David Marchese

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 Shahadeh'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, and the ways in which it should.

Here's my interview with Raja Shahadeh.

Mr. Shahadeh, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.

Please call me Raja.

Raja, thank you.

I appreciate it.

Just to start, your mother and your father, who's a lawyer, were from Jaffa, which is now part of Tel Aviv, Jaffa area.

But when they lived in Jaffa, it was part of the British mandate, Palestine.

Can you tell me about how your family ended up in Ramallah in the West Bank?

I know in your work you've written about the experience of being in Ramallah and seeing the lights off in the distance.

And, you know, they were the lights of Jaffa.

And, of course, you've lived in Ramallah your whole life.

Can you tell me about how living in the occupied territory in the West Bank has affected your own sense of agency over your own life?

You use the term an exile's consciousness.

How would you characterize that?