Interview of Juan Cole on his book Gaza Yet Stands by Shubhda Chaudhary for her Middle East Insights YouTube channel. Dr. Chaudhary Dr. Shubhda Chaudhary is the Founder of Middle East Insights Platform – India’s dynamic online volunteer-based organization with members from South Asia, Middle East, and Africa. She is an accomplished academic in Global Politics and Media, specializing in West Asian Politics. With a Ph.D. and M.Phil. in West Asian Politics from Jawaharlal Nehru University (India), and an M.A. in International Journalism from the University of Westminster (London), she is proficient in navigating diverse geopolitical contexts, including extensive experience living and working across Egypt, Oman, West Bank, Saudi Arabia US, UK, South Africa and Jordan. She has taken guest lectures at the University of Cambridge (UK), the University of Connecticut, and University of West Florida. Additionally, she has worked as a trainee in Johannesburg, South Africa, and represented India at the Study of US Institutes in Seattle and Washington DC. Her scholarly contributions are widely recognized, with numerous articles and chapters published in esteemed journals and books by renowned publishers such as Routledge, I.B. Tauris, American University of Cairo, and Sage.
Book Discussion on Gaza Yet Stands
Transcript
(Note: I fed the YouTube auto-generated transcript through ChatGPT to make it readable; although I asked ChatGPT not to shorten or rephrase the text, AI is unreliable and I cannot be sure this is a perfect transcript. I read through it carefully, though, and it seems accurate.)
Shubhda Chaudhury: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. This is Middle East Insights, and I am Dr. Shubhda Chaudhary. Today we are going to talk about a very enriching book, Gaza Yet Stands, written by none other than Juan Cole. I am very excited to have him as a speaker. As you all know, I don’t really have to introduce him to our audience internationally, but I will briefly. Juan Cole is an American academic and commentator on the modern Middle East and South Asia. He is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan—you should know where Michigan is, by the way. Since 2002, he has written a web blog called Informed Comment. I would request all of you to follow it and keep up with whatever he publishes daily.
Sir, my first question to you is—and I’m going to act as a devil’s advocate—why did you write the book Gaza Yet Stands?
Juan Cole: I had been commenting on Palestine and Gaza issues for the past 25 years, not only on my own site, Informed Comment, but also in op-ed columns for magazines such as Salon, The Nation, and Truthdig. As the Gaza genocide unfolded in 2023 and 2024, I wanted to gather up some of those essays and add my commentary on the contemporary events of this year into a book. The codex book is still unparalleled, despite the existence of the internet. To find these old essays and put them in chronological order would be impossible on the internet, but if you collect them in a book, you can read them chronologically. I reached out to some publishers to see if anyone would publish it, but publishers are very wary of publishing anything that has already appeared, and this was an entire book of pieces that had already appeared and are still on the internet. So I published it on Amazon myself and was somewhat amazed at how easy it was. There has been some interest, and we’ve had some sales of the book. I’m pleased with having these essays in book form and available for people at this time of crisis.
Chaudhary: One thing I want to ask you is that you used the word “genocide.” Again, I’m being a devil’s advocate. Where you are right now, especially with the possibility of a new president, how difficult is it for you, as a journalist, academic, scholar, or public intellectual, to use the word in the U.S.?
Juan Cole: I don’t have any difficulty using the word, and neither does Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, or many human rights organizations. The American Historical Association’s annual meeting in New York just passed a resolution against scholasticide, stating that the Israelis have destroyed all the schools and universities in Gaza. They felt, as an academic organization, they should speak out. Would I be allowed to publish an opinion piece in The New York Times making a case for genocide? Maybe, maybe not. Would a Facebook post using the word regarding Gaza and Israel be suppressed by the algorithm so nobody sees it? Yes, we know that happens. There are headwinds, and many people in the United States take umbrage at criticism of Israel, which is bizarre because Israel is a country. We criticize Argentina, Serbia, and many other countries all the time. It’s a form of propaganda, it’s a demand by partisans of Israel of whatever background they might be, Christian Zionists or Jewish Zionists or mainstream American liberals like Joe Biden. The demand that Israel be granted impunity is not one I understand. Granting impunity to Israel undermines the edifice of international humanitarian law we’ve worked hard to build since World War II to prevent such horrors from recurring.
