Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

by Isabella Hammad

His instructions were the following: if anyone comes within a certain distance of the fence, you shoot once at the ground to warn them not to come closer. If they come closer but still within a certain distance, you shoot twice at the ground to warn them. And if they come closer than that, you shoot them in the leg. Daniel told me that he and his subordinate waited day after day at their station, and nobody came. And then, one day, a man appeared in the distance. He was walking toward them. He came within the first perimeter of the fence, and this little colonel shot once at the ground to warn him. The man came closer, so he shot twice at the ground to warn him. And as the man came closer again, Daniel could see that he was entirely naked. And that he was holding something out before him. And as he came still closer, Daniel could see he was holding a photograph, and that it was a photograph of a child. He did not shoot the man in the leg. He put down his gun and fled. How many Palestinians, asked Omar Barghouti, need to die for one soldier to have their epiphany?

“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.” It’s true that emotion and understanding are not the same as action, but you might say that understanding is necessary for someone to act.

Narrative shape can comfort and guide our efforts, but we must eventually be ready to shape-shift, to be decentered, when the light of an other appears on the horizon in the project of human freedom, which remains undone.

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.

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.

The argument that Israel is exercising self-defense—already egregious when using military power against a population it occupies—in response to the Qassam Brigades operation of October 7 is untenable in the face of the wholesale slaughter, destruction of civilian infrastructure, and open discussion of mass transfer. Ten thousand dead children is not self-defense.

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.

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.