VOICES FOR GAZA was a tremendously moving event that brought together Palestinian writers and activists and their allies to speak about Gaza, Palestine, and genocide. Before an audience of many hundreds, the speakers demonstrated one of the most important values that can sustain us in a time of seemingly unending mourning, resistance, and struggle: solidarity. This is part 2 of 2 parts of the full event.
VOICES FOR GAZA was made possible by the producers Raad Rahman (@siameseorchid) and Michiko Clark (@michikoclark), as well as Sarah McNally (@sarahcmcnally) and McNally Jackson Books (@mcnallyjackson), and took place at The Town Hall (@townhallnyc) in New York City on Sept. 21, 2025, hosted by Aasif Mandvi (@aasif) and with conversations moderated by John Freeman (@atreediary).
Transcript
Speaker 1:
Welcome back everyone. Next, we will have two conversations moderated by John Freeman. John Freeman is the editor and author of a dozen books, including the poetry collection, Wind, Trees. He hosts Alta Journal’s California Book Club and is an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf, where he edits and publishes Mosab Abu Toha and Hannah Assadi. Let’s bring back Mosab Abu Toha and Seema Jilani for the first conversation about bearing witness and also John Freeman.
John Freeman:
Mosab’s just going to sing for the next 15 minutes. I am Mosab’s editor. He just told me tonight that he can sing. I’m a little frustrated. Mosab, I want to start with you. The book that we published together, Forest of Noise, your second book of poems, it bears witness in English to the genocide in Gaza, but it also remembers Gaza as a sight of love. At one point in the poem, you write, “I was born in a refugee camp. Our house is roofed with corrugated tin sheets, alleys in the neighborhood too narrow for a father and son to walk beside each other.” In the face of everything, how important is it to you to remember that the ultimate unit of Gaza for you is love, is that alley is a space for a father and son to walk together?
Mosab Abu Toha:
Thank you so much, John. And it’s a great honor to be part of this conversation. For me, I talked today in a different panel about the importance of the place for me in Gaza. I was born in a refugee camp and up until I was eight years old, the only place I knew was the refugee camp. Then we moved to live in Beit Lahia, which is a different landscape, but still we were living next to Jabalia refugee camp. That’s where my mother was born, that’s where my uncles were born on my mother’s side. So that is the only place that I knew all my life.
And I still have photos of the refugee camp, the very, very narrow streets that lead to my grandfather’s house. God bless his soul, he died in the refugee camp under bombardment. So it is very important for me to remember all these details because not only do I not have an access to that place right now because it is a genocide, but the other devastating fact is that Israel erased the Jabalia refugee camp. Jabalia is the largest of the eight refugee camps. It is the refugee camp where I was sheltering before I was abducted in November 2023. And now I’m watching the refugee camp, the photos that were posted after I left.
And I look also at the photos of the refugee camp where I was sheltering with my wife and kids in one of the schools. So it is very important for me to remember these places and also to share it with so many people around the world who have never been able to visit Gaza. Not to say to volunteer as doctors. We know how much hard it is for even doctors, for journalists to go to Gaza. Not to say that there are no journalists in Gaza. There are journalists in Gaza.
So for me to remember the place is part of keeping it alive, at least in my words, in my book of poetry or in my essays in The New Yorker. I like to share part of my story with the outside world. This is my duty as a witness, as a victim, as a survivor. And unfortunately, some of the people about whom I wrote in the essays or the poems were killed over the past 715 days, I think, today. So it is very important for me to save the place, at least in my words, and the hope that one day in the future, we will rebuild the place like it was.
And hopefully people will not be dreaming of returning to the refugee camp as they are wishing right now. I talked to my aunt, Aisha Yusuf, who is now in sheltering with her husband and their three children in Nuseirat camp. And over the past few days, she was telling me, “I miss the refugee camp. I want to go back to the refugee camp.” But this is devastating for me as a Palestinian. I don’t want my people to wish to return to the refugee camp. I want them to dream of returning to Yaffa, our original home city, which was occupied by Israel. So we love the refugee camp. We love the refugee camp, but we don’t want it to be our home.
John Freeman:
Dr. Jilani, you went to Gaza the first time in 2005 and have been back several times and you were one of the first doctors to go in in December of ’23. Can you talk a little bit about collaborating with Gazan health workers, what that was like and the ones maybe perhaps you’ve kept in touch with and what they’re telling you now?
Seema Jilani:
Every time I go to Gaza, I’ve learned so much from the physicians and the healthcare providers and the nurses there because they have had to be so utilitarian and so innovative because of the blockade. Even during 2005, there’s something called a dual-use list that has barred certain things from getting in. Some of it can include insulin. It’s very dependent on the Israeli authorities as to what does and does not get in. Just now peanut butter, we are unable to get peanut butter, which we use as a source of protein in children and areas of famine.
But previously it has included medical equipment, it has included incubators. And so they have had to be so innovative and there are exceptionally well-trained physicians there, as Mosab noted. And so some of the things that stick with me, I consistently get texts, and many of them say the same thing is, “Please tell our stories, tell our stories.” Which is very helpful to me because it’s a fine line between telling a story and also, as I mentioned in my reading, how we package it in order to be able to convince a particular audience.
But I remember very specific things about working with healthcare workers there is I remember being in the doctor’s room and when I say the doctor’s room, it’s about the size of this rug. And one of the nurses was sobbing. He was sobbing in the corner and I just said, “Should we leave? What is the most appropriate thing to do?” And they explained that he had just pronounced a colleague of his dead and that if we could just go see his patients for the day, then that would be solace for him. And so I think it’s so important to acknowledge what they are going through.
They have been forcibly displaced multiple times. So that was when I went. Now I’m hearing that your colleagues are murdered, your colleagues are dead. So I used to get texts like, “Can we get this X, Y, Z medicine in?” And now it’s, “So-and-so is no longer with us.” And along the way, you’ve seen pictures of them and completely disintegrate before my eyes. So I have all the respect in the world and I don’t know how they continue.
