After just seven months in the role, the president of one of the foremost US literary organisations resigned last week over what he described as the unfair treatment of Palestinians compared to Israelis and Jewish Americans.
Dinaw Mengestu, a celebrated Ethiopian-American novelist, exited the top job at Pen America on Thursday after the group published a report about the emotional toll on Israeli and Jewish-American writers after the fallout from Israel's nearly three-year-long genocide in Gaza.
Many reported losing jobs or career opportunities.
Mengestu wrote in an Instagram post on Sunday that "it is not about different opinions" or "different experiences", but rather "PEN America's ongoing failure to defend free expression fairly and equitably", as it keeps producing work that "supports suppression through bigotry and indifference".
That suppression, he described, comes from undermining the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which he maintained is also a form of protected free speech under the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
Human Rights Glance
AL-MAGHAZI REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza Strip—At midnight, Waad al-Shafi was still awake, sitting on the floor beside her 22-month-old son, Jawad. The room was small and worn down by Israeli shelling. Long cracks run across the concrete and flakes of paint hung from the corners. The dim light cast shadows on the wall behind her.
Israel has issued orders to confiscate large tracts of Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank in order to expand a road for Israeli settlers in the area.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has said US envoy Steve Witkoff described Gaza’s entire population as “two million Nazis” during a private meeting last year.
An Israeli soldier’s photo of a Palestinian man from Gaza stripped to his underwear, blindfolded and bound face-down to an iron rod corroborates extensive reporting on Israeli torture of Palestinians in detention and itself may constitute a war crime, rights groups have said.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a man killed by federal immigration agents during a traffic stop in Houston this week, was not the intended target of the “enforcement operation”, the Department of Homeland Security said on Thursday.
An Israeli strike on Tuesday killed Mohamed Fawaz al-Wahidi, the public relations director for the Egyptian Relief Committee in Gaza.





























