Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

by Isabella Hammad

But if we cannot always know the significance of the moment in the moment, it is also true that our moment, the one in which we now live, feels like one of chronic “crisis”: political, economic, and climate crises besiege us, along with other existential crises posed by the exponential development of artificial intelligence, and the recurring nightmare of nuclear war.

Individual moments of recognition are repeatedly overwhelmed by the energy of a political establishment that tells the onlooker: this is not what

it looks like. It is too complicated to understand. Look away.

Since the start of 2023 Israeli forces have to date already killed 233 Palestinians and made 140 families homeless (about 800 people), while settlers have conducted at least 315 attacks against Palestinians and their property. There are 5200 Palestinians in Israeli prisons, 1200 of whom are in administrative detention without charge, subjected to torture and humiliation.

The idea that Jewish Israelis at large might be persuaded through dialogue to see Palestinians as human is also absurd, given that Israelis live in a militarized society in which dissent is punished.

When you speak to refugees about Palestine, they will often describe the fig trees, the olive trees, the lost heaven of their childhoods.

What in fiction is enjoyable and beautiful is often terrifying in real life. In real life, shifts in collective understanding are necessary for major changes to occur, but on the human, individual scale, they are humbling and existentially disturbing.

for repeated shock and the ebb and flow of grief. We who are not there, witnessing from afar, in what ways are we mutilating ourselves when we dissociate to cope? To remain human at this juncture is to remain in agony. Let us remain there: it is the more honest place from which to speak.

and the abuse of the idea of antisemitism in the West to stifle speech in support of Palestinian rights in the face of what is clearly a long-standing project of ethnic cleansing.

When people are threatened and lose their jobs for speaking out against mass murder, and some have even faced arrest? What would he say about a world where it is controversial in Western democracies to call for a ceasefire?

The possibilities faced by the Israeli state for at least twenty years have been: maintain apartheid and forfeit the claim to being a democracy; return to the pre-1967 state borders and allow for the creation of a Palestinian state; break down the system of apartheid and enfranchise the Palestinians in a one-state reality; or conduct a large-scale ethnic cleansing. They are choosing the last option. Will the rest of the world let them get away with it?