John Freeman:
Mosab, in addition to a poet, you’re a journalist for The New Yorker. You won a Pulitzer for your commentary. Congratulations. But you are also your own kind of news channel. You have a line in this book where it says, “We don’t need the radio. We are the news.” But you are also at the hub of many, many people sending you information and you have a large social media following and you’re putting that information out.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that form of bearing witness, of taking stories directly from people you’re in touch with and broadcasting them to the world or putting them into an act of journalism versus writing poems in which you have sometimes used the stories of people you knew or your own stories.
Mosab Abu Toha:
Thank you so much, John, for this very important question. In fact, many of the journalists in Gaza did not start their journeys as journalists. Some of them were soccer players, some of them were just sons, some of them had different degrees. But later on, and I was one of them during the first two months, I found myself reporting because I’m not going to wait for anyone to come to the refugee camp and report and tell the story. So I’m the teller of the story and I am the story. So I found myself reporting, and I remember from the first few days of the ongoing genocide, I did not wait for Amnesty International or the International Association of Genocides Scholars or the United Nations just three days ago to call it a genocide. I call it a genocide. Okay. Now why?
Because I was born under occupation in 1992. I was born in a refugee camp. The first time I saw a helicopter firing a rocket, I wrote about it in my second poetry collection. I was eight years old when I watched an Israeli helicopter firing a rocket on a building just a few hundred meters away from me. So no one came to me and told me, “Mosab, you’re born under occupation.” No one prepared me for my life that was waiting for me. So I found myself living in a refugee camp, and then I watched this Israeli helicopter. And then in 2009, I was wounded in an airstrike. So I was not prepared for all of this, but I found myself sharing my stories with the outside world. And again, about the genocide, I did not wait for anyone to call it a genocide because I could, just like the genocide scholars, Omer Bartov said, “I’m a genocide scholar and I know I can recognize it when I see it.”
And I’m telling you and everyone that I am a Palestinian and when I see a genocide, I recognize it. So part of me, and this is dramatizing, I cannot know for sure what is going to happen to me, to every one of us in Palestine, even to you when this genocide comes to an end, because one day you will realize that what happened in the past was not normal and how we reacted to it was not normal. We don’t know how we are going to survive after the genocide. We are nowadays managing to survive, even though many of us get killed, abducted, injured. But after the genocide comes an end, we don’t know if we are going to survive after the genocide comes to an end. So I found myself in Gaza being a father, a son. My role was to go collect water like everyone. I was out in the streets looking for cardboard to make fire.
I risked my life going back to my house before it was bombed to get some of the clothes for my children because when we left our house, we couldn’t take everything. I wish I could take the walls of my living room. I wish I could take the bookshelves with me, but I didn’t take anything. Now I wish I could take the orange tree with me from our house in Beit Lahia. So I was Mosab, the father. I was Mosab, the poet. I was Mosab, the essayist. I was Mosab, the translator. I was Mosab, the reporter, and now I’m here, the same thing.
John Freeman:
And a school teacher too.
Mosab Abu Toha:
A school teacher. I forgot. A founder of the library. I founded the Edward Said Library, which now is bombed, unfortunately, but it’s not more precious than the lives of one child who visited the library. So I did not choose any of these roles. I did not choose to be a poet, not a teacher even. I just loved my people. I loved the truth and I wanted to share it with other people. Now, because I’m here in this country, I have access to the internet, I can charge my phone. When I was in Gaza, by the way, that was my second essay with The New Yorker. I was in Jabalia camp in the street, it was maybe 8:00, 9:00 PM. I can show you videos. There is no light except for the light of the ambulance in the street. It’s dark, completely dark. I was looking for a Wi-Fi connection in the street because that was the only way to find Wi-Fi connection in the street.
I was texting with my editor because I was working on the draft of my second piece, which was about the bombardment of our house in Beit Lahia. And I swear to God, about 500 meters there was an airstrike. 500 meters away. And then I put my phone in my pocket. I forgot whether I left my slippers or not, and I entered a pharmacy. I just ran for my life. I went away from that. So it was very risky for me to seek the truth, to share it with the outside world. Now I am relatively safe in this country. I have access to the internet. I have electricity to charge my laptop and my phone. So I have the luxury of translating the breaking news to download the videos and then upload them, give context to the videos. Sometimes I do a lot of follow-ups to the news because you hear that there is an airstrike in Gaza City, a house, for example, Dughmush family, seven people were killed.
And then a few minutes later you get an update, “Okay, now nine people.” Then an hour later, you get the names of the people. So I do my best to follow up on the news and put the names of the people. And if I could find the ages of these people, I put the ages of these people. And if I find the photos of these people, I get the photos of these people. So I could do that because I’m here and because if it wasn’t for the miracle when I got out of… I could be one of those people whose photos would be posted on social media with my wife and kids because that could have happened to me, but I was lucky to be alive. I don’t know. I can’t believe that I survived. Hopefully that we will survive, all of us.
Our families in Gaza, many of whom were killed. Every single morning I wake up, sometimes I wake up at 2:00 AM to go to the restroom. And then the first thing, even before I get out of my bed, I check the news too. And the first thing I look at would be the names of the people who were killed. So you look if maybe it’s your family, because I have siblings in Gaza. I have four siblings in Gaza, with their children and with their husbands. It could be them. So you could be next. I could be next. So I don’t choose to do that. I am forced to do that. Some people commend me for posting that. I didn’t choose that. I wish I could be just like you, but it’s been 716 days or over we have been doing this, and we don’t have the luxury of stopping, unfortunately.
John Freeman:
Dr. Jilani, I want to ask you about the idea of unchilding. Palestinian feminist, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s idea that the systemic deprivation of Palestinian children’s rights, innocence, and humanity within the context of this Israeli settler colonial practices strips them of their essential childhood and ultimately denies them their personhood and basic dignities. Another doctor, Ghassan Abu-Sittah, has used this phrase as well. And I wonder as a pediatrician who has operated in war zones, but specifically Gaza, if this one resonates, this term, if it resonates, and how it has evolved in the last two years?
