Roundtable: Palestinian Americans share their perspectives on conflict in Gaza

The health ministry in Gaza reports at least 3,700 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli strikes since Oct. 7.

How are Palestinian Americans processing the ongoing conflict?

Today, On Point: Palestinian Americans share their perspectives on conflict in Gaza.

Leila Farsakh, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Author of "Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel: Labour, Land and Occupation." Editor of "The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond."

Philip Farah, economist at the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Founding member of the Washington Interfaith Alliance for Middle East Peace. Co-founder of the Palestinian Christian Alliance for Peace.

Laila El-Haddad, award-winning Palestinian author, social activist, policy analyst and journalist.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Last week, we heard from a roundtable of Jewish Americans who shared their stories about Hamas's October 7th attack on Israel and what the impact of the conflict is and what the impact the conflict is having on them. Hamas killed more than 1,400 people in its attack, according to Israeli officials.

And now, in Gaza, almost 5,800 people have died so far in Israel's retaliatory bombing, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. So today, we'll hear from Palestinian Americans.

LISTENER MONTAGE: These are things that the collective Muslim population sees and sees that the world doesn't do anything about or care about. And, then it makes us feel very abandoned. But when an entire people are oppressed or victimized in so many ways for so long. It's bound to happen that certain actions are going to act out.

I do recognize that many of Israel's actions through its 75-year history are born out of a deep sense of past cultural trauma. Israelis must recognize, though, that they as well have imposed a deep cultural trauma upon all Palestinians through their ongoing military invasion. I ask, how can Israelis, they've been traumatized by their own persecution, then go on to inflict such trauma upon another innocent people, the Palestinians.

The solution to end the violence really lands on the Israeli leadership to end the illegal occupation, granting them the ownership and control of land, the dignity of human rights, and the ability to have political control as well as control of the future of their children and their families.

CHAKRABARTI: Those were On Point listeners Rami Jabber from Monroe Township, New Jersey, Laurence Qamar from Portland Oregon and Raheel Kahn from Sacramento, California.

Now joining me, we have a round table of Palestinian Americans, Leila Farsakh is with us. She's a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Author of "Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel: Labour, Land and Occupation," and she's with me in the On Point studio. Professor Farsakh, welcome to the program.

LEILA FARSAKH: Thank you for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: Also joining us is Philip Farah. He's an economist at the United States Government Accountability Office. He's retiring at the end of the month. He's also a founding member of the Washington Interfaith Alliance for Middle East Peace and a co-founder of the Palestinian Christian Alliance for Peace.

Philip, welcome to you.

PHILIP FARAH: Thank you, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: And with us as well is Laila El-Haddad. She's an award-winning author and journalist and author of "Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything in Between." Laila, welcome to the show.

LAILA EL-HADDAD: Thank you for having me, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: And I do appreciate all of you for joining us at this time. And Laila, I'm wondering if we could start with you actually. Because you still, you have family members right now in Gaza, is that correct?

EL-HADDAD: That's right. I have over 100 family members scattered across the Gaza Strip. About half of them right now are in, we're trying our best to stay in touch. I've lost touch with a third of the family in central Gaza. We haven't heard from them.

And I keep checking the rosters of those that were killed by Israel to check if their names are on there. The ones in the city, we're maintaining contact through cell phones they charge using car batteries. They've lost all power. Israel's cut off their water supply. It's difficult all around. They've had flyers dropped on their house by the Israeli army, telling them that if they don't voluntarily self-displace and leave, they will be considered accomplices to terror organizations.

So this is the kind of psychological and terror that's being unleashed on them right now. And they're standing strong. They're trying their best to just survive and stay sane right now. And we're trying to help them through that and help amplify their voices, as well. And yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: Can you tell me a little bit more about how the family members that you've been able to stay in touch with are surviving through the bombardment and the blockade of supplies. I'll note that just over the weekend a few trucks started being allowed to come in.

