The Truth Is Easy

A vital resource for understanding the ongoing calamity in Gaza, through a chorus of fiercely intelligent and principled voices, speaking from inside the struggle for justice

In 2023, against the backdrop of Israel’s genocidal campaign, Karim, Saree, and Ussama Makdisi launched the Makdisi Street podcast. Over the following months, leading figures joined the brothers to situate the genocide within the necessary contexts of history, law, politics, and culture―on the local, regional, and international levels. In this authoritative and carefully curated collection, the Makdisi brothers distill key moments from interviews, providing a depth and breadth of analysis on Palestine otherwise unseen in the Western media landscape. The result is a kaleidoscopic work that provides readers with an understanding of the struggle for freedom in Palestine and the global history of which it forms a part.

Featuring interviews with Salman Abu-Sitta on surviving the Nakba and the right of return, Mohammed El-Kurd on the politics of appeal and the role of resistance, Ta-Nehisi Coates on Black American and Palestinian culture, Noura Erakat on the end of the international rule-based order, Peter Beinart on the generational schism within Jewish communities caused by the genocide, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian on the affirmation of love and life that lies at the heart of the Palestinian struggle, and more.

Saree Makdisi is the chair of the English Department at UCLA and a scholar of Palestine, colonial history, and its afterlives. He is the author of Tolerance Is a Wasteland and Palestine Inside Out. He writes frequently for the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Guardian, n+1, and the London Review of Books.

Ussama Makdisi is the inaugural May Ziadeh Chair in Palestinian and Arab Studies, Professor of History, and Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California Berkeley. He is the author of Age of Coexistence. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Houston Chronicle, The Yale Review, and Jewish Currents. He has also appeared on numerous television and radio shows including Al Jazeera, TRT International, and NPR’s Morning Edition.

Karim Makdisi is an associate professor of International Politics and Founding Director of the Graduate Program in Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. He is also a senior fellow at the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs, a founding member and affiliated researcher in the Arab Council for the Social Sciences, and an elected member of the board of directors at the Academic Council on the United Nations. He is the coeditor of Land of the Blue Helmets and Interventions in Conflict.

ISBN: 9798903930838

Publication date: August 24, 2027

Part I: Beginnings
Salman Abu Sitta, “They carried a memory in their heads”
Rashid Khalidi, “Learning how to be colonialists”

Abed Takriti, “Partition was about creating a settler colonial state”
Avi Shlaim, “We were conscripted into the Zionist project’
Ilan Pappe, “The beginning of the end of Zionist project?”

Part II: Resistance
Diana Buttu, “I truly hope this is our year”
Hanan Ashrawi, “Every single Palestinian is traumatized”

Francesca Albanese, “I just look for the day there will be justice”

Mustafa Barghouti, “We are not defeated”
Hadeel Assali, “Palestinians have the right to reject surveillance"

Part III: Complicity
Wadie Said, “They still think we are savages”

Nimer Sultany, “The problem has always been that Israel is above the law”

John Mearsheimer, “The lobby is working overtime”

Jeremy Scahill, “The murder of our colleagues has to stop”

Abdeljawad Omar, “An even worse collaboration”
Michael Fakhri, “Famine is never a natural occurrence”

Part V: Fractures
Noura Erakat, “Israel is synonymous with the end of the rules-based order”
Melanie Macalaster, “What did it take for so many Americans not to see?”
Mouin Rabbani, “Israel is becoming a burden to those who support it”
Peter Beinart, “A kind of intergenerational civil war”

Part VII: Solidarity
Laila al-Arian, “One of my recurring fears is that people will move on”

Vijay Prashad, “The process of liberation is irresistible and irreversible”

Robin Kelley, “The ground zero of a liberated world is Palestine”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The beautiful thing about truth is that it’s easy”

Mohammed el Kurd “Every single one of us has a role to play”
Michael Barenboim, “A Little More than Nothing is better than nothing”


Part VI: Liberation
Fady Joudah, “Palestine will be liberated in Arabic”
Mitri Raheb, “Christmas—and Christians—in Palestine”
Tareq Baconi, “The first foothold in a much broader liberation”

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “There is so much love in Palestine”