PEN America in Damage-Control Mode Amid Revolt From Staff and Palestinian Writers

In a letter to the board of PEN America, a group of current and former employees this week threw their support behind a recent, high-profile protest against the literary free speech organization’s refusal to align with its parent organization PEN International and call for a ceasefire in Gaza. The staffers, who sent the letter anonymously out of fear of professional retaliation, shared with the board two letters employees sent to the organization’s top brass last year “expressing concerns from a large number of staff that PEN America is failing to comply with its mission and values with regard to its work on Palestinian free expression.”

In December, 41 PEN America staffers sent a letter to leadership raising “continued concerns about the organization’s shortcomings in mounting a principled defense of free expression,” and warning that CEO Suzanne Nossel’s decision to take an “ill-conceived” trip to Israel would undermine PEN America’s credibility on issues it purports to care about. Another October letter scrutinized the organization’s initial response after Hamas’s attack, accusing PEN America of not also addressing the ongoing and ensuing suffering inflicted upon Palestinians.

PEN America, in its own words, “stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide,” with the specific aim to “defend writers, artists, and journalists.” Israeli forces have killed more than 100 Palestinian journalists, jailed critics for mere speech, and destroyed entire universities in Gaza. PEN America has failed the moment, according not only to the organization’s employees, but also a slew of prominent writers who rejected invitations to its celebrated international annual gathering in an open letter in mid-March.

That rejection, rather than the internal staff letters, sent PEN America into damage-control mode. Publicly, it responded by calling for an immediate ceasefire and hostage release, and making a “substantial” financial contribution of $100,000 to the PEN Emergency Fund for distribution to Palestinian writers in need. 

“Like many other organizations, PEN America is wrestling with the challenges of responding to a complex conflict that has divided our community. From the outset, we have had countless discussions with staff at all levels of the organization on how we can best contribute in this moment,” a PEN America spokesperson told The Intercept. “These discussions have been fruitful and are ongoing — and, of course, will continue to shape our policies. This is consistent with our role as a big tent organization that defends free expression and writers. Our work in defense of speech, by or in defense of Palestinians, most of which is publicly available, has been robust and extensive. Airing varied voices and reflecting complexity in our work are essential in fulfillment of PEN America’s principles and mission.”

The organization also reached out to a handful of well-known Palestinians to invite them to sit on a panel on censorship of Palestinian voices. Journalist and analyst Rula Jebreal, the recipient of one such Zoom invitation, said that she was willing to hear PEN leadership out but had no interest in serving as window-dressing for their missteps. Other Palestinian writers and activists, such as human rights attorney Noura Erakat, took a similar position. “No Palestinian wants to be the token Palestinian. It’s insulting and offensive. We’re not going to clean up your mess,” Jebreal said she told PEN America. (Erakat said she stood in solidarity with Jebreal and others. Jebreal and her husband Arthur Altschul Jr. have donated to The Intercept, and Erakat spoke at a recent Intercept fundraiser.)

The question, Jebreal said, is simply one of consistency. When Russia invaded Ukraine, she noted, PEN America disinvited two Russian dissident writers from an event hosted by New Yorker magazine writer Masha Gessen, a Russian American journalist who has been an outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin, after Ukrainian writers said they would feel unsafe in the presence of the Russians. (According to PEN America, it was the Russian writers who decided to withdraw.) “You went out of your way when Ukraine was under attack and now when it comes to Palestine, it’s as if we don’t exist,” Jebreal said. “We found out a lot of our allies, people who agreed with us on Iran, on Turkey, on Ukraine, then turned on us and said, ‘Those principles don’t apply to Palestinians.’”

Jebreal and others told The Intercept they were willing to continue engaging — not wanting to feed into the toxic stereotype that “Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity” — but they wanted the organization to first commit an internal investigation into how things had veered so thoroughly off course, a change in public posture toward the conflict, and an apology to and attempt to make amends with Randa Jarrar, a Palestinian American writer who was physically removed from a January PEN event that featured a pro-Israel speaker.

Jebreal also encouraged the organization during her meeting to host events focused on the growing number of Palestinian writers killed and arbitrarily detained, the cultural genocide underway in Gaza, as well as a call to stop framing the conflict entirely around October 7. “I’m 50 years old,” said Jebreal, who grew up in Jerusalem. “My entire life was under military occupation and you’re telling me the clock starts for you with that date.”

On October 10, three days after Hamas attacked Israel, PEN America issued a statement condemning the attack, focusing in particular on the militants’ targeting of a music festival. The statement also made a brief overture toward Palestinian suffering: “Political conflicts, even when they involve grave denials of human rights, can never justify nor be resolved through attacks on innocent civilians. Noting the mounting death toll among Israelis and Palestinians, PEN America calls on all parties to uphold the sanctity of human life and to safeguard civilians and human rights.”

A week later, nearly 30 staffers sent management a letter protesting the statement for failing to include historical context about Israel’s occupation of Palestine and for failing to address the issues of free expression that had already arisen in Israel’s retaliatory war on Gaza, including the killing of journalists. That same day, October 17, PEN America released a new statement with a sharper focus on the nearly 3,000 people — including 11 journalists — killed in Gaza by that point. PEN America said it had already completed the October 17 statement prior to receiving the staff letter, and that concerns in the letter not addressed in the statement were addressed in a subsequent message to staff.