But when you say that people are having to, family members are having to charge their cell phones off car batteries, what about eating, drinking, things like that.

EL-HADDAD: Yeah, if they were sitting here right now with us, they might say that there are limits to the humanitarian discourse and that ultimately this is not about food, though, of course, that is an important part of the story. Because it bears mentioning that I don't know of another instance in the modern world where, you know, so called democratic countries have stood up and brazenly called for the collective punishment of a civilian population by depriving them of food, fuel, water, life's basic necessities, and our government here going right along with that plan.

So I think the question isn't how many trucks are coming in or what food they might have right now, but why are we allowing them to turn the water off in the first place. And prevent the entry of fuel and vital humanitarian supplies. I think that's the real story. In terms of how they're surviving, to answer your question, they're basically down to canned foods right now.

They're eating stale bread that they managed to get a bag of bread about a week ago before the bakeries shut down. And the only bakery near them was bombed actually by the Israeli army. They toasted that bread over an open fire, and they've been eating that, sort of hard pieces of bread with some canned foods and lentils.

But again, they keep emphasizing it's not about the food. What good will food do us if we are killed by the Israelis?

CHAKRABARTI: One more question for you, Laila, and then Philip and Professor Farsakh, I promise I'll come to both of you. How are you, Laila, thinking through this or trying to process and cope with what has happened and what is happening, especially as you continue to fear for your family's lives.

EL-HADDAD: It's a lot. It's a heavy burden to bear.

This is not the first time Gaza has been bombarded, assaulted, obviously which speaks to the fact that this doesn't begin and end with Hamas, this is not beginning and end with the current onslaught on Gaza, but there's a certain urgency to being able to deliver the message, to amplify the voices of my family, to put an end to the killing.

And so there is no rest right now. We're in survival mode. And I think most Palestinians with family in Gaza feel the same way. I can speak personally that I'm dividing my time between checking in on my family. Looking over my own shoulder to make sure I'm okay, and I'm a visible Muslim, I wear a headscarf along with my daughter, speaking to the media about what's happening.

And mainly though, mainly, and I think this is the most exhausting part, trying to justify our humanity to the world and explain why we and our people don't deserve to be killed. This is what I'm spending the most amount of time doing.

CHAKRABARTI: Philip, let me turn to you and I would love to hear your answer to the same question about how you've been feeling, how you've been trying to think through everything that's happened since October 7th.

FARAH: It's a feeling of frankly, oscillating between extreme outrage and extreme sadness. I have family in Gaza, Laila does. And I've been trying to check on them. Of course, communication is very bad as Laila has explained. One relative, he finally responded, he's safe, but he reported that his uncle died when a bomb exploded next to his house, and he had a heart attack and passed away.

... My family originated in Gaza. Although I grew up in Jerusalem, I immigrated at the age of 27 to the United States, but my family's life centered around the St. Porphyrius Church, that was bombed recently. 18 people were killed. Some of them are relatives. [Families] completely exterminated.

Does not exist anymore in Gaza. I was unable to reach any of my relatives who were survivors at the St. Porphyrius Church, where the church where my dad and uncles and aunts and grandparents were baptized and had their weddings and celebrated.

And one of them ... his house was bombed. He emerged from the rubble. He was lucky enough to emerge from the rubble. He, all the Christians in Gaza are now at churches, especially St. Porphyrius and the Orthodox Good Shepherd Church. And so he moved along with all his family members to that church, and he was killed in that bombing.

So you can imagine. And frankly the Christian community is somewhat privileged, I tell you, I'm a Palestinian from Christian background, and we have it somewhat better than Muslims, because there's frankly racism. There's utter racism towards all Palestinians, all Arabs, but especially towards Muslims.

