David Marchese

You know, to an Israeli, 1948, of course, is the year of independence.

To a Palestinian, 1948 is the year of the Nakba.

Is there a new narrative that might be able to accommodate both sides of the conflict?

I just want to stay on the idea of, you know, narratives for a minute.

The writer Edward Said, the way he put it famously was that Palestinians lack the permission to narrate.

Is that still the case?

But despite that, there have been calls from Palestinians and advocates of the Palestinian cause to boycott the New York Times and other publications because of its coverage of the conflict in Gaza.

But for you, how and why do you decide to engage with the media?

In, I think, November 2023, you wrote a piece for the New York Review of Books in which you described having two plumbers come to your home in Ramallah.

This was one older plumber and one younger plumber.

And you wrote about seeing the younger man looking at videos of October 7th on his phone and smiling about what Hamas was posting that day, which I think the idea of...

someone feeling pleasure about that day is horrifying to a lot of people.

And so how did you understand expressions of happiness about what happened on October 7th?

Bravery is a word that you used in a way that was interesting to me in your book called Language of War, Language of Peace, written in the aftermath of the 2014 Gaza War.

And you—

referred in that book to the bravery of the Hamas fighters who were standing up to the mighty Israeli army.

How do you reconcile the bravery that you saw, and I think bravery is widely understood to be a positive attribute, with the fact of Hamas's violent religious extremism and total lack of regard for human rights, even in Gaza?

And, you know, it's...

There's an aspect of this conversation that I realize, you know, I'm asking you to speak on behalf of Palestinians broadly.

Do you find that to be a difficult position to be put in?