Seema Jilani:
When we were staying in the guest house and I was in Gaza this pastime, we were also staying with a Palestinian family, and there was two young kids and there was a young boy. And I recall thinking that his mannerisms were very, very adult. And so there’s unchilding, but there’s also adultification, which is where they have taken on mannerisms and responsibilities that they otherwise should not have. We often see that also in the Black American community in young boys that have had to shoulder burdens that they might otherwise not.
But I also wanted to flip the script and the narrative and to say that that is something that is inflicted upon them. Again, that is not a choice. And also, in the case of Black Americans and Palestinian Americans, I would venture to go so far as the world inflicts that upon them and sees them as more adult than they are. Some examples of this that are demonstrated in our media are talking about 16-year-olds as if they’re men, when they are boys and children and so on. So it has multiple effects in multiple genres, but certainly the stress, there’s something else in pediatrics called toxic stress, and that specifically affects the amygdala and parts of the brain that have decision-making capabilities for later and has generational trauma and DNA that is altered.
But I would also say to not have it be so grim is that I’m a child of boat refugees, and so we have generational trauma as well, but what I like to think and I like to hope about is that along with that generational trauma is that we have also inherited a certain badassery that has gotten through. That’s the technical medical term, by the way.
John Freeman:
I think we saw that in your poem. One brief question for both of you before we sign off, I’m afraid we’re running out of time. Dr. Jilani, doctors in the position that you’re in are now being informed they’re becoming journalists because so many journalists have been killed, and obviously journalists are not being allowed in from the outside. And I wonder if on your trips to Gaza, your trips to Egypt, if a different aspect of your doctoring has evolved or developed where you are both practicing care and watching practicing care in a way that’s new to you?
Seema Jilani:
That is quite complex. Honestly, I would like to have a really eloquent answer for you and say yes. I just love doctoring kids and I just really appreciate and immerse myself in that. And I think rather than it’s changing the way that I do medicine, it has allowed me so much joy to re-embrace medicine. I had always otherwise thought that being an advocate and being a journalist would be so much more rewarding. And I still come back to the kids every single time because there is an intangible innocence and beauty with them. And so I don’t know that it’s changed my practice at all.
I do know that it has changed, for instance, how I interact with kids as so much more joyful. And also when I came back from Gaza and I picked my daughter up from her school, the first thing I did was kiss… I’d seen so many traumatic amputations. I just kissed every single knuckle, every single finger, and I just had a lot of gratitude around that. But I do want to say that of all the wars and so on, I think that because the rules of engagement have shifted so much that we are seeing hospitals targeted now. So yes, doctors are being placed in that position, but they’re also being targeted and tortured.
So they’re also getting detained. I have personal friends that have been detained and they’re taking their stethoscopes off before they leave the hospital. They’re changing out of their scrubs. And that is very different. Whether you care about Gaza or not, you’re going to care about whatever war comes next. And the idea that that is passable as fair play is very disturbing and should worry us all.
John Freeman:
Mosab, rather than ask you another question, could you read us one final poem?
Mosab Abu Toha:
I will. Yeah. Before I read the poem, maybe this is the first time I say this in a public event, but I don’t want us, whether we are Palestinian Americans… I’m Palestinian, I’m not Palestinian American, but I wish that no one in the outside world, be they Palestinian Americans or Americans or whatever they are, to think of the Palestinian resilience or steadfastness as a positive thing. Why? I think whatever the Palestinian people in Gaza especially are showing us, I know that these people are telling jokes, they are celebrating a birthday of their child by lighting a candle on a loaf of a bread or something.
For me, I’m starting to realize that this is not normal, what they are doing is not normal. This is not how people react to trauma, so their reaction is not normal. I don’t want to celebrate the resilience of the Palestinian people by praising what they are doing while the genocide is unfolding. Again, their reaction to things should not be considered normal because the circumstances they are living through are not normal. So I would think of the resilience of people after this comes to an end, we need to watch their reaction, how they react after this comes to an end. This is what I want people to focus on, that the jokes that we see from people in Gaza, their way of celebrating things while they are dragging whatever remainder of their houses or while they are carrying the lifeless bodies of their children, I don’t think this is normal, this is real. So we have to be careful of how we interpret their reactions.
I will read a poem, My Dreams as a Child, because Dr. Seema Jilani is a pediatrician. My Dreams as a Child. I still have dreams about a room filled with toys my mother always promised we could have if we were rich. I still have dreams about seeing the refugee camp from a window on a plane. I still have dreams about seeing the animals I learned about in third grade, elephant, giraffe, kangaroo and wolf. I still have dreams about running for miles and miles with no border blocking my feet, with no unexploded bombs scaring me off. I still have dreams about my favorite team playing soccer on the beach, me waiting for the ball to come away and run away with it. I dream still about my grandfather, Hassan, how much I want to pick oranges with him in Yaffa, but my grandfather died. Yaffa is occupied and oranges no longer grow on his weeping groves.
That’s the poem. I just wanted to end with this note, my poems in this book, if you have the book, the books or either of them, I want you to keep in mind that while you are reading the poems, these poems are missing a lot of things. As of now, some people about whom I wrote in the book who were alive are not with us anymore. Some of the places about which I wrote are not here anymore. And why I remember to say this is because in the poem I said, “I still have dreamed about seeing the refugee camp from a window on a plane.” Now, I wish that the refugee camp exists because Israel, as I said, erased two refugee camps out of the eight. So even if there was an airport, Israel bombed out two refugee camps. So these poems continue evolving mostly to the negative side of the change.
So many of these places that you are reading about, many of the people I mentioned in the books that I wrote about are no longer in this world. So I need you to keep in mind that some of these places were erased or are being erased or will be erased. And I pray that the genocide will come to an end and those who perpetrated it are held accountable and punished for these world crimes.
John Freeman:
Thank you, Mosab. Thank you, Seema. This is all the time we have. I’m going to bring out Viet, Hala and Hannah. Thank you. While there’s no music, I’ll talk about the theme of this conversation with Viet, Hala and Hannah. It’s a pleasure to be here with you.