And, things are far worse for people who are refugee, refugees and refugee camps, which are the 70% of the population of Gaza.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. I just want to note that indeed the Israeli military did say that last Thursday the blast that damaged or destroyed the St. Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church was a result of an Israeli airstrike. The Israeli military did indeed acknowledge that. Professor Farsakh, we've only got less than a minute before our first break. So I'll promise to give you a bigger, a larger chance to speak after that break, but if you could choose a word right now about what your, what's been going through your mind or your mindset has been over the past couple of weeks, what would it be?

FARSAKH: Despair and determination to speak and tell our stories as Laila said, it's our humanity. The hardest part is to prove our humanity and we don't need to prove it because we're all equal human beings. And war is not justified and the genocide going on is petrifying.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Last week we heard from a roundtable of Jewish Americans, and if you missed that program, you can listen to it at our website or in our podcast feed. And Professor Farsakh, last week from our Jewish American guests, we heard a great deal about the need to understand the context of Jewish lives in Israel and how that connects to the families of Jewish Americans, both there and here. And the context is of course very old.

The same goes for understanding the place that Palestinians are and Palestinian Americans find themselves. So I wonder if you might tell us or deepen the understanding of your particular context. Because you've written about how your father, you say that he saw Palestine get lost twice.

What did you mean by that?

FARSAKH: Yeah, my father was born in 1934. And what I mean by that is that the first time, we have an expression, we lost Palestine, was in 1948 when Israel was created and it expelled two third off the Palestinian population at the time from its homeland, which many of them are now the descendant living in Gaza.

That's something you need to understand. So the context for the Palestinian is that this war has not started on the 7th of October, has not started 17 years ago when Israel put the Gaza Strip on the siege. It started in 1947, '48 when Israel got created and expelled the Palestinians.

So we are coming from that context and what is very scary and problematic is that many thought that with the peace process that started in 1993, we could come to an end to the suffering. That Palestinians and Israeli can live side by side in two states. And what has happened over the past 30 years is that the Palestinian has seen that their possibility of creating a state has dwindled and been fragmented because of Israeli settlements policy.

People forget there are 750,000 settlers today in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which is triple their size in 1993. They fragment the West Bank. They, Israel has direct control over 60% of the West Bank, has put the Gaza Strip under siege. And I think that's something that we keep wanting to emphasize.

We are not just in a humanitarian crisis. We are in a political crisis. I think what Laila has said is very important. We're not here just to prove our humanity and make our voices heard, but also to explain that the problem is not just about getting people, Gaza is not a humanitarian problem, is a political problem.

And Gaza is a microcosm off the problem that we live. But on a personal level, it's been hard because my father, okay, in '48 he saw the refugees coming into his town. He lived in the West Bank. In '67, he was not allowed to be back home. In '94, he came back and thought," Okay, I can settle and live there in peace."

But then this, you know, more Israeli incursions, more Israeli settlements, more checkpoints. So he got his wish, which was to die there. But what is very hard is to see this continuous assault on the Palestinian by fragmenting them. Israel is trying to fragment them and dilute the question and reduce the question to a humanitarian crisis.

And I think what we see in front of our eyes right now is that this is not just a humanitarian crisis. This is a political crisis.

CHAKRABARTI: So since you put it that way, help us understand the different layers of this political crisis. And Philip and Laila El-Haddad, I want to hear responses from you on this very specific question as well, because yes, looking across that 70 plus year history, you clearly see that this is a profound political crisis.

At the same time, there have been moments when partial responsibility has rested on the shoulders of Palestinian leadership.

FARSAKH: Correct.

CHAKRABARTI: In terms of not being able to resolve the political crisis. I'm thinking of when Arafat and the PLO walked away from or could not come to an agreement in around 2000, or 2000-ish about --

FARSAKH: Camp David.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, at Camp David. In looking at the history of Hamas, we were looking at its original founding charter and then the subsequent charters, and it says clearly that Hamas will never be party to any international agreement whatsoever. That's just, they simply do not believe in that as a solution, a workable solution for the Palestinian people.