Chaudhary: That is true, sir. What happened today is that Free Palestine TV, which has a Twitter/X account and a YouTube account, had its YouTube account completely suspended. When they filed an appeal, within 10 minutes, YouTube rejected it. They stated that the account violated their community guidelines. How fair is it for YouTube to come to such a decision in 10 minutes? They said they want to make YouTube a safe place for all, but this is not even a facade anymore.
How do you brace yourself with Trump potentially coming to office in January? He has stated that his first priority is the release of hostages. At the same time, Israeli protesters demanding the release of hostages were met with violence from their own country. How do you see the status quo changing? Was “genocidal Joe Biden” better, or will it be the same under Trump?
Juan Cole: The Biden Administration’s position on Israel [was] no different from Trump’s. The U.S. political establishment, across the board, is committed to Israeli impunity. It is a project of American white nationalism and imperialism. There is no expectation of change. Washington’s position is that Israelis can do whatever they want, and the far right in Israel knows what it wants—genocide.
Chaudhary: In your book Gaza Yet Stands, you chronologically list your essays and analyses from over the past 15–20 years. Were there parallels or inklings 20 years ago that something like this would happen?
Juan Cole: Yes. In 2010, when WikiLeaks released U.S. diplomatic correspondence, a report emerged, picked up by a Norwegian newspaper, that the Israeli high command had developed plans for the complete destruction of Gaza. I blogged about it then, but it was ignored by mainstream media and the academic establishment in the U.S. They told U.S. diplomats that the next time there was trouble with Gaza, they would level it. This was planned 15 years ago.
Chaudhary: If this was planned so long ago, and given Netanyahu’s own role in supporting Hamas in some ways, do you think October 7 was foreseen by Israeli intelligence?
Juan Cole: There is evidence that lower-level Israeli troops, including women stationed near the Gaza border, noticed unusual activity weeks before October 7 — training exercises of a suspicious nature. They reportedly tried to pass their alarm up the chain of command but were ignored. Netanyahu’s government believed it had a deal with Hamas to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. The deal was to keep the PLO in the West Bank and Hamas and Gaza were at daggers drawn, so it was a divide-and-rule strategy, and Netanyahu was willing to allow Hamas to have Gaza as a kind of fiefdom, a sphere of their own control, in return for the obstruction of Palestinian unity and the possibility of a Palestinian state emerging of the sort that was envisaged in the 1993 Oslo Accords. As a result of this bargain, as you say, Netanyahu pleaded with Arab states, particularly Qatar and Egypt, to send in vast amounts of money to Gaza, which everyone knew would end up in Hamas’s coffers.
At the same time, the Israelis kept a blockade on the Gaza economy. They wouldn’t let in cement because it was dual-purpose, and they wouldn’t allow many essential building materials in because they could be used for military purposes. However, they also didn’t want people to starve to death in front of the world’s TV cameras, and they were wiser then than they are now. So, they let this aid money come in from Qatar and Egypt. It appears that in 2017 or so, the Qatari government became extremely frustrated with Hamas and had decided to end this relationship—to kick Hamas out of Qatar and cease sending money to Gaza. Netanyahu actually sent the head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, to Doha to argue the case for continuing the arrangement.
As you say, the money from Egypt and Qatar was deposited in Israeli accounts, and then it was the Netanyahu government that transferred it to Gaza. Netanyahu was essentially bankrolling Hamas. The arrangement was imperfect. Hamas, in order to retain credibility, felt it had to be constantly attacking Israel, so they developed these homemade rockets. They would send them out into the desert; every once in a while, they managed to hit something. They were unguided, small rockets. Mostly, the thousands of them landed uselessly in the desert, but sometimes they fell on people’s homes or factories, killing a few Israelis.
The Netanyahu government appears to have decided that this kind of drumbeat of harassment from Gaza was a price well worth paying for keeping the Palestinians divided and for keeping this deal going. Netanyahu thought he had a deal with Hamas, and he was shocked and amazed on October 7 when the deal fell apart. There is a question as to why Hamas changed its policies. It hadn’t been conducting this kind of spectacular terrorism in the decade before October 7. It had done terrorism—it had sent agents over into Israel, blown things up, attacked the cafeteria at Hebrew University, killed students—but that was more than 20 years ago. They had more or less ceased for a long time and depended more on rocket attacks to make their statement.
