From the London Review of Books
On 16 October, Sabrina Tavernise, the host of the New York Times podcast The Daily, spoke to two Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. ‘So, Abdallah,’ Tavernise said to Abdallah Hasaneen, a resident of Rafah, near the Egyptian border, who was only able to get a signal from his balcony, ‘we’ve been talking about all of the air strikes that have been happening since last Saturday, and of course the thing that happened last Saturday as well was this very deadly attack by Hamas on Israel. How do you understand that attack? What did you think of that?’
‘You cannot just put people into prison, deprive them of their fundamental rights, and then see nothing in response,’ Hasaneen replied. ‘You cannot dehumanise people and expect nothing … I am not Hamas, and I was never a big fan of Hamas … But what’s happening here is not about Hamas at all.’
Tavernise (sheepishly): ‘What’s it about?’
Hasaneen: ‘It’s about ethnically cleansing Palestinian people, it’s about 2.3 million Palestinian people. That’s why Israel, the first thing that it did was cutting off water and cutting off electricity and cutting off food. So this is not, never about Hamas. It’s about our mistake to be born Palestinians.’
Adam Shatz is the LRB’s US editor. He is the author of ‘Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination’, which includes many pieces from the paper,and ‘The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon’.
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