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Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza is the culmination of a violent settler-colonial project that goes all the way back to the Nakba (“Catastrophe”) of 1948. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, former political prisoner and Black Panther Mansa Musa speaks with award-winning Palestinian author and former political prisoner Basem Khandakji about the decades-long destruction of Palestinian society and mass displacement of Palestinians from their homeland, as well as the perseverance of Palestinian prisoners under the totalitarian conditions of Israeli prisons.
Producer / Videographer / Editor: Cameron Granadino
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. Today we are joined by Basem Khandakji, an award-winning author and former political prisoner who was held in Israel’s prisons for 21 years. Baising was released this past October and joins us today from Cairo. Let me say before I welcome you, he was released under the terms that Israelis concocted to release hundreds of Palestinians under the pretense that if Hamas released so- called hostages, he was released along with other people, but in being released as you’ll see as the story unfold, he was released from this concentration camp and then placed in the exile for no other reason as you’ll learn than that he wanted to be treated as a human being. Basemq, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you. Thank you, Brother Mansa. And I salute you and I really touch to meet you and I salute your 48 years inside the injustice prisons in United States.
And we definitely are honored anytime we have anyone of Palestinian origin or anybody that stand up for their rights. Whenever we have them in this space, we are honored to be able to say, “Let’s turn the volume up on your voice.” So that’s what we’d be doing today. But first, introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a little bit about your life prior to being kidnapped and then specifically your time as a student and a revolutionary socialist.
I wonder every time how can I introduce myself before I’ve been in prison? But first of all, let me say maybe my English language, it’s not influent language like the science of the West like it. I prefer the anti-colonial language. So I hate grammars of all languages. So I try to introduce myself, but I really wonder who I am before I was being in prison. If I really was a human or a human being or a boy, a young man, I don’t know, but I just know that I was in the middle of war, the second antifather. I was a student in the university inside my city, Najah University. I joined journalism college in the university, but when the Intifada start, the Israeli war against my people in West Bang and Gaza and Jerusalem. So I think between me and myself, what can I do?
I saw all my friends was being killed by the Israeli forces. They assassinated them. They killed our children, our women. At that time, I was a member in the Communist Party, the Palestinian Communist Party. And my party at that time, the political program, my party in some part of it, they don’t believe in the revolutionary violence, let’s say. They just believe in public resistance. But I don’t find myself at that time in that program. So I joined some military cell. It’s for the Palestinian public front and me and my comrades, we tried to fight the Israeli forces. And since that time I discovered that the whole issue and the main matter, it’s about who is me. And I discovered that Israeli soldier or that Israeli politician is ambitious and he tried every time to dehumanize me
Now. So at that time today when I remembered this era, that era, and it’s so hard, it’s so complicated because I told you it’s not just a rebeal, it’s not just antifada. We call it in Palestine and in Arabic. It’s a war. It was a war, a
War against my people. And genocide didn’t start just in Gaza in 2023. The genocide against us started since 1948.
That’s right. The reason why I asked that question, I’m big on our always understanding that Palestinian people are human. The narrative that we see in this country is always a narrative that’s painted as inhuman that people that don’t have no sense of dignity, pride, or respect. In this country, this is what we see in this country. So it’s important that our audience first recognize that social conditions propelled you into a state of mind or into a position where if you’re going to get killed sitting on your porch or you’re going to get killed fighting back. A great poet in this country called Claude McKay, he got this poem, he say, “If I must die, I’m back pressed against the wall, dying, but fighting back.” So your back is pressed against the wall and you dying, you going to die, but it’s how you die. Talk about, as we segue into this, in this country we often say when the court system fails, then we go to the court of public opinion.
We organize people to understand that this is an injustice and try to get people to take a position against the injustice that is taking place. Could you speak to the circumstances of your imprisonment, specifically the forced contraction and the legal process? And here, when I talk about the legal process, if you can understand what I’m saying, I want you to make it clear to our ordinance that you have the military court and then you have the civil, you have the criminal court. And are Palestinian people being tried under military court or are they being tried under criminal court? And if it’s different, talk about your circumstances. Yeah,
