Transcript
A (0:00)
If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat, community discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com. Hello, William Durimple here we've just record a brilliant bonus episode with my old friend Raja Shahada. Raja is one of the greatest living Palestinian writers. Raja's family lost their family home in Jaffa at the Nakba in 1948. Raja grew up in Ramallah in their summer house and saw Ramallah change from a rural backwater under Jordanian rule to this kind of slowly throttled focus of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation. He's seen the different Israeli incursions, he' settlements growing. He founded the very first Palestinian human rights organization, Al Haq, to monitor the growing abuses of the IDF occupation forces and the slow throttling of Ramallah by the settlers. He's an extraordinary writer. He's a wonderful human being, an incredibly gentle, precise and learned man whose walks through the west bank have turned into a whole series of wonderful books, one of which won the Orwell Prize. And I really cannot recommend this recording more. Here is an extract from the bonus but if you want to watch the whole episode, you can join up and become a member of the club. Get early access add free main episodes Join empire club@empirepoduk.com today for again, people listening who have not been to the west bank and perhaps are confused. Could you just, in very basic terms, explain to someone who's never been to the west bank how your life would be different from, say, a Jewish author living a few miles away in Jerusalem?
B (2:11)
Well, a Jewish person living next door to Ramallah because Ramallah is surrounded by settlements and the settlements live under Israeli law and have all the rights under Israeli law and can move move from the west bank to Israel with a
A (2:25)
very good road, lovely new roads straight through without any airs and, and, and sort of brand new roads. If you have Israeli citizenship and also have a car plates that you get kind of waved through all the, all the roadblocks.
B (2:42)
Yeah. So visible in the west bank because the roads are segregated. Views of natural resources is segregated and discriminatory. And so the West Banker lives in a closed area which is now very much surrounded by settlements and roadblocks and sometimes gates. Israel is very adamant at making the Palestinians in the west bank feel that they are in Israel. So if you travel from Ramallah to Nablus along the road, you will find millions, thousands of Israeli flags all along the road and billboards advertising things in the settlements and restaurants and dry clean and so on, in Hebrew, of course. And all of this makes you feel that you are in Israel when you cannot move around freely and you have to be careful about when to leave because then the point will be closed and when it's, when is it open, when is it closed, when is the gate closed and when is the gate open? It's a very restricted life and you have no control over your affairs, over travel, over use of natural resources, over the taxes, Colonization at best, in a very strong sense.