So, there is a question as to why the Hamas high command decided to kill over 1,100 Israelis on October 7. There’s something almost ISIS-like about it. The terrorist organization Daesh or ISIS also engaged in these kinds of spectacles as terrorism. Why did Hamas do that? It’s not clear. It may be that they felt they were being sidelined permanently by the arrangement they had made with Netanyahu and that it was unsustainable, and they needed to put themselves back on the map.
Chaudhary: When we talk about Hamas, the common perception is that Hamas is mostly composed of militants from Gaza, but they have also gained traction in the West Bank over the past decade along with other Palestinian organizations. One thing I have never understood is why organizations like Haganah or Irgun were never considered terrorist organizations, but Hamas and other Palestinian organizations are. In the same way, when a Muslim commits any kind of crime, it is immediately labeled as terrorism, but when a white man or woman commits a crime, it is portrayed as an isolated incident. That is how the media portrays it.
So, my question to you is, what do you perceive as the strategy of Netanyahu’s government for the West Bank now?
Juan Cole: Apart from whatever is happening right now, Netanyahu has long wanted to annex large sections of the Palestinian West Bank, which is illegal in international law—it’s a war crime. He pushed for this during the last Trump Administration. The Oslo Accords categorized the West Bank into three main territories: A, B, and C. The plan in the 1990s was for the Israelis to withdraw from areas A, B, and C by 1997 and to turn them over to the Palestine Liberation Organization, which is the core of the Palestinian Authority that was created by the Oslo Accords and which has police and so forth. But only 40% of the West Bank was turned over to the PLO, and the other 60%, Area C, is controlled by the Israeli military. It’s under military occupation.
Many Israelis, including Netanyahu, want to annex Area C. For one thing, it would give Israel a border with Jordan — or a bigger border with Jordan — and allow them to have bases right on that Jordanian border. Additionally, they are land-hungry. They want to send settlers from Israel to the West Bank. Israel is now an expensive place to live, and many people are eager to move to the West Bank because housing is much more inexpensive there. The Israeli government actually subsidizes illegal settlements in the West Bank—illegal from an international point of view.
Then, in late 2022, Netanyahu crossed a red line. He wanted to form a government and come back to power. The only way he could do it was to bring on board the far-right—the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis—the Jewish Power organization, the Religious Zionists. That strain of Israeli politics is deeply committed to annexing the entire Palestinian West Bank. If they could, they would like to expel the Palestinians from it, settle it, and make it Israel. They are now in charge of it.
The Palestinian West Bank is beholden to the Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, and the Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir. All you have to do is read Haaretz, the English-language version of the center-left Israeli newspaper, and see what they say. It’s very clear they want to annex the West Bank. My guess is there isn’t anything to stop them from doing that. The Biden Administration tutted whenever they talked like that, but it didn’t impose serious sanctions or do anything substantial to stop it. I think Trump would let them do whatever they want. So, we could well see an annexation of the West Bank in the next four years.
Chaudhary: Yes, and sir, what you have also been writing about is something called water apartheid in the West Bank. Can you explain to our audience what exactly this water apartheid is when it comes to Palestine and Israel?
Juan Cole: Water is very important in the Middle East, which is an arid zone. I think it’s hard for Americans or Indians to understand quite how perilous the situation is with regard to water. The Jordan River, which is so famous and where Jesus was baptized, is now a tiny little trickle. A lot of water is drawn off by Israeli society. There are also underground aquifers — deposits of water that are refilled by rainfall — but they are being drawn down, overused. You can make an aquifer run dry if you use it faster than rainfall replenishes it.
On the West Bank, the Israeli state has very carefully directed the water resources to the Israeli squatter settlements. These are settlements covertly backed by Israel, which sends in settlers with bulldozers and equipment to build a housing complex—a big set of apartment buildings—where Palestinians are not allowed to live. It is an apartheid system. The Israelis dig deep wells, deeper than the Palestinian wells. When the aquifer level falls, the Palestinian wells go dry, and the Israelis still have water. The Israelis also direct water to the settlements from riverine sources and desalination plants. The Palestinians have access to only a fraction of the amount of water on a daily basis that the Israeli settlers do.
Chaudhary: When you investigate and write about all of this, what has been the level of surveillance on you by the CIA, Mossad, and AIPAC?
