Susan Abulhawa

Susan Abulhawa's parents, born in At-Tur, a neighborhood on the Mount of Olives east of the Old City of Jerusalem, were Palestinian refugees of the Six-Day War in 1967. Her father, according to one account, "was expelled at gunpoint; her mother, who was studying in Germany at the time, was unable to return and the couple reunited in Jordan before moving to Kuwait, where Abulhawa was born in 1970."^[1]

Her parents split shortly after her birth and Abulhawa's childhood was turbulent, moving between Kuwait, the United States, Jordan, and Palestine. She lived in the United States with an uncle until she was 5, then spent several years moving between relatives in Jordan and Kuwait. She lived in Dar al-Tifl al-Arabi, a Jerusalem orphanage, from the age of 10 to 13.^[1] At 13 she returned to the United States, where she lived with her father briefly before entering the foster care system.^[2]

Abulhawa studied biology at Pfeiffer University in North Carolina, and completed a masters in neuroscience (biomedical science) at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine.^[2][1]

After her studies, Abulhawa began a career in medical science.^[2][1] Prior to dedicating herself to writing full-time, she worked as a researcher for a large pharmaceutical company.^[3][4]

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In July 2001, Abulhawa founded Playgrounds for Palestine, a non-governmental organization dedicated to upholding The Right to Play for Palestinian children and build playgrounds in Palestine and UN refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria.^[5] The first playground was erected in early 2002.^[6][7] She is involved in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and as a speaker for Al Awda, a Palestinian right of return coalition.^[1] Abulhawa is signatory to the boycott^[which?] campaign against Israel, including a cultural boycott. She gave the keynote address at one of the first campus BDS conferences at the University of Pennsylvania.^[8] Abulhawa has said the BDS movement was "one of the most effective ways to promote Palestinian rights and achieve justice against Israel's ongoing ethnic cleansing".^[9]

Abulhawa has compared Israel to apartheid South Africa.^[10] In 2013, Abulhawa declined an invitation from Al Jazeera Media Network to participate in a discussion about the Nakba with three or four Israelis, having been asked by the producer to participate as the only Palestinian as they needed her to "balance things out".^[11] In an explanatory letter, she criticized the premise of the discussion, comparing it to featuring descendants of Nazis on Holocaust Remembrance Day with a token Jewish participant.^[12]

In 2024, Abulhawa declared in light of the Gaza war that "Israel is committing the holocaust of our time, and it is doing it in full view of a seemingly indifferent world."^[13] On November 29, 2024, Abulhawa was invited by the Oxford Union to debate the motion "This House Believes Israel is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide". She spoke as a member of a team in favor of the proposition together with Miko Peled and Mohammed El-Kurd. The motion was carried with a majority of 278 to 59. The Oxford Union later deleted her original recording on YouTube and uploaded a censored version. Abulhawa responded that the Union seemed to have yielded to demands from Zionists "as Palestinians struggle to make our voices heard in the midst of a genocide".^[14][15]

Abulhawa has been strongly critical of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who she has called "a depraved Zionist trying to ignite World War III". One month after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Abulhawa tweeted: "This man is no hero. He's mad and far more dangerous than Putin."^[16] In March 2023, Abulhawa denied being a "cheerleader for Putin", who she said had "committed horrible crimes", but asserted that Putin had agreed to terms to end the war that Zelenskyy had rejected. Abulhawa stated: "It's shocking to me that western media continues to promulgate this kind of 'good versus evil narrative'."^[17]

Abulhawa has referred to Israelis as "rootless, soulless ghouls" in her writing, as well as describing the October 7, 2023 attacks as a "spectacular moment that shocked the world".^[18] She described the Gaza war as a "Jewish supremacist slaughter", writing, "these sons of Satan will taste what they meted to us".^[19] In December 2024, Abulhawa said that Zionists "aren't human like us" and that "we're ruled by spawns of Satan", in reference to Governor of Pennsylvania Josh Shapiro signing missiles alongside Volodymyr Zelenskyy at a factory supplying munitions to Ukraine.^[20][21]