We’re going to talk about imagination, art, activism, and allyship as important forces in how we’re going to survive. Hannah, in your novel, the Nakba of 1948 figures so much and so enormously in the lives of so many people, yet how many of us have read a novel about it or seen a film about it? And I’m wondering if you were in some ways trying to close that gap by writing your father’s story?
Hannah Assadi:
I was just trying to personally maybe close that gap for me, but I think one of the things that as my father was dying and in the aftermath of his death, the Nakba informed his self-narrative for so long, but for me, what hit me or what struck me was that this event, which is ongoing, that defined the opening of his life persisted past his end and there was something unbearable about that.
It gained new tragedy personally for me. And I think I had no other place to go than to the work. So I think, to answer your question, certainly the Nakba is huge in Palestinian memory and literature and film, and whether that gap has been closed for the broader cultural public, I don’t know. But I know that for me, I had to take it on.
John Freeman:
Grief as a generative force seems to have come up in several conversations tonight. Hala, could you talk a little bit about that in terms of your poetry and what it means to be a poet in the line of… If you don’t see yourself, please correct me, of Mahmoud Darwish where politics and activism are at the forefront of what he was doing as well as redefining certain terms? And one of the ways that he redefined terms was to involve a capacious grief into his poems. And I see that in your work. Is that something that makes you write poems? And how does it make you write poems?
Hala Alyan:
I think it would be an honor to be operating in his tradition. I think that like what you’re saying, I don’t know how much consciousness is going into how I approach writing in general in that there’s actually very little of it. I think that I am moved by making the things that keep me up at night nameable. I think it’s really important for me as a person to be able to get through this life, to continue to try to shed light on the things that I can’t look away from, that I feel haunted by, that I feel fixated on, et cetera.
Grief obviously is like a particularly pernicious house guest. It’s very difficult to shake it. And I think especially in the face of grief and trauma and internal emotions that are particularly dislocating and dislocated, I think of Dr. Samah Jabr, who’s a Palestinian psychologist who talks about how there’s no such thing as PTSD in many communities around the world, including Palestinian because PTSD implies that there’s a post to the trauma and that that’s not the case for so many communities, certainly like what we’re watching.
I say that to say there’s something about trying to find ways to make space for enduring pain that feels like it doesn’t have any end to it or any end in sight. For me, writing and making and creating is the only way that I’ve been able to find any sort of shape. It feels like I’m writing my way, not out of those emotions, but through them. And that for me becomes a way of enhancing my endurance or my capacity to be able to keep trying to think of what kind of person I want to be in this world or how I want to show up for this moment or what I want to be able to tell my toddler I did with this time.
More than anything, it just helps me orient. So again, I don’t know how much forethought is going into any of it, as much as that if I didn’t do it, I would become really unwell, I think. I don’t know that I’d say I’m very well, but I think I would become profoundly more unwell than I am.
John Freeman:
I don’t know how many of us are well right now.
Hala Alyan:
And I think that’s adaptive. I think it’d be really concerning if you were like, “I’ve never been better. I’m thriving right now.” Truly, I think it’s a sign that you’re able to access and touch something and be moved and be broken over and over again by things that should be breaking you. This should be bringing everyone to their knees. But yeah, writing just helps give shape to that.
John Freeman:
Viet, you have a line in your new book, To Save and Destroy, in which you talk about writing as another, reading as another. And you talk about the trauma, both giving the other value and also devaluing the other and the trap therein. And you say there are some temptations as writing as another, to idealize or sentimentalize, to separate oneself from the herd, to say, “I’m not a refugee, I’m in exile,” maybe is one form of that. You can talk about that. “Or to see the other as an identity.” And I’m quite interested in the last one, to see the other as an identity and the traps in that. Can you talk a little bit about that in this moment? The talk you just gave touched on it, but what are some other things you might say about it now?
Viet:
Well, I think about the fact that all of us are other in some ways, I think. Some of us are definitely stigmatized or marked as other as part of a population. And then all of us grapple and confront with very intimate othernesses within ourselves, within our families and so on. And all of that is important. And one of the ways that that is important is that it’s allowed us to have a tradition of resistance and a genealogy of resistance where we’ve created communities around being others.
We’ve created literatures and cultures and memories and histories and all that is enormously motivating and powerful. And then the problem is that once you do that, once you have your otherness as an identity, it’s something solid that can be turned into something not so great, like a commodity, or you can turn your otherness that was an otherness built out of your wound into something that justifies you wounding other people. And if we look at any of our histories, any of our communities of otherness, I think the lesson we should take away is not simply that we should celebrate what makes us other, which we should do, but that is actually secondary to remembering what made us an other in the first place.
And what made us an other is a force and a violence that is a part of human nature and that we as human beings can repeat that. And so I brought up the Vietnamese example because I’ve seen that happening within Vietnam, the nation and my own Vietnamese community. And the lesson that I take away that I try to reinforce is that otherness should be a principle. We should always be looking out for the other, and we who have been other can do violence upon others as well. And that’s actually a really, really hard lesson to learn.
And we’re seeing that enacted today in the most tragic and the most ironic way possible that people who are once the victims of a Holocaust and a genocide are perpetrating a Holocaust and a genocide. It should not surprise us. It does surprise us, but it’s happened throughout history and we’re just getting another lesson today in what that means.
John Freeman:
Hannah, in Viet’s book, he writes, “Apocalypse now was my first encounter with a story powerful enough to destroy me.” And then he proceeds to claim the story and describe how he taught himself how to identify with the other inside of himself as well as the other from outside. And I’m curious if there was a piece of film or fiction that worked that way for you?
Hannah Assadi:
Yeah. I’m just actually still thinking about what Viet said about the people who were the victims of the Holocaust now perpetrating a genocide. And I don’t know that I felt this way. I’m sure I have felt this way from a text or a piece of film, but what comes to mind is I happen to have Jewish ancestry on my mother’s side and I’m Palestinian and there was about a week that I attended Hebrew school and it lasted that long for this reason was because there was this narrative they were teaching us about the Holocaust. And then quite seamlessly they went to move to talk about the Arabs and how the Arabs have genocidal intent toward the Jews or toward us.
