LISTEN (Thursday August 21, 2017, 2.30 pm) to Haidar Eid, Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Postmodern Literature at Gaza’s al-Aqsa University in Gaza, being interviewed by David Lloyd, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, and a founding member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, on today’s SWANA Region Radio.
The show will be available on audio archive for 90 days at http://kpfk.org/, which streams live: from the top of the main page, click on Programs, then Audio Archives and search SWANA.
“After successive assaults by the Israeli military, in 2008-9, 2012 and 2014, in which thousands of civilians without any where to flee were killed and in which Gaza”s infrastructure was devastated, the United Nations has forecast that the Gaza Strip will be uninhabitable by 2020. As our guest, Professor Eid, states in the interview, that is an optimistic statement: after a decade of barbaric siege and assaults, Gaza is already humanly unlivable. Israeli bombardments destroyed Gaza”s only electrical power station, its sewage treatment plant as well as thousands of dwellings and educational facilities, including UN schools. The water supply is undrinkable and raw sewage is vented into the sea and on beaches which offer Gazans one of their few recreational spaces. The Palestinian Authority, in its ongoing efforts to pressure Hamas, recently requested Israel to reduce electrical supplies to the strip. Gazans now receive only between 2 and four hours of electrical supply daily. To compound matters, the PA has now also cut the salaries of over 6000 civil servants, including university teachers, who have been placed on early retirement at a salary cut of 85%. Though teachers continue to teach at their schools and universities, these conditions are clearly intolerable and constitute a form of collective punishment. Today we discuss with Haidar Eid the causes of these conditions and possible solutions to Israel”s illegal blockade of Gaza, without which this unbearable human catastrophe would have bene impossible.”
Haidar Eid is Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Postmodern Literature at Gaza’s al-Aqsa University. He has written widely on the Arab-Israeli conflict, including articles published at Znet, The Electronic Intifada, The Palestine Chronicle, and openDemocracy. He is also a policy adviser to the Palestinian policy network Al-Shabaka and a member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).
SWANA Region Radio is one of the few programs on KPFK, let alone on radio stations nationally, that covers the whole of this crucial region consistently and regularly.