In May 2025, after the Capital Jewish Museum shooting in which two Israeli Embassy staff were killed, Abulhawa said the victims were "genocidal cheerleaders" and "human garbage", and that "no genocidal Zionist should be safe anywhere in the world". She described the attack as "an act of resistance", while also saying that it could be "a false flag to focus [attention] on manufactured antisemitism".^[20] In August 2025, Abulhawa wrote on Twitter that "Israelis should not feel safe anywhere in the world", and "I also don't give a shit if people collapse the distinction between zionists from jews". She called to "wipe that vile colony [Israel] from this earth".^[22][23]

In April 2026, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned Abulhawa's comments as "reprehensible" and "patently unacceptable".^[19][18] Al Jazeera stated that some activists, such as Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, criticized Mamdani for "reinforcing harmful narratives that conflate support for Palestinians with anti-Jewish sentiment". In a video statement, Abulhawa said that her comments were not antisemitic or anti-Jewish because racism "can only flow from those who have power".^[22] She said that "Israel and by extension, Israelis ... have destroyed, shattered and robbed my family of everything", and described "the feelings [Palestinians] have of pain, rage, contempt or hatred, coupled with the impotence to make the suffering stop".^[19]

Summarize Timeline Fact Check

Abulhawa's political and romantic fiction is written in English. Her first language in which she learned to read and write was Arabic.^[5] Her writing career began with essays and political commentaries. Her work appeared in newspapers and magazines, including the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Internationalist, The Christian Science Monitor , and more.^[24]

Abulhawa is a contributing author to two anthologies, Shattered Illusions (Amal Press, 2002) and Searching Jenin (Cune Press, 2003).^[25]

Her debut novel The Scar of David (2006), republished as Mornings in Jenin (2010), is a multigenerational family epic spanning five countries and more than sixty years, focusing on the effects on Palestinians of the Israeli occupation. It became an international bestseller translated into 32 languages.^[1][26][27]

In 2013 Abulhawa published a collection of poetry entitled My Voice Sought the Wind.^[28]

Her second novel, The Blue Between Sky and Water (2015), a novel of family, love and loss centered on Gaza City, garnered a global readership and critical acclaim.^[29][30] Her third novel, Against the Loveless World, was published in 2020, again to critical acclaim.^[12][31][32]

Novels

• Mornings in Jenin (Bloomsbury, 2010, ISBN 978-1608190461).
• The Blue Between Sky and Water (Bloomsbury, 2015, ISBN 978-1632862228).
• Against the Loveless World (Bloomsbury, 2020, ISBN 978-1526618801).

Other

• Abulhawa, Susan (2025). "Gaza is Humanity's Moment of Truth". In Davutoglu, Ahmet; Falk, Richard (eds.). Genocide in Gaza: Voices of Global Conscience. SCB Distributors.
• Will the Flower Slip Through the Asphalt: Writers Respond to Capitalist Climate Change, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2017.
• This Is Not A Border: Reportage & Reflections from the Palestine Festival of Literature, New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.^[33]
• Shattered Illusions, anthology (Amal Press, 2002)^[34]
• Searching Jenin, anthology (Cune Press, 2003)^[34]
• "Memories of an un-Palestinian story, in a can of tuna" in an anthology: Penny Johnson; Raja Shehadeh (eds.) (2012). Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home.^[35]
• My Voice Sought The Wind, poetry collection (Charlottesville: Just World Books, November 2013)^[36]

• Arab American Book Award Winner^[37]
• The Leeway Foundation Edna Andrade 2003 award for fiction and creative non-fiction^[24]
• Best Books Award for Historic Fiction^[38]
• MEMO Palestine Book Award^[39]
• Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Award^[40]
• 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize Finalist^[41][42]
• Arab American Museum Award for Fiction^[43]
• Long-listed for Rathsbones Folio Prize^[37]
• 2020 Palestine Book Awards Winner^[37]
• Finalist for the 2020 Athenaeum of Philadelphia Literary Award^[44]

• Jenin – Palestinian city, northern West Bank