David Marchese

It was edited by Annabelle Bacon.

Mixing by Sonia Herrera.

Original music by Dan Powell, Diane Wong, and Marian Lozano.

Photography by Philip Montgomery.

The rest of the team is Priya Matthew, Seth Kelly, Paola Neudorf, Andrew Karpinski, Amy Marino, Mark Zemel, and Brooke Minters.

Our executive producer is Allison Benedict.

Next week, Lulu talks with ultra-runner and mountaineer Killian Journet.

I'm David Marchese, and this is The Interview from The New York Times.

From The New York Times, this is The Interview.

I'm David Marchese.

The writer, lawyer, and human rights activist Raja Shahadeh, 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 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.