And I was sitting there like, “Who am I in this us?” And so in those sorts of moments, yeah, I don’t know if this answers your question explicitly, but that is my experience of feeling othered within. And back to your point about how important it is to be an other as a principled position versus using it or forwarding it for abuse or a commodity. And I think that’s something that I try to inhabit and I’m forced to think about a lot.
John Freeman:
Hala, in one of your poems, Half-Life in Exile, you write, “Everybody loves the poem. It’s embroidered on a pillow in Milwaukee. It’s done nothing for Palestine.” And later on you write, “It’s compulsive to watch videos. Is it compulsive to memorize names?” And one of the things I admire so much about your recent poems is that you’re interrogating your allyship. And you even said in the poem that you read, “I’m profiting from this poem.” And how has that felt as you’ve done it and what has the response been to it? Has it led to anything else unexpected?
Hala Alyan:
It hasn’t felt very good. It would be weird if I was like, “I’ve loved it.” I think it’s done this thing where it’s interesting as you’re talking about having to contend with those two things and being like, “Where am I in this?” And you’ve written about this beautifully, about what it means to engage with things diasporically, what it means to engage meaningfully and respectfully, and not to allow the diasporic distance to silence you. Because oftentimes that’s just a method of weaponization, right? If you feel this way, then go back to Gaza. If you feel this way, then why are you in your comfortable apartment in Williams… et cetera, right?
So I don’t know the answer, but I think I’m trying very hard to figure out how to inhabit two spaces at once, which is that I have a tremendous amount of privilege because of completely random and luck-based decisions that my father’s family made. That’s it. My dad’s dad decided to get a teaching position in Kuwait as a school teacher, and that means that I’m not currently in Gaza. That’s all. And what has come from that is just an embarrassment of doors that have opened and privileges and just opportunities that if you’re not careful and if you’re not interrogating enough, can almost seem like, I don’t know, there’s a way that if… Yeah, I just think there’s a way that if you’re not really willing to look at that and name that and not be afraid of bringing that into the space, I think you screw yourself over.
Because I think then you start to believe a certain mythology that is not correct about your positionality. Anyway, all of this is to say it doesn’t feel very good. I feel guilty a lot. I feel gross. I don’t know how to engage with social media very well. I post something that I’m not sure I should have posted it. I’ll write an op-ed. I’ll regret writing that op-ed. I’ll write another op-ed. I’ll be like, “I don’t know.” I alternate between this. I believe strongly that the hero archetype or the idea that there’s this individualistic thing that one of us is going to come up with the perfect argument.
I’m sure everybody in here has a similar delusion that if only we can say it well or if only we can show up in this particular way, or if only we happen to be here with the camera or the whatever. And I think the first few months there was a lot of that where I was just like, “I need to write this. Has anyone thought about changing minds? Has anyone thought about looking at it from this way? We have to speak…” And I think that that part is getting beaten out of me that I will try as much as I can to show up as consistently as I can in a way that’s honoring my value system.
And when I feel like I’m burning out, which is all the time, I will do what I can do responsibly to keep, again, enhancing my endurance, which it’s not a luxurious thing to do. It’s a necessity. It’s like the Audre Lorde idea of self-care. You owe it to everybody that is on the ground to keep your capacity up. But I think there is something about just starting to be like, “Use the privilege in whatever ways you actually can and try not to waste so much time feeling…” Because I was doing this too where I was feeling really sorry or guilty and then being like, “What kind of person? If only. Should I be there? Why am I here?” And it’s like when somebody microaggresses someone and then they’re just like, “I am so sorry. I’m so sorry. I can’t believe I just did that to you. Oh, my God, I can barely look at…”
And you’re just like, “Way to just make this about yourself. And now I have to make you feel better about the fact that you engaged in a transgressive thing.” There’s something similar with that, I think, diasporically, where it’s a little bit of like, “No, you’re positioning, but don’t then center even further. Deal with your guilt on your own time.” I don’t know that that deserved applause, to be honest with you. I don’t know that was a very nice thing to say, but I appreciate that.
John Freeman:
Viet, there’s a line in your book where you talk about Asian Americans and you said, “Our silence was the price of admission,” or something along those lines. And the list of co-sponsors of this event includes the Asian American Writers’ Workshop as well as Jewish Voices for Peace. It was a beautiful expression of expansive grief. And I’m wondering how statements like that, Asian American writers are extremely successful and have made themselves a force in America. Has there been pushback against that kind of statement or other requests that you’ve been making encouragements for an expansive idea of what you call the Oriental and the definition of Asian American?
Viet:
Well, it’s a very personal question for me because I came into political and artistic consciousness as an Asian American. That’s how I was radicalized. And that’s an example of otherness. We were stigmatized as Orientals and outsiders and foreigners, and then therefore we’ll organize around our otherness and then we’ll make our claim to belonging in this country. And then that was a very successful move. We have all kinds of successful Asian American organizations and Asian American celebrities and Asian American politicians. And we have Kash Patel.
God, we direct the FBI now. And so you see the problem, you see the problem. What does it mean to claim to belong to a nation when the nation is an empire, when the nation is built on settler colonialism, when the nation is built on genocide? And I think too many Americans have never asked that question, who are not Indigenous people, who are not Black people. And Asian Americans are very guilty of this. We’re so focused on our own otherness that we’ll take every moment of approbation and inclusion and we’ll lap it up because too many of us have internalized being the model minority. Even when we reject it on the surface, so many of us still want to be included. And the question we should always ask ourselves is included into what?
And so I’m very happy that Asian American Writers’ Workshop is a part of this and other Asian American organizations, but you know that and Jewish Voice for Peace, these are all groups that are testimony to the fact that communities are divided. Some communities do want to belong at any price. They want to be included in a genocidal war machine and they won’t talk about it because they’ll get the benefits for it.
And then there are others who will stand up against that. And that has caused division within our communities. And that includes the Asian American literary community too. And so I think it’s just beholden on all of us who have benefited from our citizenship, who have benefited from inclusion, who have benefited from it, possibly exploited our own otherness as an identity to refuse, to refuse to continue to participate, to refuse the price of inclusion if that price is silence on genocide.