Juan Cole: I think we’re all in a world now where we’re under surveillance all the time. That’s what the internet is. If someone is on Facebook, the purpose of Facebook is to surveil people and sell them things. But I’m not important — I don’t think people are spending a lot of resources on me. If anybody is following me around, they would get bored quickly because I mostly sit in a corner and read books. However, there are ways of sidelining people and making it difficult for certain voices to be heard. The YouTube algorithm, the Facebook algorithm, and so forth are impersonal ways of doing that. You can set the algorithm to downplay any mention of Palestine or Gaza.
One problem with covering the Gaza genocide is that it’s horrific. These pictures are coming out of dead people, and unlike in movies, when someone is blown up, there’s not a whole body lying there—it’s in bits and pieces. That’s something no one likes to see. Some Palestine activists feel a need to share these images Available on social media, but most social media community standards disallow gore and disallow these kinds of bloody pictures. However, if you don’t show the bloody pictures, then how do you convey the horror of what has been happening in Gaza, where tens of thousands of civilians—these are not militants, the vast majority of them are not—have been killed? Nearly 17,000 children have been killed, and their deaths have not been easy. They have been shot, blown up, and subjected to horrific violence.
Chaudhary: How do you convey that horror if you’re not allowed to show the pictures? It’s completely frustrating. Even with us, for example, the algorithm of YouTube — when I put up a lot of shorts, there are strikes that you get before they remove your channel completely. YouTube has already given me one strike because I was posting every day about Gaza. Then I took a break, thinking, “Let’s take a step back.” I thought we should have a copy of all our podcasts before they remove them because they’re going to do it anyway—not today, but maybe six months from now.
A lot of activists are shifting to platforms like BlueSky or Rumble, but at the same time, my question to you is: how about your own blog commentary? Have you noticed the algorithm functioning against your blog or website?
Juan Cole: Oh, it’s not just me. Actually, the algorithm now deprecates news. They don’t want news. They downplay it. If you follow someone on Facebook, Threads, or Instagram because you want news, they won’t show it to you even though you’ve followed them. Our hits have been cut to one-eighth of what they were three years ago.
This started happening before 2023 and 2024, even as early as 2022. Facebook decided to play down news and, in particular, decided to play down Palestine. I have about 100,000 followers on various social media platforms, but almost none of them are being shown my postings anymore.
Chaudhary: Yes, exactly. Until I go on X or Twitter, type in your name, and specifically look for your posts — even though I follow you — your posts are not visible to me.
Juan Cole: No, they don’t show them to you. Unless you specifically check out my profile, you won’t see my posts. On Facebook, there are ways to go into your settings and tell them you want to see more from certain sites, but most people don’t do that. They don’t realize that even if they follow someone, they won’t see their postings. X, formerly Twitter, isn’t just ideological. Elon Musk at X has decided not to show posts with external links because he wants to create a walled garden to trap people inside the platform. Ultimately, he wants X to become like Amazon, selling things to users. Links take you away from the site, so if you include a link in your post on X, fewer people will see it.
Chaudhary: Wow, that’s another level of control. And he’s also trying to introduce something called a positive algorithm. Meanwhile, Emmanuel Macron is saying that Elon Musk is interfering with elections in different countries. Many communities are discussing boycotting not just X but all of Elon Musk’s ventures.
The normalization of genocide over time is truly disturbing. Every day, reports come in: ten Palestinians killed, twenty killed. Pediatrician Dr. Abu Hassam has been missing since December 27th. Children are hungry, there’s starvation, babies are freezing to death, and the entirety of Gaza is flooded. People are living in tents without warm clothes. The apathy that has grown around us—how do you deal with that, and how does your book address it?
Juan Cole: Let’s face it. The major television media have demoted Gaza as a subject. In India, I don’t know if you see reporting on Gaza on NDTV or other channels. But in the United States, you can watch CNN or MSNBC all day, every day, and Gaza will barely be mentioned. There’s almost no footage or coverage. You have to go to Al Jazeera, based in Qatar, or TRT World, the Turkish channel, to get news. The major media in the U.S.—- and I don’t mean the print media because newspapers still cover it — but the major mass media, such as television and cable news, don’t cover it. They have deprecated it.
These national media outlets provoke national conversations. If they consistently don’t cover a subject, then it becomes a non-issue. It’s not just Gaza. For example, there’s a massive genocide happening in Sudan. There’s no coverage of it in the international mass media. You wouldn’t even know Sudan exists. Fourteen million people are on the verge of starvation—it’s one of the worst situations we’ve seen since the end of World War II — and it’s not being covered either.
