The View From Gaza
Notes from America with Kai Wright
WNYC Studios
4.4 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 16 October 2023
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How can we have a more honest conversation about security, war, and peace in the region? As the humanitarian crisis in Gaza deepens, we ask two scholars with ties to the region for help.
Kai is joined by Laila El-Haddad, a Palestinian author and journalist based in Clarksville, Maryland, whose family has fled their home in northern Gaza. She is the author of “Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between,” and her latest book is "The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey." Plus Anna Baltzer, who is a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, describes her own evolution in thinking about the relationship between security for Jewish people and Palestinian rights. She shares stories and perspectives from her book “Witness in Palestine: A Jewish American Woman in the Occupied Territories.”
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“Notes from America” airs live on Sunday evenings at 6pm ET. The podcast episodes are lightly edited from our live broadcasts. Tune into the show on Sunday nights via the stream on notesfromamerica.org.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What is your connection to Israel or Palestine? |
| 0:04.8 | My grandparents had to leave Palestine in 1948 to escape to Jordan from the Israeli occupation. |
| 0:12.4 | I went on birth right like 10 years ago and I just kept going back and I ended up making |
| 0:17.6 | alia and I do it with the country. |
| 0:20.4 | As Americans, again, it's all the violence, we're sick for peace and we want peace for |
| 0:25.0 | this people, they are human. |
| 0:27.0 | And we cannot just do this as an aside for all of us. |
| 0:29.2 | My grandparents were born in Palestine, that will expect any of the first world big countries |
| 0:33.5 | to side with us. |
| 0:34.5 | I am for peace. |
| 0:36.5 | As a rabbi, I have so much love for so many Israelis and so many Palestinians in my life. |
| 0:42.7 | That love and this grief is not available to be weaponized for a mass destruction of |
| 0:49.8 | life in Gaza. |
| 0:59.2 | It's notes from America, I'm Kai Wright, welcome to the show. |
| 1:15.4 | We talk about a lot of hard stuff on this show. |
| 1:18.3 | We do have fun too, but as a show that is essentially asking how the United States can |
| 1:23.4 | become the country we say we are, that means a lot of difficult conversations. |
| 1:28.2 | I try not to exceptionalize any of these conversations, all of them are deeply personal |
| 1:33.5 | and challenging for somebody listening. |
| 1:36.4 | But it just be a lie to say the one we need to have this week isn't uniquely emotional. |
| 1:41.2 | The news over the past week since Hamas launched its attack in southern Israel has been |
| 1:46.0 | filled with death and destruction. |
... |
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