How do you think through that as well in terms of, have there been opportunities missed? Who do we look to as holding responsibility for that?

FARSAKH: And that's a very good question. And definitely the Palestinian leadership has a lot to be blamed for, but I think there's also lots of misconception about what was the mistake of the leadership what the mistakes of Hamas and the atrocities Hamas did.

I think to understand, we need to understand that the Palestinians accepted to enter the peace process in 1993. From a political point of view, people would argue they had no choice, but still they entered this process and they, with the international community, thought they will get a Palestinian state.

And what happened over the past 30 years is that Israel actually used the peace process, not to reduce or retreat from its colonial structure of domination, or what many Palestinian calls the apartheid reality. Israel inadvertently maybe created an apartheid reality, and we call it apartheid because Palestinians are fragmented in the West Bank and Gaza.

I'm not, they cannot, people who are in Ramallah cannot get to Jerusalem, cannot get to the Hebron, cannot get to Nablus, we're talking about me living in Cambridge, not being able to come to you on the other side of the river because there's so many checkpoints and bypass roads. And imagine that will be Israeli settlements.

Okay, so we're talking about this reality. What Palestinians saw is this has been entrenched, losing more and more land and blaming the Palestinians for every time they rebelled against the oppression. So if you're asking me, what is the solution, if that's where we're going, or what is the, I find it difficult to blame the Palestinians.

CHAKRABARTI: Can I just, sorry to interrupt, but I don't think that it's fair for me to ask anyone, what is the solution now?

FARSAKH: Thank you.

CHAKRABARTI: So if that's what it sounded like, I didn't mean that at all, but mostly trying to understand how the different layers, because the Palestinian people are not a monolith.

The Israeli people are not a monolith. And I find that in the media, we tend to reduce people down to very flat and two-dimensional caricatures. And that's not fair or just. So I was just trying to ask you how you think through.

El-HADDAD: I want to say in that respect.

CHAKRABARTI: Leila, go ahead. Just one second. Let me let Professor Farsakh finish.

FARSAKH: It's important to understand that the Palestinian Authority and Fatah said, "Okay, we're going to make peace with the Israelis." By accepting the Oslo Agreement, and the international community said, "Let's have a two-seat solution. But for many Palestinians, is that what did we get?

Many Palestinians are saying, "Okay, you did peace for 30 years. What did you get out of it?" You get out of it more and more fragmentation. Hamas is saying, "Armed struggle is the only way that you could get a two-seat solution." Because Hamas inadvertently said, "Why would I accept Israel?" Because those who did recognize Israel got nothing, from that perspective that's coming. I just want to explain.

CHAKRABARTI: Laila El-Haddad. Go ahead.

EL-HADDAD: Thank you.

CHAKRABARTI: And thank you for being patient, by the way.

EL-HADDAD: Yeah, no problem. Just a few things here. To be made very clear, Oslo was simply a pretext for continued settlement expansion. There was never a mention anywhere in the Oslo Accords, and you can look this up, of Palestinian statehood. I think this is a myth. Edward Said, the late Edward Said, has talked extensively about this. And just on the point of, I always like to emphasize this doesn't begin and end with Hamas, but if we're talking charters, the Likud charter of the current Netanyahu government calls for the destruction of any concept idea of Palestinian statehood, rejects the idea of Palestinian statehood.

And the sitting minister on that government has said that Palestinians have two choices. They either accept a life of subjugation under Israeli apartheid rule, or they leave their own land. And this is a sitting minister. So let's be clear about that. I do want to backtrack just a little bit here. Because the overarching theme that drives all Israeli policy towards the Palestinians, way before Oslo, through Oslo, and to the current day, is maximizing control over Palestinian land with as few Palestinians in that land that Israel controls as possible.

And in line with that is the demographic threat, right? The Palestinian demographic threat. That's what drives Israeli policy. And just one more point, talking about history and about, I was a reporter in Gaza between the years of 2003 and 2007. I raised my young son there.