Corporate bosses of these major television networks decide that some subjects won’t be covered.
Chaudhary: On a personal level, how do you deal with anger or humiliation when critics, including Israeli or British professors, claim that your research on the 20th-century Middle East is derivative and accuse you of antisemitism? Today, everything seems to be labeled antisemitic. How do you manage that?
Juan Cole: There are active campaigns in the United States by organizations targeting academics who speak out, attempting to smear them. This is especially threatening for younger academics, people without tenure, or those not yet well-established. It can deeply affect them.
Personally, this has not impacted me at my university or in my professional situation. I believe you just have to focus on your work. If anyone reads my books and checks the footnotes, they’ll find I’ve done the research and used the archives.
As for being called a racist, there’s no good way to respond to that. If someone calls you a racist, what can you say? Replying to it only makes you look ridiculous. You just have to live your life in a way that makes the charge seem absurd to those who know you.
I have a thick skin. In my early 20s, I lived in Beirut, Lebanon, during the outbreak of the civil war. I got a job working for a newspaper while the civil war was ongoing. It was a very disturbing experience, and I think I still carry some post-traumatic stress from it.
The Syrian Army had artillery pieces with rifled bores for more precision. When they fired, it felt like an earthquake, shaking the ground and making you fear the shell would hit your building. I lived under those conditions for about a year. That experience helped me deal with flame wars on the internet. If someone isn’t literally firing a shell at me, I don’t really care if they criticize me.
Chaudhary: Thank you so much. I ask this personally for my own guidance. This binary perspective — who decides what is scholarly and who doesn’t, especially in the hierarchy of academia? This is particularly challenging for South Asian scholars, women in academia, and others. It’s frustrating to navigate these dynamics.
Yes, absolutely. And when we talk about the Middle East, regions like Syria, Lebanon, and their civil wars bring up rich literature. One book that made me fall in love with this region was The Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine. I’ve read it ten times. Although the character is fictional, the book captures the real dangers of civil war in a way that’s both understandable and consumable.
Shifting back to Syria, what do you think is happening now? Who is Abu Mohammad al-Jolani? What is HTS? What’s the role of the SDF? There are discussions with Gulf leaders, and foreign ministers from France and Germany are visiting Sednaya Prison. Assad reportedly survived a poisoning attempt. Meanwhile, Israel continues to take over 40% of Jordan’s water capacity, pushing through the buffer zone toward Damascus. Jolani hasn’t made any comment about them. What is your perspective on what’s happening in Syria right now?
Juan Cole: HTS, or Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, is a far-right Muslim radical movement. In the past, it was an affiliate of al-Qaeda. They used to speak about Ayman al-Zawahiri or Osama bin Laden with honorifics and respect. In 2015, HTS attracted patronage from Turkey and Qatar, who pressured them to dissociate from al-Qaeda. They ended up running Idlib Province in northern Syria, where refugees fleeing the Assad regime sought refuge.
When running Idlib, HTS had to moderate their radicalism to some extent. The province included non-Sunni groups like the Druze. Many Syrians had also been raised under the Ba’ath nationalist party, which A form of nationalist socialism and relatively secular in its emphases, a lot of Syrians are not particularly religious. I can remember visiting Damascus when I was young, hanging around with students. We got to talking about what we wanted to do in the future and our regrets so far, and one young man said, “Well, I really think I should pray.” He was Muslim but wasn’t saying his five daily prayers—he wasn’t saying any prayers at all. I think there are a lot of Syrians like that.
HTS is hardline and the kind of organization that doesn’t deal well with people not practicing religion. There will be an attempt to impose this kind of fundamentalism by HTS on the rest of Syria, which I think will be a very difficult task because 35% of Syrians are some kind of minority. They’re Christians, Shiites, and leftist Kurds. A large number of urban Syrians are secular-minded and not particularly religiously oriented. But because of guns and because HTS behind the scenes probably has gotten a lot of money from the Gulf, they were able to take over the country.
It’s a little bit like the Taliban taking back Afghanistan. It’s not quite to that extent because HTS has certain constraints on how it behaves from its sponsors and because it wants to get the sanctions on the old Syrian government removed. The United States and Europe are tying the removal of sanctions to their behavior in office. Were they to conduct a massacre of the Druze minority or take a very radical stand on women’s rights, I think they would face significant economic difficulties. They’re much more beholden to the West than the Taliban are.
