DEMOCRACY NOW
In this special broadcast, we air excerpts from a recent event organized by the Palestine Festival of Literature at the Union Theological Seminary here in New York. The event featured a discussion between the acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates and Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi. Coates won the National Book Award for his book Between the World and Me. Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia. His books include The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. Their conversation was moderated by civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander.
Transcript
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. In this special broadcast, we’re airing excerpts of a recent event organized by the Palestine Festival of Literature at the Union Theological Seminary here in New York. It featured a discussion between the acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates and Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi. Coates won the National Book Award for his book Between the World and Me. His other books, We Were Eight Years in Power, The Beautiful Struggle and the novel The Water Dancer. Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University. His books include The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. Their conversation was moderated by the civil rights attorney and author Michelle Alexander, who asked about personal connections to Palestine. This is professor Rashid Khalidi.
RASHID KHALIDI: I’m honored to be here, and I’m extremely pleased that it was possible to put this together. This is the second Palestine Festival of Literature event that has been canceled and canceled again, and the heroic organizers managed to pull it together. They did the same thing in London, where I was supposed to speak last Friday. And it was canceled and canceled again in London. They sent the anti-terrorism police to the Royal Geographic Society and told them they could not hold the event, but they held it anyway.
My connection to Palestine is obviously a personal one. My family is from there. I have family there now. My niece’s family is actually in Gaza. They live in Nu’man, which is a neighborhood of Gaza right near the sea, or not far from the sea. They fled from their home under bombardment to the southern part of Gaza. They were being bombarded there. And so they went back to the shelter of their home. And then, just two days — just yesterday, because they were warned that the neighborhood would be bombed, they moved to the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, which is, like all hospitals in Gaza, threatened by the Israeli military with being bombed. So that’s part of my connection. And I have family in other places there.
I was there last in March, and it was obvious that the situation was on the point of exploding. One has to be there to see exactly how awful occupation and dispossession and decades of living as people have had to live, whether in refugee camps or in other parts of occupied Palestine, whether they’re Palestinian citizens living as fifth-class citizens in Israel, whether they’re in the Gaza Strip, whether they’re in the West Bank, whether they’re in Jerusalem. I should say that my wish is that every single one of you has a chance to go there.
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