May 6, 2025, 6:19am
A group of American booksellers, publishers, and authors have issued a statement calling for Mosab Abu Toha—the award-winning Palestinian poet, writer, and librarian who was detained and beaten by Israeli forces as he tried to flee Gaza with his young family in November 2023—to be protected in the wake of threats against him by a far-right Zionist organization.
Betar USA—an extremist pro-Israel movement which has targeted pro-Palestine activists and advocates, vandalized property, and openly called for vigilante violence against student protesters as well as for the destruction of Gaza—has been supplying the Trump administration with “deportation lists” of individuals it believes are in the US on visas and have participated in pro-Palestinian protests, claiming that these individuals “terrorize America.” (The organization took credit for the detention and threatened deportation of recently graduated Palestinian Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil on March 8, as well as for the abduction of Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk on March 25.)
On a number of occasions over the past few months, Betar USA has used its official X account to target Mosab Abu Toha, calling him a “jihadi” and urging immigration authorities to deport him.
Abu Toha—who founded the Edward Said Library in Gaza (which was destroyed earlier this year by the Israeli army) and who is currently a visiting scholar at Syracuse University in New York—had been touring the country with his latest collection of poetry, Forest of Noise, when threats from Betar forced him to cancel the remainder of his engagements.
Unfortunately I had to cancel all my upcoming events in the United States as I felt unsafe traveling, especially after watching students and university professors abducted on the street just in front of other people. I had 16 events scheduled for the next five weeks (at Stanford,…
— Mosab Abu Toha (@MosabAbuToha) March 28, 2025
In response, Revolution Books of Harlem and several other booksellers and publishers from around the country have released an open letter declaring their “determination to defend Mosab Abu Toha and to stand with writers in the cross-hairs of this fascist assault on voices telling the truth of the subjugation of the Palestinian people” and calling on bookstores and other cultural institutions to hold readings of Abu Toha’s work in order to raise awareness of the situation.
Toha, a Gaza native who just yesterday received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary (for his New Yorker stories “on the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza that combined deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience of more than a year and a half of war”) has every reason to be fearful. Earlier this month, the Egyptian writer and former political prisoner Abdelrahman ElGendy—another outspoken critic of Israel who has been targeted by the anonymously-run doxxing website Canary Mission in recent months—was forced to flee the United States.
You can read the Revolution Books letter in its entirety, and submit your name as a signatory, here.