The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

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.

Basem Khandakji:

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.

Mansa Musa:

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.

Basem Khandakji:

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?

How can I defend myself?

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

Mansa Musa:

Until

Basem Khandakji:

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

Mansa Musa:

Comprehensive

Basem Khandakji:

War against my people. And genocide didn’t start just in Gaza in 2023. The genocide against us started since 1948.

Mansa Musa:

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,

Basem Khandakji:

It’s different. The Palestinians who live in West Bank and in Gaza Strip and in East Jerusalem, they tried in military court. This military court established after 1967 and only the Palestinians tried at that court. So it’s illegal court. It’s the injustice court. There is no such a thing we can call it a legal process inside the Israeli judgment system or Israeli courts. So when they tried me at the military court, I told them from the beginning, I refused to organize that court. It’s illegal court and the confession you took from me, it’s by force. And the judges who judge me at that time, they are colonials in the Israeli army. And at that time when they judged me three life sentence, the judge give me a permission to speak before they send me back to prison from the court and I give a speech about how they kill my humanity.

I

Mansa Musa:

Told you. Come on.

Basem Khandakji:

Yeah. I told them, “You killed my humanity and now you judge me about that.

” And I told him also if I was lived in Eastern Europe in the World War II during the Holocaust and during the Nazi final solution for Jews and communists and homosexuals at that time, I will hide the Jew inside my house and I will give all my solidarity and all my protection too and I will support the Jews by hiding them inside my house. But when the Israeli soldier killed that girl in Gaza and put in her chest more than 20 bullets, he must at that time just remember that Jews girl at the gate of Oswitz in Boland and he will throw out his rifle and cry. So the judge look at me and he thought to himself, “Is he really a human who speak like that? ” Are the Palestinians can say

Mansa Musa:

Something

Basem Khandakji:

Like that? Yes, we can say something like that because our struggle, it’s a struggle to restore our humanity,

Mansa Musa:

To

Basem Khandakji:

Reclaim our

Mansa Musa:

Human. Yeah, claim it. That’s right. That’s

Basem Khandakji:

Right. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, to reclaim our humanity. And I remember at that time my mother was in the court and she’s shouting on me, “Be a man, be a man. Don’t give up inside the prison. It’s okay. They give you a three life sentence. You will be free soon. Don’t

Mansa Musa:

Give

Basem Khandakji:

Up.” Yeah.

Mansa Musa:

Thank God for that. And during your imprisonment, you wrote it and published The War Winning Hour, Mass, The Color of the Sky. One, can you share the process of writing this book and give our audience a brief summary of the story and tell us what inspired it. Also, how did the publication become a collective … How many hands was involved in making sure that this work got out? So talk about that book, talk about how it came about and talk about the network that came out of that space to make sure that it got published so that we could be able to talk about it today. And once again, going back to your last point about your humanity, this right here shows your humanity despite what they did and try to do to you, you were still able to arrive, raise your level of thinking and your consciousness to document your humanity.

Basem Khandakji:

Yeah. First of all, let me tell you about my motivations for writing inside the prison. Since day one inside the prison, I decide to write and I saw the writing, the aspects of writing inside the prison, it’s an act of resistance.

It’s an act of freedom, an act of salvation. Through writing, I can just through writing inside the prison, I can reclaim all my values and my principles and try to searching for my humanity and to my identity as a human being, as a Palestinian. So I start writing since the beginning. I start with poetry first, but after that, I believe that the poetry can’t represent my ideas and my narrative. I turn to a novel, I start to write fictions and about circumstances of writings, it’s complicated. It’s not easy process. It’s resistance really because writing inside the prison, it’s writing in secret all the time because the jailers all the time searching us and try to forbidden pens and papers and books, especially during the genocide after 2023. And if the writing, it’s a resistance or let’s say a resistance operation also to smuggle the words and the papers outside the prison, that’s the whole issue.

That’s the matter. At that time I find that my word, it’s not just words, it’s a part of my soul. It’s a part of my heart. It’s like children, my children. So I have to smuggle it outside the prison by many ways.

