This book is a record of 19 interviews conducted by the late Dr Muhammad al-Hallaj in the period between March and April 1982 with a number of leading figures in the PLO and other Palestinian movements, as well as independent Palestinian writers, thinkers, and academics. These interviews remained in the private possession of Dr al-Hallaj until his death in 2017, when his son, Ibrahim al-Hallaj, bequeathed them to the Institute for Palestine Studies. Given their historical and contemporary importance, the Institute decided to publish them in this book.
These interviews shed light on an important period in the history of the Palestinian national movement when, starting in the late Sixties of the last century, the idea of a democratic state in Palestine began to be mooted. In its analytic introduction, the book places the question of a single state in the context of the evolution of Palestinian political thought, all the way from the Interim Program, to the Oslo Accords and the failure of the two state solution, and down to the Tufan al-Aqsa.
Today, when there is talk again of a free Palestine from the river to the sea, contemporary importance reattaches to the idea of a single democratic state as expounded in the interviews found in this book.
The interviewees
Munir Shafiq, Shafiq al-Hut, Jamil Hilal, Bassam Abu Sharif, Dawud Talhami, Sakhr Habash (Abu Nizar), Yasir `Abd Rabbuh, Faisal Hurani, Salah al-Dabbagh, Bilal al-Hasan, Muhammad Abu Maizar (Abu Hatim), Yusuf Sayigh, Ilyas Shufani, Ahmad Najm (Abu `Ala’), Taysir Qub`a, Samir Ghusha, Ibrahim Abu Lughod, `Abd al-Jawad Salih and Camille Mansur.