John Freeman:
One of the other things I really love about your new book is how much you claim the qualities of self that are often people of color, people who are considered other are asked to suppress. And Hannah, your novel, Paradiso 17, is like a catalog of those. Your main character is an angry alcoholic drifter who has many partners, adultery, you could go through all the sins, and yet we also completely and desperately sympathize with him. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit about writing the messy character into this moment?
Hannah Assadi:
Yeah. Dad, are you listening to this? Yeah, it was important for me. And I also have to say that because it’s such a personal work, I could only write it in the aftermath of his passing. But yeah, it is important for me that he was full, and that characters are full, and that other characters are full. And some of them are abusive and angry for really understandable reasons, and drink too much, and cheat, and do all the things that humans do because life is really painful.
And I think to not have all of that in there would’ve been a lie. And I just didn’t want to lie. And I also think I’ve had the experience, particularly with my first novel, which was a little bit racy and a little bit out of fictional, where there was this expectation that that wasn’t the story that I was supposed to write. It wasn’t what the publishing audience or the auditor audience would expect of somebody like me writing a novel, which I don’t know what they expect. What is the expectation around certain writers of color? So yeah, I wanted him to be full in all of his imperfections, and I think it’s really, really important.
John Freeman:
Hala, briefly, there’s a line in your recent collection of poems. You say, “To love in Arabic, you must say, ‘Be the thing that buries me.'” And I wonder if you can talk about love as a value in your life now when you’re constantly also watching a genocide, how many times you redefine it for yourself and what that means in terms of allyship?
Hala Alyan:
So I’m getting a divorce. And actually, I don’t mean that facetiously. I do think that has been not disconnected from the moment. It has taken place in the last couple of years, and I don’t know that that wasn’t going to be the outcome regardless, but I definitely think it was hastened along by everything happening because I do think there’s moments when there is this… We were talking about clarity a little bit ago, and there’s something about moments that have this level of fever pitch and urgency do call forward in people clarity. And I think two things happened. One was editing the memoir that just came out, which is about my daughter being born via surrogate and all these things.
And then in that, talking about the rockiness of the marriage and then experiencing, like I’m sure so many people here, this really visceral, unable-to-eat, unable-to-sleep grief at watching, particularly in the fall and winter of 2023 into 2024, and feeling like really there was something being reassembled in me and being in early motherhood and trying to figure out how to navigate that. And then feeling a grief so intensely and so deeply, and then looking around and realizing that there was someone that I was sharing my home and my life and my heart with that was not carrying that grief in the same way.
And that’s not an indictment of anything. It really isn’t. I have other indictments, but that’s not the one. That’s not the one. It’s really just that there was something about capacity, to be able to step into an experience and really to be able to let the experience devastate you, rearrange you, crush you. That just wasn’t there in a house where you’re raising a kid that’s Palestinian. There was something about that that then just clarified certain things.
So even though obviously this isn’t how I wanted my life to go, I don’t want to be getting a divorce, but I think there is something about being like, it has clarified my thinking on what love looks like and that it’s not just about feeling a certain set of things towards a certain person or a certain group of people or certain whatever. And I imagine a lot of people in here have had to confront that too in different ways, that you can love somebody or you can love your family or your friends or your hometown, whatever, and then you also have to be able to show up for these moments and feel like that love has to be aligned with a certain, again, value system in a way.
And if it isn’t, I don’t know. There’s something about that that I’m thinking more about love as an act of care, love as an act of, again, attending, love as an act of witnessing, love as being willing to sit in to see what other people see and to not flinch. Or flinch, but don’t look away, that there’s something in that, like something active. Yeah, and I don’t think it’s disconnected from also mothering for me and trying to think of how I want this person, this little creature to be in the world and what I want to be able to model for her. So yeah, I think love has just become a… I don’t know. I have watched the most intense displays of love on my phone from on the ground in Gaza and felt that so intense.
Is that not love? I have felt it. I’ve heard the voice of children call for their parents or the look of someone’s face and be like, “I can feel that.” It’s not mine. That’s totally different. And you have to, again, be aware of your positionality, but there’s something about the expansiveness of it that I think of. Yeah, I’m just trying to break and put together these definitions for myself.
John Freeman:
Thank you for that answer. Final question for Viet, and then I’m afraid our time is up. Viet, you’ve talked about capacious grief and you’ve written a very powerful book that’s in a large part about your mother. And in the last couple of years, your father has also died. And I wonder if your thoughts about how to mourn have changed in this time, especially as we’re mourning strangers who are so close to us and who we obviously care about if you care about the dignity of any individual, let alone Palestinians. Have you thought through the way to mourn publicly or capaciously with others who are strangers?
Viet:
Well, Hannah, what really struck me about what you were saying is that you had to wait until your father passed away. And likewise, I wrote this memoir, Man of Two Faces. I had to wait until my mother passed away before I felt like I could write about her. The book is about her, about our refugee experience, about my parents surviving 40 years of war and colonialism and racism and becoming refugees twice. But writing that book was my act of mourning. Writing is my act of grieving. And I think something is wrong with me. I think normal human beings should be able to grieve. You should be able to cry and express your grief to people, and I really can’t do that. So instead I write books. And you know what? It’s actually very productive. There’s a lot of things to grieve and to mourn.
And my father was fading away as I wrote the next book To Save and to Destroy. And he passed away a few months before the book was published and I record him fading away in that book. And I think in both cases, I was grieving my parents in advance. I had 13, 14 years to grieve my mom because it was a long, slow, painful decline. My father declined faster, but he may or may not like this wherever he is, but I will grieve him through a book as well, I think, and mourn him through a book. And these acts of mourning and grieving are very powerful. And we as writers… Well, I can’t speak for the other writers, but myself as a writer, I feel that we all have to do what we can. And my one sole talent in the world is to write.