I was there as the disengagement was happening through the elections, through the beginning of the blockade. And I just, we tend to have a short-term memory here, but before Hamas was on the scene, it was Fatah and the Palestinian Authority and Yasser Arafat that were the bogeymans of the hour, right?

They were the ones being referred to by Ariel Sharon as, Arafat was referred to as a terrorist and Israelis were referring to them as saying they did not have a partner for peace on the other side. So this is cyclical and continuous. And then we had the disengagement happened, this unilateral process that was not coordinated with the Palestinian Authority, during which Israel dismantled its settlements, restructured its occupation, moved the settlements to the West Bank and retained an iron fist on Gaza from the outside.

And then began to effectively close Gaza off more than it had before, from the outside world. This leads us up to the beginning of the Palestinian elections in 2006, which of course the United States did not anticipate the result there.

And instead of allowing things to take their natural course, and perhaps allowing Hamas as a political party to rule and maybe fail and maybe succeed, who knows, they meddled. The CIA meddled and siphoned millions of dollars in arms into Gaza in an attempt to overthrow them, which, of course, didn't work.

And then a brutal blockade was imposed on the 2.2 million people of Gaza, which has been enduring for 17 years now. There's a lot more to the story than Palestinian leadership has failed. I take offense at that statement because that's, I don't think that's it at all.

Do we have an effectual leadership? Yes. Do, in my opinion, does the Palestinian Authority simply act as a subcontractor of the Israeli occupation, the West Bank? Absolutely.

CHAKRABARTI: I appreciate, again, the context really matters here, and I appreciate you walking through. Walking us through all that, Laila, in my defense, I wasn't just saying, Let's pin all the blame for these decades of the political crisis, as Professor Farsakh put it, solely on Palestinian leadership.

I am just trying to understand that, look. From the distance where I sit, and I acknowledge that it's a distance of miles, history, people, et cetera. I can't say that that there's been universal flawless leadership throughout this process amongst any group. And I just wanted to understand again how you all think through this.

Professor Farsakh, I'll come back to you in a second. But I just want to give Philip a chance to chime in here. But Philip, go ahead.

FARAH: Thanks, Meghna. I just want to backtrack a bit. I was identified as being with the U.S. Government accountability office. And I just want to make sure that for your listeners that I'm representing myself certainly, and not any other party.

And yes, to this point, every struggle for emancipation in history has had both a resistance, a nonviolent resistance component, and a violent component as well. The oppressed are never alike angels, and to demand, certainly their oppressors are the ones who visit far more violence than the people who are under occupation or under colonial settler, colonial regime or the like, in Calcutta the airport of Calcutta is named after Chandra Bose, who he's very revered in India as well as Gandhi is, and Chandra Bose called for armed resistance and sometimes some of his followers did acts of violence against civilians, against Brits.

The important thing is in all these struggles, you have situations where the people who follow a path like Gandhi's might have the upper hand. Or as in Algeria, it was more the violent resistance and in all of these struggles, as far as I know, from my knowledge of history, it's the outside pressure that often has an important impact on which path wins, submission is not an option for Palestinians.

It's either resistance, and nonviolent means, or armed resistance. And the world is really turning a blind eye to them when they practice nonviolent resistance. They are attacked as being anti-Semitic in 30 some states, and the United States will punish anybody who calls for boycott, divestment and sanctions.

Leaders in the Western world have chimed in, some of them, like a prominent member of Congress has said, "Level Gaza." It's just mind boggling the complicity of the Western world and the Western media to a large extent, yours excluded. Its preponderance of assisting and messaging the same messages that Israel, the Israeli leadership.

And it's not good for Israel in the long run, for it to have fascists like Smotrich, who actually is proud of being called a fascist homophobe. By the way, he said we are going to plaster all of the West Bank with settlements and the Palestinians have three choices, not to, as Laila said, one to accept, the other to leave, be ethnically cleansed, basically, or to die. Are these the people that we are supporting?

