Salman Rushdie says a free Palestine state today would be Taliban-like

“A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep,” wrote Salman Rushdie in The Satanic Verses. Rushdie himself has started an argument on the Israel-Palestine dispute, saying that establishing a Palestinian state right now would mean creating a “Taliban-like state”. What has to be remembered is that the Indian-origin author has been a life-long proponent of a free Palestinian state.

Rushdie, a British-Indian author, warned the world that Gaza would become like the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan as Hamas would rule it.

He also discussed the pro-Palestine protests on the US campus and did not pick a side in an interview with the German rbb24 TV channel on Sunday.

Rushdie revealed he had “argued for a Palestinian state for most of my life – since the 1980s, probably – right now, if there was a Palestinian state, it would be run by Hamas, and that would make it a Taliban-like state, and it would be a client state of Iran”.

The author asked if this is what the western Left called a progressive movement. He cautioned the western world against the rise of “another Ayatollah Khomeini”.

Khomeini, Iran’s Supreme Leader, issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989 due to his novel The Satanic Verses, which many Muslims found blasphemous.

“The fact is that I think any human being right now has to be distressed by what is happening in Gaza because of the quantity of innocent deaths. I would just like some of the protests to mention Hamas. Because that’s where this started, and Hamas is a terrorist organisation. It’s very strange for young, progressive student politics to kind of support a fascist terrorist group”, said the novelist on a podcast by German broadcaster Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg.

Rushdie’s statements should be seen against the backdrop of Hamas’ attack on Israel which took place on October 7. This resulted in the killing of over 1,000 Israelis. Israel retaliated and attacked Gaza, and it has killed over 35,000 Palestinians in a seven-months-long ongoing war.

The 76-year-old author also discussed New York University, where he teaches, and said he has seen a pro-Palestine “student upheaval” on the campus. Here also, he did not pick a side between the protestors and the administration. He said he supported the students’ right to demonstrate only if they ensured that other students did not feel unsafe. He also spoke against both: damaging college property and police violence.

“I feel that there’s not a lot of deep thought happening. There’s an emotional reaction to the death in Gaza, and that’s absolutely right. But when it slides over towards antisemitism and sometimes to actual support of Hamas, then it’s very problematic”.

Rushdie was seen on Orte und Worte (Places and Words) podcast to discuss his latest work, Knife. He discusses the knife attack, which blinded him in one eye, on him in August 2023 in his book.