"I see promise in the connections between the 2020 protests against anti-Blackness and the 2023-2024 protests against Palestinian genocide,” Palestinian American scholar Zahi Zalloua told me this summer. “I’m very invested in the reignited Black-Palestinian solidarity movement; it points to the vibrancy of an anti-racist, anti-colonial Left.”

To grapple with the horror of this ongoing genocide, I conducted this exclusive interview for Truthout with Zalloua, who is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and a professor of Indigeneity, ace, and ethnicity studies at Whitman College, as well as editor of The Comparatist. In this interview, Zalloua argues with clarity and conceptual rigor that, as he says, “Arguing for Palestinian life is not antisemitic.” We also discuss the precarity of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation, the importance of pessimism and the theme of solidarity.