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Leila, I hear you there also, and I'll definitely let you come back in. But, Philip, it's interesting that you mentioned Chandra Bose, because I know his history decently. And you're exactly right. He definitely, in terms of desire, desiring to overthrow British colonial rule in India. He was not a pacifist. But again, life is very complicated because Bose was also closely aligned with Nazi Germany. He lived in Berlin for a while. It was under tutelage of Nazi leadership there.

And he then moved on to Imperial Japan and supported Japan's Imperial ambitions in during the second world war. So I don't even know how to think through that, but people have many layers. We'll be back in just a moment. We have a lot more to discuss with our Palestinian American roundtable today.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Leila Farsakh, pick up your thought, you wanted to respond to things that Philip and Laila were saying, go ahead.

FARSAKH: I think Laila really nailed it very nicely when explaining that Israel's policy has always been to maximize land, control with, minimize Palestinian and dehumanize the Palestinians.

So but I want to come back also to your point about where does the responsibility lie? And the problem that whenever we want to put blame on victims and victimizers, who is the perpetrator or not, I don't want to go there. But I think it's helpful to think a little bit about who has the most power in this conflict.

And because that's the person who terms, who defined the terms off the engagement, whether we like it or not. Unfortunately, I cannot put my hat as a political scientist. And as the most powerful on that, since 1948, has been Israel and the U. S. And they have a role to play, because the most powerful is the one who can decide, does he want to foster peace or want to foster violence?

And unfortunately, what we've seen with Israeli policies since 1993, since the peace process, is that Israel has used this process to exactly as Laila said, maximize taking Palestinian land and fragmenting the Palestinian. In other words, the past 30 years haven't been an attempt by Israel to finish the Palestinian question by fragmenting it, by saying that there are no Palestinians.

There's some good Palestinians, there's bad Palestinians, and we're going to give them pieces here and there just to be quiet. But that has not worked, because the Palestinians have rights. They are human beings like everybody else.

And I think the United States has a very important role now to play in reminding Israel of this, but also has to take responsibility for the failure of the Camp David Accord in 2000, in how the disengagement from Gaza that Laila talked about took place, in upholding the elections that according to U.S. Representative on the ground in 2006, they said these were democratic elections.

What do we do with results that we don't like? So I think the U. S. has an important role now to play in trying to stop this war and bring everybody around for an engagement on a peaceful solution. But maybe it's too early.

I think right now we need to stop the war. We need to stop this genocide. But I think there's much blame to go on U. S. foreign policy and how it dealt with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

CHAKRABARTI: I'm pausing because I'm just thinking about there was a moment in our Jewish American roundtable where I asked our guests, the response, even at that time, coming from Israel was total devastation in Gaza, right? And it continues to be that. And I asked, honestly, what does Israel gain by doing that?

Because the world can see what is happening now. And it doesn't necessarily buy the security that Israel says it seeks. No matter how many members of Hamas you kill, you're also just, no matter how many members of Hamas Israel kills, it doesn't really effectively eliminate the things that gave rise to Hamas's winning of the 2006 election, for example.

In that moment, one of our guests Professor Ilan Troen, who spoke to us from Israel and just to remind folks, his daughter and son in law were killed by Hamas on Oct. 7, and he happened to be on the phone with his daughter as she and her husband were being killed. Professor Troen answered my question in this way.

He instead posed a question to Palestinians, particularly those in Gaza, and I want to play that question back to you, and here's what he said.

TROEN: Is there not something that Palestinians in Gaza can do to free themselves of this murderous, abhorrent, aberrant form of Islamic political organization that throughout the PA, and is a dictatorial, fascistic, and you can use all the other words that come with that organization.

Are they not also victims of Hamas? And the question is, can they do something? And if they can't do anything, what then are we to do to suspend the conflict until Hamas fires at us again from civilian areas, and then to be accused of abusing human rights when we merely try to defend our families, our children, our loved ones, and the places in which we live.