In December, 41 staffers wrote another letter to leadership, taking pains to acknowledge the complexity of the situation, but arguing that in the aggregate, PEN America was giving signals it was siding with Israel in the conflict and overlooking what was increasingly becoming a clear crime against humanity. Of particular concern, the staffers wrote, was an upcoming trip by Nossel, the CEO, to Israel. (PEN America President Jennifer Finney Boylan joined Nossel on the trip, during which they met with both Palestinian and Jewish Israeli writers and human rights organizations.)

“It is a core tenet of PEN America that a country’s citizens should not be punished or held responsible for the actions of their governments. We wholly agree with this sentiment. At the same time, we are concerned that Suzanne Nossel’s trip as planned will be perceived as a dismissal of the urgent and worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza and free expression and human rights violations in the West Bank and in Israel,” the staffers wrote. “Our point is not that PEN America personnel should refrain from work-related travel to nations with whose governments we have disagreements, but that traveling to Israel at this precise moment, with the resumption of the war, loss of civilian life and civilian infrastructure, without a forceful institutional stance on the humanitarian crisis, is profoundly ill-conceived.”

The letter came a week after the end of a temporary truce in Gaza and, according to the staffers, shortly after PEN America’s senior leadership decided not to back a ceasefire. According to the letter, leadership rejected a recommendation to call for a ceasefire because doing so would fall outside the organization’s free expression mandate. PEN America said it ultimately decided to call for a ceasefire when it concluded that doing so would be understood by its constituency as consistent with its broader mission and that it had never before formally made an organizational call for a ceasefire.

In the letter to the board, sent on Tuesday this week, the current and former staff members said they wanted to see the organization work consistently across conflicts. Also this week, the PEN America union accused management of pushing policies that could discipline staff for engaging in political activity like signing letters criticizing PEN or attending a protest. “Sweeping restrictions like these coming from a leading free-expression organization would set a very dangerous precedent for employees everywhere,” the union wrote. “It is incredibly disappointing to see Management does not respect this internally, despite PEN’s guidance to other organizations.”

The organization has countered the charges, saying that contract language it proposed last year on political activity was “intended to ensure compliance” with its legal obligations as a non-profit entity and to avoid potential conflicts of interest. Beyond those considerations, the organization said, it “ does not seek to curtail the political activities of staff.” 

PEN America has also been facing concurrent external criticism. In a February letter that now has more than 1,000 signatures, writers urged the organization to “find the same zeal and passion that they have for banned books in the US to speak out about actual human beings in Palestine.”

In mid-March, Naomi Klein, Michelle Alexander, Hisham Matar, Isabella Hammad, Emily Wilson, and several other writers co-signed a open letter to PEN America, announcing they would not be participating in this year’s PEN World Voices Festival, which was founded in the wake of 9/11 to be a bulwark against xenophobia, dehumanization, and the choking-off of dissent ripping through the culture at the time.

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“In the context of Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, we believe that PEN America has betrayed the organization’s professed commitment to peace and equality for all, and to freedom and security for writers everywhere,” reads the letter. The co-signees criticized PEN America for not joining calls for a ceasefire; for condemning authors who honor Palestinian calls to boycott Israeli institutions; and contrasted the organization’s minimal efforts around Gaza to its campaigns opposing the war in Ukraine and in support of Latin American journalists.

In its response, the organization wrote that its focus on the war in Gaza was “extensive” — including webinars on Israel and Palestine; issuing more than 35 statements since October related to the war; and speaking out against efforts to chill Palestinian and pro-Palestinian speech — and outlined several additional steps it was taking. PEN also wrote that it has “continually affirmed” writers’ choice to participate in boycotts and opposed efforts to penalize boycotts of Israel, and it expressed “regret” over Jarrar’s removal from the January event.

The dissident writers welcomed the organization’s apparent interest in “introspection and self-appraisal” and asked the organization to put together a “group of individuals whose integrity and impartiality is beyond reproach” to review PEN America’s approach to the consequences of decades of Israeli occupation of Palestine. The writers explained the need for such an approach because “criticisms of bias in this area have been recurring over many years, and only this systematic approach can identify if there is a pattern.”

Members of the Worker Writers School — a literary group founded in 2011 at a Ford factory and composed of taxi drivers, construction and food service workers, home health aides, and more — voted unanimously to co-sign the response statement. The group’s members had also collectively decided to not attend the PEN World Voices Festival, said Mark Nowak, poet and founder of the school.

“I think this is a really important fact that for a lot of writers, you know, this is a really big decision to do this,” Nowak told The Intercept, comparing them to higher-profile writers. “For the Worker Writers School members, this is their big event of the year … their one chance to share their work with a big institution with a big audience.”

Correction: March 30, 2024, 3:37 p.m. ET
This article was corrected to remove an errant reference to the date of PEN America’s founding. It was also updated to include the organization’s position on the event involving Russian dissident writers and on cultural boycotts, and to disclose Rula Jebreal’s donation to The Intercept.

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