One of that ways is to swallow the papers. Yeah. And when there was prisoners get their free freedom, we give them these papers and they swallow these papers. And after that, for me, my family, it’s my, let’s say a secure net for me. They

Mansa Musa:

Protect

Basem Khandakji:

My word and they support me every time, especially my father wrist in peace. Yes,

Mansa Musa:

Definitely

Basem Khandakji:

West in peace. Yeah. And now my brother Yusefe is the one who has all the credit to publish my words and to especially this novel, Mask, the Color of the Sky. This novel, it’s a new project of me. It’s talked about, I just want to say that this course and the context of that novel, it’s about the literary of engagement, how we can write anti-colonial narrative inside the colonial context, how we can decolonial this context and to write about the other, the Zionist and try to find his main ideas and his main concept about us as Palestinians. So I draw that character. His name is Norishadi and he is a Palestinian, a young Palestinian man. He is an archeologist and he tried to find Tom of the Mary Magdalena, the ignorance character inside the New Testimony and by accident he find that idea, the Ashkenazi idea for some Jews in a bucket of a jacket.

And he faked this idea, he put his picture at that idea because he look like him and he have this blue eyes and white face, but inside himself, he is just not a human for the Israelis. So I used Franz Venon vision about that, France Vanon vision in the Richard of the earth and in his article about white masks, black skins.

Mansa Musa:

Black skin, right, right.

Basem Khandakji:

Yeah. Yeah. I use it, but I use the mask at the novel as a technique. It’s not an answer for Norishe, the Palestinian man or the Palestinian human. The mosque, the Ashkenazi, the Israeli mosque, this white mask, it’s just a technique for me to enter, throw it inside the Zionism concept, this totalitarian concept about us to discover the racism, the discrimination, the oppression, to discover the injustice of this movement to try every time to represent itself as a nationalism movement and it’s an emancipation movement for the Jewish people in all the world. And this novel, it’s three but it’s a theology and party three recently published in Beirut. And I just concentrate in my narrative in my discourse about how we can engage the Israeli literary and the Israeli discourse and how we can launch this cultural front against him just to reclaim our human narrative and how we can shape our identity again and our faces until today for me as a Palestinian, okay, I’m a former political president inside the Israeli presence, but today I am an exile.

They

Mansa Musa:

Exam me.

Basem Khandakji:

And why is that? It’s not just a silly thing to do to exile someone. It’s about small details. The whole concept of colonialism, it’s about small details, how he can punish me all the time through these small details. You know what? They refuse to give my mom a permission to visit me here in Egypt and my mother and my mother suffering from a priest cancer. Every time she go to the checkpoint in the British between Palestine and Jordan, they send her back to Naples, my city.

Mansa Musa:

And

Basem Khandakji:

You know what? The strongest army in the Middle East, this Israeli army, they fighting me, throw my mother

Mansa Musa:

Hug.

Basem Khandakji:

Yeah, they refused to just to let me hug her. But it’s not okay, but I have to hold on and I have to resist every time.

Mansa Musa:

You definitely resisting because this novel, let you know the response to the novel, the response to the writing response that like, one time in this country it was illegal for a black person to know how to read and write. It was punishable by death in certain parts of the South. If they found out that a black person that was a slave could read or write, they killed him. And the reason why they killed him wasn’t because he could read or write or she could read or write, was the prospect of her teaching or him teaching somebody else how to read and write. And the response that you got from this novel, it wasn’t because you wrote the novel and no, it was the fact that you had the audacity to hold onto your humanity to the extent where you felt as though that you was able to articulate it and put it into perspective.

And to your point, the whole thing is the whole design of this system is to dehumanize us to the point where we give up. But what your mother told you when you was in court said, “Look, be your man, don’t give up.” So that right there at the end of the process and at the end of the day, you can hold your head high knowing that you heard what your mother said and you stay in that space. But let’s talk about this. Now I did 48 years in prison prior to being released and during that time we had a sense of camaraderie amongst some of the prisons, not all of the prisoners, but the majority of us had a sense of comradery and we became politicized and in our political thinking we felt compelled to look out for each other. How did y’all under the circumstances, and you described them in a couple of interviews, the humanity of the imprisonment, how were y’all able to maintain a sense of camaraderie and how did that look under them circumstances?