CHAKRABARTI: And we got many responses to that question from Palestinian Americans who called us. Here are a couple.

LISTENER MONTAGE: You have this professor talking about Hamas this, Hamas that, but he fails to talk about the 75 years of brutal occupation that the Palestinian people have had to endure. Underneath the boots of the Israeli forces.

Why doesn't nobody talk about that?

One clear solution is for Israel to ... give them their independence, give them their freedom, give them the ability to move anywhere, and then there won't be Hamas. The reason why all this is happening is because of your occupation.

CHAKRABARTI: Laila El-Haddad, I can practically feel you wanting to reach through the radio, but what's your answer to the professor's question?

EL-HADDAD: (LAUGHS) Oh, in the words Edward Said blaming the victim, Golda Meir famously said, "I will never forgive the Palestinians for forcing us to kill their children." And that kind of sums it up. The burden here is not on the oppressed and the occupied. The burden is on the occupier. When has overwhelming military might and an oppressive, brutal apartheid regime ever succeeded at eliminating whatever you want to call it.

When has it ever made that state more secure and when has it ever resulted in freedom and justice and all the things that your Israeli guest was referring to. Walls and barriers and bombardment and starvation and genocide will never make Israel more secure if that's indeed the objective and the goal. We all, at the end of the day, are human beings, who have children and families and we want to live lives of dignity and freedom and go about our lives.

Palestinians, just like anyone else. That cannot be achieved through military might and pummeling the civilian population into submission to the point where they will then say, "Okay, yeah, we're going to overthrow Hamas." Or whatever the case may be. Again, I just want to emphasize this doesn't begin and end with them.

They weren't on the picture before 1987. They weren't even a dominant political force until the early 2000s. So we should make no mistake about it just happens to be the scapegoat that the Israelis need now. But that's not really at the heart of the problem. More recently, it's a blockade who stated aims, to be clear, Gaza, the situation wrought upon Gaza was brought upon it deliberately by design, not by accident.

The stated aims of the blockade by the Israelis were to deprive the Palestinians of the of the ability to prosper and rebuild, and in the words of the Dove Weissglas, who designed this policy, "To keep them always on the brink of collapse, just above the point of starvation."

And then you have the audacity to come and say, why aren't the Palestinians blaming Hamas and why aren't they doing more to, I really have no words. I don't know what else to say.

CHAKRABARTI: Philip, let me follow up with that, with this thought. There hasn't been an election in Gaza since Hamas did win that surprise election in 2006.

So again, I'm not victim blaming here, but this constant question is popping into my head, hearing about the horrors that Laila's family is experiencing right now in Gaza. And you talked about the destruction of the church and the ongoing death that's happening there.

I hate to say it, but was that somewhat predictable as the response Israel was going to have, given how surprised it was by Hamas's successful attack. My question is, for the Palestinian people in Gaza, who are suffering the brutality of the bombings right now, Hamas has gained nothing for them. Has it? I cannot see anything that Hamas's decision to attack Israel in the way it did, I can't see any way in which that has benefited the Palestinian people in Gaza. And I point that out and I ask this because again, not victim blaming, but is there nothing, not at this moment?

Not at this moment, because of the violence that is occurring, but is there nothing that can be done? No way to actuate the desires of the Palestinian people, not to have leadership whose every action leads to a counteraction from Israel that leads more to more death. Philip I'm sorry for my very confusing question, but it's hard for me to think through this way.

Yeah, go ahead.

FARAH: No, it's a fair question And I think really it goes back to the point that I made earlier about how, you know, emancipation can follow one of two paths, violence or nonviolence. And in every situation where the oppressing regime, the colonial regime, say in Algeria, where the colonial regime exercised extreme violence, it's very traumatizing and it is bound to have a reaction that is also violent.

