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00:00So, what format will this interview appear in?
00:04I would write the interview as well, like in a question and answer format and we would
00:10we had thought that we would include this video as well.
00:14But now since you know, it would be an audio format, so we would simply it would be a written
00:21format interview.
00:22Okay, very good.
00:24Okay.
00:25Yeah.
00:26All right.
00:27Perfect.
00:28I actually read that book of yours, The World After Gaza, and I was I was really moved reading
00:37it.
00:38First of all, I wish I want to congratulate you for the exhaustive piece that this book
00:43is.
00:44And at the same time, I would also want to know about your views on some points that
00:50you know, I marked in the book.
00:53I hope that's okay with you.
00:54Yeah, absolutely.
00:56Please go on.
00:57All right.
00:58Now, I understand that your essay Shoah After Gaza, you know, it provides a comprehensive
01:08guide to understanding, you know, the contours of this grave humanitarian issue.
01:13And this book, The World After Gaza, would you call it a timely piece of literature or
01:20just a way to express the humiliation of our physical and political incapacity?
01:25If I may borrow the words from your book.
01:28I think, you know, I mean, I don't, I can't really make too many claims for the book as
01:35a work of literature or as a work of analysis or anything.
01:38It's just something I felt compelled to write.
01:42It's the only response a writer can make to an atrocity like this.
01:48It's up to other people to assess it as a piece of analysis, as a work of literature,
01:54whatever they want to see it as.
01:58It's entirely up to them.
01:59For me, it met a very profound and urgent need to put words, to put together sentences
02:11and to simply describe not only what was happening, because a lot of people have already been
02:18describing it, but try and sort of make sense of it in some way, using history, using the
02:27enormous archive that has been created in the last hundred years of various other historical
02:35atrocities.
02:37So it was very much a book really written almost entirely in response to something that
02:46was happening as I was writing.
02:49So unlike any other book I've written.
02:52Okay.
02:53For our readers, we just, you know, to introduce you as someone who is such an exhaustive writer
03:01and award-winning essayist and novelist and, you know, a prolific contributor to noted
03:05periodicals such as the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books.
03:11I was moved by the comments by Hisham Matar, the American-born Libyan-British novelist,
03:18you know, who says your book, and I quote, is a humane inquiry into what suffering can
03:24make us do and the troubling question of what world we will find after Gaza.
03:30Can you give us a glimpse of what that world would be?
03:35Well, unfortunately, at this point, it looks like a world where all the norms of not just
03:45war, conflict, but also basic morality are under threat like never before, certainly
03:54like never before in our lifetimes.
03:57So this is a world, as I speak to you, in which some of the most powerful people in
04:03the world are egging on nakedly racist, nakedly pro-Nazi political movements and personalities.
04:16They're openly stoking resentment and anger and hostility towards weaker groups, towards
04:25minorities, using every event, whether it's the fires in Los Angeles or, you know, the
04:35sort of, you know, random terrorist attacks to stoke these angers and resentments.
04:43So I think it's very clear that we've embarked upon a really treacherous phase in human existence.
04:52And certainly large parts of the world, and I include, you know, India in that category,