Basem Khandakji:

We are just like you. We are politicized inside the prison and we have this kind of organized frameworks outside the prison we built and we established this frameworks and inside this frameworks we get our sessions, our lessons, our every day every day. And we take history, philosophy about our Palestinian history, sociology, and we learn Hebrew also. I learn Hebrew and I consider that as a war prize. I get that language from his mouth because he is a wolf. I get this language as a war brother from his mouth and he was upset about that because when you know your enemy language,

That’s a tool or that’s a weapon with you and you can understand him and you can understand his mind, how he think and how he can use this oppression against you. So inside the prison, and I said that many times, really I thank the prison because the prison, it give me that platform to create myself as a writer, as an intellectual and as a freedom fighter also, but not the Israeli jailers. When I talk about prison, I talk about this position, this cultural position and this cultural location. I stand on it and I look at the world and I shout, I’m a human and I deserve to be a human because for me as a Palestinian, I was not born to be a killer and I was not born to be killed. I just born to be equal and to be a free man like everyone in this world.

And really when we read about your struggle in the United States, about the Black banters and I saw many documentaries and many movies inside the prison, but before October 2023. And for me, I always feel that there is this common sense between me and you, this common things and this soldierity between me and this kind of struggle inside the United States. And also after 2012, there was a huge term in the Brazil when we bring in academic programs and I finished my master degree inside the prison in the Israeli studies. And that helped me so much in how to understand this Zionism movement and how to understand the whole conceptions about the conflict between the Zionist and us inside colonized Palestine. And after that, I discovered that I’m not under occupation. It’s not an occupation. It’s a bad joke to say that Palestine, it’s under occupation.

It’s a colonialism. And all the time we describe that as a colonial abarthit regime. It’s a hybrid colonialism. It’s an apartheid and colonialism. And there is so many levels of that colonialism and many kind of biopolitics. For example, in Gaza, they use genocide policy in Gaza. In West Bank, they use set elements when

Mansa Musa:

They want.

Basem Khandakji:

Inside colonized Palestine since 1948, they use discrimination. They use oppression. They use injustice inside their courts against Palestinians when they legitimize some kinds of laws that can give the racism legitimacy.

Mansa Musa:

Going to your point, to your point about colonialization, there’s at one point we call it the Jim Crow Earth and the Jim Crow, we call it the Jim Crow South, but basically the attitude, it’s very astute on your part to make that observation on how in different parts of the colony, colonialized Palestine and different parts, they use different techniques based on what their objective is. We use settlements in here, we use direct force here, but talk about this here and before I get you to talk about it, I like your point that you made earlier and I want to emphasize, I want to raise that elevate that point again that you said what you told them when you was in court, say, “Man, you made this in me. Now you going to punish me for what you created.” But talk about what’s going on with you now.

Tell our audience about since they put you in exile and I made reference to how they was using exile as a ways when they was releasing Palestinians, they were saying, as opposed to put them back to where you took me from, you send me somewhere, you exile me into a country that I’ve got fragile relationship with them, but more importantly, I can’t have no established no relationship, physical relationship with my family. Talk about your current state.

Basem Khandakji:

Today I am an exile and I stay in Egypt and Egypt is the biggest Arabic country, but it’s an exile for me. It’s not my streets, it’s not my areas, it’s not my time, it’s not my city, it’s not my first tip inside my home. So until now I can’t undermine the spaces, the distance between spaces. Egypt, it’s a huge country and I try to find every time something can let me feel that I am in my homeland, that I am in Palestine, but there is no such a thing. And every time they keep asking me, how does it feel in the freedom life?