And we all have to contribute through the one sole talent that each of us hopefully is blessed to have, and that’s writing. The other thing I think about mourning and grieving, and as I’m watching these images too, and it’s very painful for me to watch them, because I’m a father, I have a five-year-old and a 12-year-old, and it’s impossible for me, I think, to enjoy almost any moment of joy with my children without also having these images overlaid with them. And what I also think about is I’m watching this from a distance and I remember, I think that when my parents and I were refugees and when my parents were living through the Vietnam War, Americans were watching us. The whole world was watching. And what was the whole world thinking? We look back and we think that there was the anti-war movement, there was the counterculture movement, everybody must have been against this.
And I think the fact of the matter is that’s not true. I think for a lot of people all over the world, but especially in the United States, life just went on. Most people were not in the anti-war movement. Most people were not protesting. They were just watching from a distance. And so what’s happening today, I just feel there’s such enormous resonance with my own history and thinking about the fact that one of the reasons why I’m also so personally interpolated into that position of what it means to watch what’s happening to Palestinians is because sometimes I think what would I have done if I was an American or somebody else watching what was happening to the Vietnamese? And so this is my personal test, how to grieve, how to mourn, how to fight, how to write back against all of that.
And then finally, I think to address what you said, the question of guilt, I think for so many of us who are refugees, one thing that is not talked about a lot is survivor’s guilt. To be a refugee is to have survived and not necessarily to feel that you have deserved your survival. Why are you here and all these other people are not? Those Vietnamese refugees who made it to the United States and they crossed the South China Sea, they were the lucky ones that half the people who got on those boats to try to cross the sea did not make it. And so if you did make it, you’re lucky, but you also feel that survivor’s guilt. You feel the weight of your fate and the weight of everyone else who didn’t make it. And I just can’t help but feel that for Palestinians, this must be true, but for everybody who’s watching this. Anyway, the survivor’s guilt, the mourning, the grief, all of this, it’s wrapped up in the history of the Vietnamese and the history of the Palestinians.
And lastly, it’s not unique. This is the other thing about being an other and having survived something horrifying. You’re tempted to believe that what’s happened to you is utterly unique and it’s not. And that is not to devalue anybody. What happened to my mother was not unique. She was just like 100,000 other women who survived all these things and that’s what makes it powerful. The fact that this has happened to so many people across so many different times, that is what makes it powerful. And if you believe that you are unique, what that allows you to do is to believe that nothing else this bad has ever happened to anybody else. And if we look at our history, that is simply not true. And that is what allows the solidarity and the capacious grief, which allows us not simply to sit here and mourn, but to take action as well.
John Freeman:
I’m afraid our time is up. Please thank Viet, Hala, and Hannah.
Hala Alyan:
Thank you.
John Freeman:
And INARA.
Speaker 1:
What a remarkable conversation. So while these guys are changing the set around, let me introduce our next speaker, Mahmoud Khalil. They asked me to come out here and just vamp for a couple of minutes while… And I said, when I say his name, there’s going to be an applause and so I won’t need to vamp. Mahmoud Khalil is a recent Palestinian graduate of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.
He’s previously worked in development and international affairs of the United Nations, the UK’s Foreign Office, as well as other nonprofit organizations in the Middle East. Khalil played a key role in Columbia student movement opposing Israel’s war on Gaza. In March 2025, the Trump administration unlawfully arrested Khalil and attempted to deport him all in retaliation for his lawful advocacy in support of Palestinian rights. After 104 days in detention, a federal court ordered his release on bail. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mahmoud Khalil.
Mahmoud Khalil:
Thank you. Thank you so much for all the love and for all the support.
Audience:
Free Palestine.
Mahmoud Khalil:
Free Palestine. Forever, free Palestine. Thank you so much for your time. I know the program ran a little bit late, little bit. Also, thank you so much, Aasif, for the idea. Stay tuned for my late night show. Perhaps this would save me from deportation or maybe not. Comedy only buys so much immunity when your identity is a target and when your homeland is a metaphor everyone fears to name. I’m going to read just a little bit of my diary when I was in detention. And when I came here, I wanted to talk a little bit about hope.
But to be honest, I don’t know how to find hope in this time of genocide. In the prison yard, the sun is too bright, yet there’s always a draft of chills. The men circle the field like planets in disorder. Some kicking a ball, others standing in clusters, others lining up for haircuts. I avoid the walking track. Too many eyes scanning, searching for something I cannot give. Hope. How can you find hope in the time of genocide? My Nepali friend leaving today on bond refuses when I ask if he would like to speak to the press about detention conditions even anonymously. His fear runs deeper than the fences. Fear of the state, fear of deportation, fear of being seen. That fear is everywhere here inside and outside. When I call Noor, my wife, she tells me my lawyers need more letters of support for my release.
We make a list of friends and I’m struck of how many decline, afraid their names might leak. I understand, but I don’t. If friendship collapses at the thought of risk, then what is it worth? Fear like that remind me of how many watch the bombs fall in Gaza while silent, afraid of losing their jobs, their visas, their scholarships, their carefully constructed safety. They said nothing while the children of Deir al-Balah and Jabalia were buried in pieces. They called it complex. They called it conflict. They called it anything but what it was and what it is. Genocide.
On the far side of the yard, men in yellow and red uniform, those with convictions mingle with us in blue. One of them, a Guinean, calls me by name. He says he saw me on television. He has lived in the United States for more than 20 years. The court betrayed him, locked him for five years. Now they want to deport him. His words carry no faith in justice, only in struggle. The world must unite against injustice. I nod, thinking not only of this cage, but of the open air prisons in Palestine, the checkpoints, the blockade, the rationed food, and the rationed humanity.
The children born knowing the sound of drones before lullabies. I think of James Baldwin’s line to Angela Davis, “We must fight with love as well courage.” But here, love feels like contraband, smuggled in small gestures, a Guatemalan man arranging my bed when I first arrived, and the Mexican teaching me a card game. Love survives siege. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it. In Palestine, they rescue books from rubble. They insist not only on survival, on life, on beauty, on the future.
In Nablus, they bake bread during raids. In Ramallah, they teach children the names of villages erased from the map. Here too, we find ways to remain human, to remain Palestinian, even as the world demands our erasure. When the judge denied my release, I returned to my bunk and stared at my son’s photograph for hours. His eyes fixed at me, already carrying the weight of lineage he cannot name. I see echoes of my parents in his cheeks, his gaze. Baldwin wrote, “One’s crown has already been bought and paid for. That all we must do is to put it on.” But what does it mean to crown a child born into exile while his father counts time under fluorescent light?
