From the New York Times, this is the interview.

I'm David Markezi.

The writer, lawyer, and human rights activist, Rajah Shahade, who's 74, has spent most

of his life living in Ramallah, a city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Since he was a much younger man, he's been writing about what it's been like for him and other Palestinians to live under Israeli occupation.

That work, which is defined by precise description and powerfully measured emotion, has won him widespread acclaim.

His 2007 book, Palestinian Walks, Forays into a Vanishing Landscape,

won Britain's Orwell Prize for Political Writing.

And here in the United States, his book, We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I,

was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award.

He's also a co-founder of Al Haq, a human rights organization

that has documented abuses against Palestinians in the occupied territories for over 45 years.

To read Shahade's work, including over the years several pieces for the New York Times opinion section,

is to be exposed to a thinker with a long and stubbornly optimistic view of the

Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One who believes that peace remains possible. He also believes that

for peace to have any chance of prevailing, there's so much from the dominant stories told about

the region to how we talk about the conflict in the first place that needs to be reconsidered.

But at the end of another brutal year of strife and suffering,

with a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas holding,

but a plan for what's next still unclear,

I thought it might be helpful to speak with a writer

who has a real sense of the ways in which the past need not predict the future,

...