Mansa Musa:

And

Basem Khandakji:

I say, until today, I can’t say that I find the meaning of my freedom. Maybe by small details I can find something, but until today I keep saying that I’m still in the bus. The bus who took us from the Rafah checkpoint to Cairo, I’m still

In that bus because why? Why is that? Because the meaning of the freedom, it’s a trip. It’s a journey. If I can achieve my whole freedom, that’s mean I’m a dead man. There is no such thing like a total freedom or a comprehensive freedom. So every time I try throw this small details to find the meaning of freedom, but at the same time, I have to live my life because my people give a precious price for my freedom. They give their bloods in Gaza. There are a flood of blood in Gaza. So after 70,000 Palestinians was being killed in the genocide, the Zionist genocide in Gaza for my freedom and for my comrades freedom. But if you ask me as a writer, I only find my freedom through my writing.

When I write, I feel that I’m a free man after all because I live in the, we call it metaphor. I live in the metaphor. I don’t live in the real world. And when they exhaled me, when the Security officers say at the negative prison, he told me, “You will never come back to Palestine. You will never going to see your family. You will never drink the water of Naples, my city, Naples.” And I say, “It’s okay. I believe that after 21 years in a prison, after all, I am free man. So I’m going to come back

Mansa Musa:

To

Basem Khandakji:

My country, to Palestine. But if you like, I can just briefing you about what’s happening now inside this prison, inside this colonial prison. Because until now I live sometime at the time of prison. My friends, my comrades who we living there and since 2023 when the Israelis launched their genocide against my people, they also launched genocide against the Palestinian prisoners in the Israeli prisons. They use a new kind of politics against us, a new kind of killing politics against us. They’re starving us. Now, while we talking, there is prisoners suffering from starving and they suffering from scabias and they suffering from diseases. We live in the 21st century, the century of the AI. And today they torture the Palestinian prisoners inside the prisons and they refuse to let them know anything about their families. They put them in a total isolation. And I was there.

And sometimes I feel like I’m still there with my friends as an act of solidarity with them.

Mansa Musa:

Right. Yeah.

The entire conversation, you emphasize this point and I want our audience to understand this and I can’t drum this home hard enough. This is about people that want to be treated as human beings and it’s about your humanity and that you have a right under the law to be treated as human being. And I want to say this here. I think it’s a surreal in the Quran, El Kalam, the pen. So yeah, you definitely represent that part of the narrative that your pen, they say the pen is mighty than the sword. In this case it is. But tell our orient what you want. You got the last word. You raised the voices of our comrades in the Dungeons. So whatever else you want to say, you got to lay final say.

Basem Khandakji:

Yeah. I just can say that I can’t be like my enemy. I can’t be like him. When they tortured us inside the prison, when they use this necropolitics against us inside the prison, every time I say to myself, can I be like him? If I become in his position? No, I will never be like him because my struggle today is, and my whole conflict today is how to reclaim my humanity and how to write a new narrative for my people and to represent our Palestinian people in the cosmopolitan dimension, let’s say. And my message today through you, my brother Mansa is there is human beings inside Israeli presence and they are suffering all the time twenty four seven. They are suffering, they are dying, they are starving and no one given care about them. Even the international associations who cared about human rights, they don’t do anything because the Israeli security service don’t let them to visit the prisons.

And at the end, I really salute you and it was really a pleasure to talk with you. And when I told my friends I will made that interview with you, I told them Brother Manas has been 48 years in the prison. And they said, oh my God, how old is he now? But I see now a young man and I

Mansa Musa:

Salute

Basem Khandakji:

You.

Mansa Musa:

I appreciate that. And you know what? And I can’t describe the honor anytime I get in this space to talk to anyone of Palestinian origin. It’s a y’all spirit. The Black Panther Party always out the forefront in emphasizing, exercising the rights y’all rights are. But it was an honor speaking to you, Bassem.

Basem Khandakji:

The honor is mine.

Mansa Musa:

We want to let our audience know that you the author of a Mass, The Color of the Sky, which won the 2024 International Prize for Arab Fiction. Thank you. We ask that you continue to support the real news and rallying the bar, because guess what? We actually, the real news,