What does it mean to inherit a legacy of resistance so old it predates the language used to criminalize it? To be born Palestinian is to be born accused, guilty of existing, of remembering, of refusing to disappear. My name is Mahmoud Khalil. I am 30 years old. Palestinian, raised in a Palestinian refugee camp in Southern Damascus, Syria. I write because silence is worse than despair. And because one day when my son reads this, I want him to know his father did not accept the fear. His father did not keep quiet while his people were massacred. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:
The Resistance Revival Chorus is a group of 60-plus women and non-binary singers who come together to breathe joy and song into the resistance and to uplift and center women’s voices. Chorus members are touring musicians, filmmakers, solo recording artists, gospel singers, political activists, and more, representing a multitude of identities, professions, creative backgrounds, and activist causes. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the Resistance Revival Chorus.
MUSIC:
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.
Ceasefire now.
Ceasefire now.
Ceasefire now.
Ceasefire now.
Ceasefire now.
Ceasefire now.
Ceasefire now.
Ceasefire now.
Put your weapons down.
Put your weapons down.
Put your weapons down.
Put your weapons down.
Put your weapons down.
Put your weapons down.
Put your weapons down.
Put your weapons down.
No genocide.
No genocide.
No genocide.
No genocide.
No genocide.
No genocide.
No genocide.
No genocide.
Let Gaza live.
Let Gaza live.
Let Gaza live.
Let Gaza live.
Let Gaza live.
Let Gaza live.
Let Gaza live.
Let Gaza live.
Free Palestine.
Free Palestine.
Free Palestine.
Free Palestine.
Free Palestine.
Free Palestine.
Free Palestine.
Free Palestine.
From the river.
From the river.
To the sea.
To the sea.
Palestine.
Palestine.
Will be free.
Will be free.
Speaker 8:
Thank you. Thank you. We are…
Resistance Revival Chorus:
The Resistance Revival Chorus.
Speaker 8:
This is Everybody Deserves To Be Free by the great Deva Mahal.
MUSIC:
It isn’t right.
Far too many falling.
They say it’s in the name of the greater good.
We’ve lost sight.
The world is getting colder.
What happened to the words.
For which we once stood.
I will stand for you.
Would you stand for me?
Everybody deserves to be free.
I would lend a hand to you.
Would you lend a hand to me?
Everybody deserves to be free.
It’s close to night.
So I’ll leave a candle burning.
To light your way home.
Won’t give up the fight.
The story isn’t over.
I won’t let you walk all alone.
I will stand for you.
Would you stand for me?
Everybody deserves to be free.
I would lend a hand to you.
Would you lend a hand to me?
Everybody deserves to be free.
If you feel like I do.
Stand with me.
If you hurt like I do.
Stand with me.
Stand with me. Yeah.
If you feel like I do.
If you feel like I do.
Stand with me.
Oh, oh, oh, yeah.
If you hurt like I do.
If you hurt like I do.
Stand with me.
Stand.
If you think it’s a shame.
If it gives you the blues.
I’m telling you.
I will stand for you.
Would you stand for me?
Everybody deserves to be free.
I would lend a hand to you.
Would you lend a hand to me?
Everybody deserves to be free.
Oh, I would lend a hand to you.
Would you lend a hand to me?
Everybody deserves to be free.
I would lend a hand to you.
Would you lend a hand to me?
Everybody deserves to be free.
Everybody deserves to be free.
Everybody deserves to be free.
Speaker 8:
Thank you, thank you. All right, we’ve got one more song for you all. If you catch onto it please sing along, clap along. We’d love to hear your voices.
MUSIC:
When I woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom.
Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom.
Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom.
Hallelu.
Hallelu.
Hallelu.
Hallelu.
Hallelujah.
Well, I’m walking and talking with my mind stayed on freedom.
Oh, yes, I’m walking and talking with my mind.
You know that I am stayed on freedom.
You know I’m stayed on freedom.
Walking and talking with my mind.
Walking with my mind.
Stayed on freedom.
Hallelu.
Hallelu.
Hallelu.
Hallelu.
Hallelujah.
Well, there ain’t no harm when your mind stayed on freedom.
Stayed on freedom.
Ain’t no harm when your mind.
Ain’t no harm.
Stayed on freedom.
You know I’m stayed on freedom.
Ain’t no harm when your mind.
Ain’t no harm.
Stayed on freedom.
Stayed on freedom.
Hallelu.
Hallelu.
Hallelu.
Hallelu.
Hallelujah.
Come on and walk now.
Walk, walk.
You better walk, walk.
Come on and walk.
Walk, walk.
With your mind on freedom.
Walk, walk.
You better walk, walk.
Come on and walk.
Walk, walk.
With your mind on freedom.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, you better walk, walk.
Come on and walk, walk.
Well, I’m singing and shouting with my mind.
Stayed on freedom.
Stayed on freedom.
Singing and shouting with my mind.
Singing with my mind.
Stayed on freedom.
You know I’m stayed on freedom.
Singing and shouting with my mind.
Singing with my mind stayed on freedom.
Hallelu.
Hallelu.
Hallelu.
Hallelu.
Hallelujah.
Hallelu.
Hallelu.
Hallelu.
Hallelu.
Hallelujah.
Hallelu.
Hallelu.
Hallelu.
Hallelu.
Hallelujah.
Hallelu.
Hallelu.
Hallelu.
Hallelu.
Hallelujah.
One more time.
Hallelu.
Hallelu.
Hallelu.
Hallelu.
Hallelujah.
Speaker 1:
Thank you to the Resistance Revival Chorus. Thank you to you. I told you you were going to need Kleenexes and I was right. Ladies and gentlemen, a big round of applause to all of our speakers, all of our guests, everybody involved in the program. Please give money to INARA. The QR code, they can put it back up there. Goodnight, everybody. Thank you. Free Palestine.
