David Marchese

You know, it's striking to me in reading your works that you often express anger over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But at the same time, I never get a sense from your work that anger consumes you, that the anger has curdled into a hate or is the prism through which you view the situation in Israel and the occupied territories.

So what is your relationship with anger?

How have you not let it define you?

I think it's fair to say that justice or the pursuit of justice is one of the great themes of your work.

And given that, particularly now, when politics that are based in raw power are so ascendant, what is the role of a justice-driven writer?

And when you talk about the process, you're specifically referring to the building of settlements in the West Bank?

Yeah, that's part of it, of course.

That's a big part of it.

You know, it connects for me to this sort of illusion that I think is pervasive, and it's an illusion of collective responsibility, the illusion that all Israelis are in some way responsible for the actions of Netanyahu's government or the IDF, or the illusion that...

all Palestinians are supporters of Hamas or might be terrorists.

What might we do with that illusion?

Is that just a fact of politics that individuals are ascribed responsibility that might not apply?

Yeah, you know, it's interesting.

I think people can often conceive of the conflict as being thousands of years old, when the reality is it's a little over 100 years old.

And there's a long history of what you just described, of a different kind of living in that region of the world than today.

than I think is often assumed to be the case.

That's perverse.

Well, you know, what you're describing is Zionism.

Can you talk about what your personal experience is of Zionism as a political project?