The people who went into Israel on Oct. 7, the Hamas fighters, and actually also a lot of civilians, they were traumatized by 75 years of Nakba, of 56 years of occupation, direct occupation. And by 17 years off a brutal siege, I just want to quote, so they're traumatized.

They are people who have been, some of these fighters were people who lost family members, close family members, who saw their mother, or father, or brother shredded to pieces or the like. So this is after the 2015 attack on Gaza. The Save the Children did a survey of the children in Gaza, and 75% of the children reported bedwetting.

These are people, these are the people who went into Israel. They're traumatized people. And just as Gandhi and Mandela and Martin Luther King in his Letter from a Birmingham jail said, look, you increase the pressure on us and there's going to be more violence.

And it's obviously not good for the future of anybody in the region, including the Israelis, this is going to breed more and more resentment, more and more rage, and not everybody is going to react to it in a charitable way, in an enlightened way, in an unviolent way. There are going to be acts.

It's like asking, I want to return the question to Professor Troen, is it, why is it that the Israelis allow the fascists like Smotrich and Ben Gavir? Why are they electing them?

FARSAKH: Yeah, to that I'd like also to go back to this question, this blaming the victim or asking, let's engage with this question.

How can the Palestinian free themselves of Hamas? It's as Laila clearly said, you need to end the occupation, the way to end Hamas is or any violent resistance is to end the occupation. That's something Israel does not seem interested in doing, and this is why we are in a serious problem. Because you might eliminate Hamas right now.

The Israeli forget. But in 1992, Israel went to war in Lebanon to eliminate the PLO and the PLO and Fatah were considered terrorist organization, and it nearly succeeded. It put Beirut at the time, one of the most important Arab cities on the seat for 88 days.

I can, for me, it's like a PTSD. Because I relived, I lived that war. So for me, it's, "Is this going to happen again?" Again, Palestinian resistance was called terrorist. They were expelled. Israel thought it eliminated the Palestinian question. It thought it eliminated the Palestinian question in 1948 when it expelled two third of the population.

And when Palestinian come back and say, "We have rights. This is our land. We want freedom. We don't want anybody to die. We want freedom." How to do it is what tools you have. As again, during the Oslo process, Fatah, Mahmoud Abbas said nonviolence. Nonviolence gave nothing.

Actually, nonviolence according to Hamas, and many people, brought more dispossession, more displacement, more settlements, more killing. Right now, in West Bank, over this past two weeks, 1,000 Palestinians were arrested, 95 Palestinians were killed. And there is no Hamas there. Settler violence is unrestrained.

The problem, it's on Israel to end this war now, and it's on Israel to keep its citizens safe by ending the siege, not maintaining it, not by fragmenting Palestine, because maybe they'll succeed in eliminating Hamas.

But you can be sure in 20 years' time, something else is going to come. Because the reality is Israel controls a population of 14 million, seven million of them are Jewish citizens with rights and seven million are Palestinians, which are dispersed into four areas. The West Bank is Jerusalem, Gaza and the Palestinian citizens of Israel. And those seven million Palestinians are being attacked in different ways, are being deprived, are being discriminated against, are being dehumanized.

And this is what needs now to stop. And I'm hoping the U. S. administration will do something about it because we are at the inflection point.

CHAKRABARTI: I will admit to all three of you that this issue and the reality that the Palestinian people have been living with and also Israelis as well. And I'm talking about the people.

Not leadership, is larger and more complex than my ability to navigate a satisfactory conversation. I just want to admit that, because it sounds that right now, we're just facing the continuation of a cycle of, with the asymmetric power still in mind, of a cycle of traumatized people continuing to traumatize each other.

FARSAKH: But Meghna, it is actually much simpler. It's about maintaining the humanity of everybody. This land can take us all. It can take the 7 million Palestinians, 7 million Jews. We can all live in peace, but we need to live by respecting our humanity and protecting the equality of everybody to life and freedom.

It's simple. It's not as complicated as you think.