One of her most striking points was about roots. Israel, she argues, wields military and surveillance power but lacks what sustains a people: stories in the soil, unbroken traditions, belonging to land. In her telling, hatred toward Palestinians is bound up with envy—the desire to appropriate authenticity that can’t be faked.

She told a story of transplanted trees collapsing under children’s weight—a parable for what happens when there are no roots. The image lingers: a set built to mimic a forest, falling apart at the lightest touch.

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This Resistance, means, and the argument we avoid

We touched the third rail: the right to resist by any means under colonization. Susan is unapologetic about including armed resistance among them, insisting decades of polite methods have failed.

We dove into escalation, like Palestine Action’s UK activists shutting down arms factories, risking jail. “They are willing to pay the price... If more people do that, they can’t put us all in prison,” Susan says. She exposes the hypocrisy of “free societies” arresting hundreds for anti-genocide placards, noting, “Israel’s own belligerence is what’s changing the narrative,” as even the indifferent wake up.

America’s subservience to Israel—nailed by Susan’s hashtag #AmericaIsIsraelsBitch—cuts deep. “The United States is totally subservient to Israel—they have hijacked our sovereignty,” she states, citing scholars like Paul Findley. She traces Zionists pulling the US into World War I for the Balfour Declaration, using fabricated pretexts like the Zimmerman Telegram. The Iraq War, driven by the 1996 “Securing the Realm” white paper, was “fought for Israel.” Even right-wing voices like Marjorie Taylor Greene are starting to see the “big lie.”

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Complicity and betrayal

Nothing stings like betrayal. We talked about Western governments arming the assault while criminalizing dissent. And we spoke—briefly—about regional complicity: trade expanding, leaders equivocating, capitals that mouth solidarity while signing the opposite. That is a wound within the wound—an internal conversation Palestinians often reserve for family rooms. But history will not forget who cashed in while Gaza starved.

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Hope as discipline

What sustains her? Not a single hero story, but the accumulation: young fighters persisting despite famine, mothers shielding children, engineers turning rubble into possibility, writers composing by candlelight.

Hope here is not naïve. It is a discipline. It survives like a flame cupped in the wind—kept alive because to drop it is to die on your knees.

“We die standing,” she said. “Not on our knees.”

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Rage into responsibility

If you are burning but frozen, start small and move one step:

• Educate and unlearn. Read the histories you weren’t taught. Share carefully sourced material.

• Organize locally. Join or support coalitions, legal funds, boycott campaigns, aid drives.

• Escalate. Decide the cost you can carry—time, money, arrest risk—and act.

• Protect storytellers. Journalists, translators, archivists, and families of the disappeared need support.

• Make culture. Art, food, song, and story preserve memory.

• Show up together. A thousand arrests matter less when a hundred thousand arrive the next day.

And then—this is the hard part—love yourself enough to be unpopular. I’ve lost respect for people I once admired not for their politics, but for their refusal to respect themselves in this moment. Self-respect is a political act.

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What Susan is building

Amid everything, Susan keeps making. She has a children’s book, Palestine on the Moon, available for pre-order. She has a new novel on the way, following an elder who journeys back to Palestine after losing her memory. And in 2026 she’ll publish a bilingual anthology of stories by young Palestinians in Gaza she mentored: Every Moment Is a Life: Gaza in the Time of a Holocaust.

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I ended our conversation with gratitude—for the clarity, the rejection of euphemism, and the reminder that liberation is something we practice, not perform.

I also left energized and inspired. Susan’s clear-eyed, candid insistence on naming things as they are—and on showing how to escalate, organize, and hold Israel accountable—was more than bracing. It was galvanizing. She made change feel not abstract, but concrete. She made accountability feel not impossible, but inevitable—if we dare to act.

If you watch nothing else this week, watch the interview and tell me here or on YouTube what you think — particularly if something she said made you uncomfortable. Lean into the discomfort.

If you do nothing else this week, choose one action today. Rage without practice curdles into shame. Rage with practice becomes responsibility—and sometimes, finally, a road.

With love,
Ahmed

P.S. Follow Susan on X for more of her writing and organizing.

Links: Susan Abulhawa’s website | Episode on Spotify | Episode on YouTube