Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative
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a writer has to at various points and to varying degrees sustain a split consciousness.
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Novels reflect the perpetuation of a human impulse to use and experience narrative form as a way of making sense of the world.
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Aristotle describes anagnorisis as a movement from ignorance to knowledge.
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the world of the text becomes momentarily intelligible to the protagonist and thus also to the audience.
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Everything we thought we knew has been turned on its head, and yet it all makes sense.
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Ghassan Kanafani’s novel Returning to Haifa,
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Dov lashes out with reproach at Said and Safiyya: they should not have left him behind as a baby, he says; they should have fought with arms to retrieve him.
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this is no recuperation of the stranger as the familiar, with all the potentially tragic fallout of that revelation, but rather, through the act of denial, a recognition that kinship is insufficient. Man is not just flesh and blood, says the protagonist, in a flash of insight: man is a cause.
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it is not enough for the bonds of personal and political identity to be passively inherited but that they must be imprinted with intention and will.
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Recognition in these cases is quite literally the realization of who someone is: the person you thought was a stranger is actually a member of the family.
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did not want to know but I have since come to know.” Encased in this “I did not want to know” is an already-knowing.
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Increased normalization with Israel by Arab states is a symptom of the ways Palestine has been abandoned in the region.
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speech in support of Palestinian rights is punished at the highest levels.
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Zionist ideology is ethnocentric and expansionist, and to the pernicious fiction that this is a fight between two equal sides. 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.
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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.
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How many Palestinians, asked Omar Barghouti, need to die for one soldier to have their epiphany?
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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.
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The Israeli state as a Jewish democracy to which Palestinian Arabs have always posed a demographic threat was a state born from European empire, cast in the mold of other European settler colonial projects, and it was both fueled and justified by a history of European racism and antisemitism.
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Once Palestinian voices began to reach wider audiences in the West, the story was quickly cast as a war of two opposing narratives, rather than a holistic and variegated history of European racism and empire and the ensuing and ongoing history of American empire, and the concomitant struggles for self-determination by colonized peoples, from Haiti to Algeria to Vietnam.
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The Palestinian struggle has gone on so long now that it is easy to feel disillusioned with the scene of recognition as a site of radical change, or indeed as a turning point at all.
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And yet the pressure is again on Palestinians to tell the human story that will educate and enlighten others and so allow for the conversion of the repentant Westerner, who might then descend onto the stage if not as a hero then perhaps as some kind of deus ex machina.
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“Rather than wondering about the efficacy of addressing men,” she asks, “can we think of breaking into their awareness as a by-product of us speaking to one another? Can we focus instead on our own networks, on thinking together, on resisting together, on supporting one another—openly?”
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What I learned through writing this book is that literary anagnorisis feels most truthful when it is not redemptive: when it instead stages a troubling encounter with limitation or wrongness.
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not everyone can be unpersuaded of their worldview through argument and appeal, or through narrative.
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“Having a strong reaction is not the same thing as having an understanding,” she writes, “and neither is the same thing as taking an action.”
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The Berlin Wall fell, political apartheid in South Africa did end, and although in neither of these cases were these putative conclusions by any means the end of the story, they are testaments to the fact that, under the force of coordinated international and local action, Israeli apartheid will also end.
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In today’s crisis of climate destruction, there will be moments—maybe they are happening right now, maybe they happened recently—that will later be narrated as turning points, when the devastating knowledge hits home to a greater and greater number that we are treating the earth as a slave, and that this exploitation is profoundly unethical.
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This secret Egyptianness at the root of the Jewish religion, he argues, has been collectively repressed in the establishment of the Israeli state as an essentially European project in the Middle East.
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Palestinianism was for Said a condition of chronic exile, exile as agony but also as ethical position. To remain aloof from the group while honoring one’s organic ties to it; to exist between loneliness and alignment, remaining always a bit of a stranger; to resist the resolution of the narrative, the closing of the circle; to keep looking, to not feel too at home.
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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.
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general impunity by the occupying power in their treatment of Palestinians with the full blessing of the United States.
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incredibly violent jailbreak. It also signified a paradigm shift: it showed that a system in which one population is afforded rights that the other population is denied will be safe for neither.
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Ten thousand dead children is not self-defense.
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The first two months of this most recent Israeli assault saw at least 281,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere—greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than twenty of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations. How can we expect to care for our planet and its resources and our collective future if such atrocities can happen before our eyes with the support of the world’s great powers?
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the US vetoed the Security Council resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian ceasefire on December 8, 2023.
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Why do Americans pay billions of tax dollars annually to a foreign war machine, deployed on a captive civilian population? If the United States and the United Kingdom both voted against the Palestinian right to self-determination should we interpret this to mean that the most powerful nations in the Anglosphere if not the Global North at large believe that Palestinians must remain a colonized and dispersed people forever?
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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.
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But the West is stuck in a loop, always looking at the past (displaced into language), instead of at the present (communicated in images), from which they want to look away.
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The Eurocentrism of the definition may now be on trial at the Hague, but in dominant Western discourse, genocide can only be committed against the Jews because it once was, and therefore they are the only group that must be protected.
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Meanwhile, the memory of the Holocaust is starting to function like the murder of another famous Jew, who was also a Palestinian, and who was called Jesus Christ, and in whose name all manner of catastrophes have been perpetrated over the centuries, exploitations and violent nationalisms, crusades and manifest destinies.
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A little girl, rescued from the rubble of her destroyed home and carried out on a stretcher by three men, asks if they are taking her to the cemetery. One of the men laughs in surprise, and tells her how beautiful she is, and that she is alive. But it is terrible: the girl has been preparing herself to die and now thinks she is dead.
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In 1982, the French writer Jean Genet recorded his impressions of Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon, a week after the massacre of Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites carried out by Phalangist forces with the support and help of the Israelis. “Photography is unable to capture the flies,” he writes, “or the thick white smell of death. Nor can it tell about the little hops you have to make when walking from one corpse to the next.”
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in order to frame and make sense of what is happening, to look at the Warsaw Ghetto, at the 1982 Israeli invasion of Beirut, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and to analogize and compare, to make use of universal concepts—and it is equally important to take stock of the particularities of the moment, and to recognize that we are hurtling somewhere new.
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the face. Say: that’s me! Mahmoud Darwish tells us: “Gaza does not propel people to cool contemplation; rather she propels them to erupt and collide with the truth.”
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But they can never complete the process, because they cannot kill us all.
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The Palestinians in Gaza are beautiful. The way they care for each other in the face of death puts the rest of us to shame.