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00:00Thank you, first of all, thank you very much for speaking to ATV Bharat.
00:06So what format will this interview appear in?
00:09I would write the interview as well, like in a question and answer format and we would,
00:15we had thought that we would include this video as well.
00:19But now since, you know, it would be an audio format, so we would simply, it would be, you
00:25know, a written format interview.
00:27Okay, very good.
00:28Okay.
00:30All right, perfect.
00:32So I actually read that book of yours, The World After Gaza, and I was, I was really
00:40moved reading it.
00:42First of all, I wish, I want to congratulate you for the exhaustive piece that this book
00:48is.
00:49And at the same time, I would also want to know about your views on some points that,
00:55you know, I marked in the book.
00:57I hope that's okay with you.
00:59Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
01:01Please go on.
01:02Perfect.
01:03Now, I understand that your essay, Shoah After Gaza, you know, it provides a comprehensive
01:12guide to understanding, you know, the contours of this grave humanitarian issue.
01:18And this book, The World After Gaza, would you call it a timely piece of literature or
01:25just a way to express the humiliation of our physical and political incapacity?
01:30If I may borrow the words from your book?
01:33I think, you know, I mean, I don't, I can't really make too many claims for the book as
01:39a work of literature or as a work of analysis or anything.
01:43It's just something I felt compelled to write.
01:47It's the only response a writer can make to an atrocity like this.
01:53It's up to other people to assess it as a piece of analysis, as a work of literature,
01:59whatever they want to see it as, it's entirely up to them.
02:04For me, it met a very profound and urgent need to put words, to put together sentences
02:15and to, you know, simply describe not only what was happening, because a lot of people
02:22have already been describing it, but try and sort of make sense of it in some way,
02:28using history, using the enormous archive that has been created in the last hundred
02:35years of various other historical atrocities.
02:42So it was very much a book really written almost entirely in response to something that
02:51was happening as I was writing.
02:53So unlike any other book I've written.
02:56Okay.
02:57For our readers, we just, you know, to introduce you as someone who is such an exhaustive writer
03:05and award-winning essayist and novelist and, you know, a prolific contributor to noted
03:10periodicals such as the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books.
03:15I was moved by the comments by Hisham Mattar, the American-born Libyan-British novelist,
03:23you know, who says your book, and I quote, is a humane inquiry into what suffering can
03:28make us do and the troubling question of what world we will find after Gaza.
03:34Can you give us a glimpse of what that world would be?
03:39Well, unfortunately, at this point, it looks like a world where all the norms of not just
03:50war, conflict, but also basic morality are under threat like never before, certainly
03:59like never before in our lifetimes.
04:02So this is a world, as I speak to you, in which some of the most powerful people in
04:07the world are egging on nakedly racist, nakedly pro-Nazi political movements and personalities.
04:21They're openly stalking resentment and anger and hostility towards weaker groups, towards
04:30minorities, using every event, whether it's the fires in Los Angeles or, you know, the
04:39sort of, you know, random terrorist attacks to stop these angers and resentments.
04:48So I think it's very clear that we've embarked upon a really treacherous phase in human existence.
04:57And certainly large parts of the world.