Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life

“Since the start of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians, I have been grasping for words. Yazbek has done something extraordinary. She has captured the vocabulary we have all been searching for by turning to the people who witnessed this violence firsthand in Gaza. The book does not make heroes of genocide survivors, nor does it romanticize their struggle. Instead, we are invited to mourn with them, to marvel at their endurance, and to be sobered by humanity’s capacity for barbarism. Yazbek shows us what it means to bear witness, to make space for grief, pain, and suffering too vast to be contained, and how to do so with dignity, respect, and humility. She has once again modeled what it means to be a keeper of humanity’s memory.” —Tareq Baconi, author of Fire in Every Direction

“A work of profound ethical significance, a direct offering of words from voices that should never be silenced. Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life is almost too painful to read, but so deeply humane and important that it compels us not to look away.” —Preti Taneja, author of Aftermath

“This is a remarkable, shattering book that holds its voices with dignity and care. It speaks to us from a red world of absolute loss, yet is suffused with an extraordinary persistence of love. Beyond geopolitics, rhetoric, territory, and leaders, there remains the bare fact of broken lives and the unbearable weight of human love.” —A. L. Kennedy, author of Alive in the Merciful Country

“These testimonies of the unconscionably injured are among hundreds of thousands such testimonies emerging from Gaza since October 7, 2023. Despite Israel’s genocidal drive to silence Palestinian voices, despite Western complicity in this silencing, these twenty-six testimonies—shared with Yazbek and translated by Price—now exist as pages. If, like me, you have the means and the capacity to read them in all their blistering detail, and if you too have no personal knowledge of the unspeakable zannanat that plague these pages, then you—we—have a particular duty: not only to read these precious words, but to act on them.” —Natasha Soobramanien, coauthor (with Luke Williams) of Diego Garcia