With regard to Israel, the situation is complex. The Israelis had mixed feelings about the Assad government. They saw it as an enemy, but the question was whether it was an enemy they preferred to other enemies. When the Arab Spring youth revolt broke out in 2011 and very quickly devolved into a civil war—essentially between rural Sunnis and the Shiite- and Alawite-dominated government of Assad, which had this Ba’ath nationalist socialist ideological framework—the Israelis gave some support to HTS. In its then incarnation, it was called the al-Nusra Front. The al-Nusra Front was fighting Hezbollah, which had come into Syria from Lebanon and was part of Iran’s axis of resistance supporting the Assad regime.
The Israelis were very afraid of Hezbollah and didn’t want it to establish a base on the Golan Heights in Syria from which it could shell Israel. Because the Sunni hardline fundamentalists were fighting the Shiite hardline fundamentalists, the Israelis swung around and gave some support to the al-Qaeda-linked faction. In fact, there are reports of wounded fighters from Jabhat al-Nusra being taken into Israel for treatment. The Druze in Israel didn’t like the hardline Sunni fundamentalists, as the Druze are an offshoot of Ismailism, and they were afraid of them. The Druze in southern Syria and the Druze in Israel have relations with one another, so they lobbied the Netanyahu government to stop giving support to the predecessor of HTS. Still, there are HTS fighters who owe their lives to Israeli physicians.
This is one of the reasons Abu Mohammad al-Julani [Ahmad al-Shara], the leader of HTS, has a complex set of relations with Israel and owes them for some things. He can’t possibly be happy that the Israelis have taken Syrian territory or, as you say, occupied a dam that supplies a lot of water to Syria and Jordan. However, he doesn’t seem to feel he’s in a position to push back very hard against that at the moment. Again, the likelihood is that the Biden Administration is holding out a carrot for him—that if he will recognize Israel, they will take off the sanctions.
I say this because they did this to Sudan. When Sudan had its people’s revolution against Omar al-Bashir and overthrew him, the new civilian politicians tried to cohabit with the officer corps. Antony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, came to Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the general, and said, “We’ll take the sanctions off Sudan, which had been imposed because of al-Bashir, who was a war criminal with warrants against him from the International Criminal Court, if you recognize Israel.” And so Burhan did.
I think the same thing will be tried with Syria: to use the sanctions as a wedge to get Israeli recognition. If Syria recognizes Israel, it can also come to Washington and try to get Washington to put pressure on Israel to draw back a bit. But I don’t think the Israelis are going to give up everything they’ve taken from Syria.
Chaudhary: That’s one of the few, or rare, or only countries in the world that has no fixed borders. So, I don’t think they are giving up the territory, especially Mount Hermon, which provides a higher surveillance point over all of Syria. Things are only going to get worse from January 20th because of the incoming administration.
My last question to you is: Why should people unfamiliar with the conflict, such as younger scholars or those from regions without this kind of conflict, read your book Gaza Yet Stands?
Juan Cole: I’m a historian, and we believe you can’t understand the present without understanding the past. While this is the recent past, journalism — while important — tends to focus on the immediate. To understand an event like October 7th and its aftermath, we can’t start on October 7th. My book begins with the 2006 electoral victory of Hamas in elections sponsored by the Bush Administration for the Palestinian Authority. It was in that election that Hamas won Gaza.
The story begins there — how Israel imposed economic sanctions on Gaza, divided the Palestinian Authority between Gaza and the West Bank, and how policies toward Hamas evolved. My book includes many episodes, such as the 2010 flotilla incident when aid ships from Turkey tried to reach Gaza and were attacked by Israel in international waters, which is illegal.
The book helps readers understand how we got to where we are. It consists of short opinion pieces from magazines like Salon and The Nation, and curated blog entries. For someone who is 20 years old, the material is accessible and easy to digest — it’s not dense exposition but engaging op-eds. Professors often tell me they assign my blog essays in their classes because undergraduates today are accustomed to short pieces on the web.
Chaudhary: Thank you so much, sir. Your resilience, integrity, and commitment to truth are inspiring. You’ve faced challenges but continue to persevere, which is empowering for scholars like me. Thank you again, and please let me know if you visit India.
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