Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

by Isabella Hammad

said of beginnings—whether of texts, epochs, or ideas—the turning point is likewise a human construction, something we identify in retrospect.

We look back on our lives, or on the course of history, and according to the shape of the particular narrative we are telling we can say—ah, see, that is how the course of the story developed, and that was a key node when everything changed.

anagnorisis

“I 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. The reversal hastened by recognition functions only on account of an accumulation of knowledge, knowledge that has not been confronted.

for some the novel “is a way of imparting knowledge,” for him “it is more a way of imparting recognition of things that you didn’t know you knew.

The historically international significance of the Palestinian cause, first as a pan-Arab issue in the mid-twentieth century and later as an internationalist leftist one, has changed. Increased normalization with Israel by Arab states is a symptom of the ways Palestine has been abandoned in the region.

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.

once heard Palestinian activist and co-founder of the BDS movement, Omar Barghouti, talking about an “aha moment”—what I would call, as you might by now have guessed, recognition. He was talking specifically about the moment when an Israeli realizes, in a turning point of action, that a Palestinian is a human being, just like him or her.

How many Palestinians, asked Omar Barghouti, need to die for one soldier to have their epiphany?

“Facts do not at all speak for themselves, but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain and circulate them. Such a narrative has to have a beginning and end: in the Palestinian case, a homeland for the resolution of

its exile since 1948. [. . .] [The] acceptance of a narrative entailing a homeland [. . .] has been resisted as strenuously on the imaginative and ideological level as it has been politically.”

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.

Aristotle says that tragedy compresses time: in real life we do not usually have sudden moments of recognition; normally we learn and grow and change gradually, if indeed we change at all. But I’m perhaps unusually familiar with the extremely dramatic nature of revelations in real life because I have seen it and heard about it happening so many times.

The Palestinian struggle for freedom has outlasted the narrative shape of other anticolonial liberation movements that concluded with independence during the twentieth century, and it is becoming more difficult to hold fast to the old narratives about the power of narrative.

In layman’s terms, an epiphany is a eureka moment. But in literary art, we associate epiphany primarily with the short story form rather than with the novel, and most particularly with James Joyce. In Joyce’s stories, the epiphanic moment is not usually a moment of understanding, however, but one that introduces a shift of perspective. A kind of partial turn.

The word epiphany itself comes from the Koine Greek word ἐπιφάνεια, epipháneia, meaning manifestation or appearance, derived from the verb φαίνειν, phainein, meaning to appear. It is usually applied in Ancient Greek contexts to three things: the first is dawn, the second is the appearance of an enemy army, and the third is the manifestation of a deity.

The third one is obviously what led to its use in the Bible and subsequently provided the meaning that the Catholic-born James Joyce subverted, detheologizing it in his writing.

There’s another version of this same story that does not involve anagnorisis but is instead a familiar repeating tragedy of living in a constant state of fear of having your home destroyed, of losing loved ones or your own life to bombs dropped from the sky from which there is no shelter. 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.

bitter at their high emotional tenor when they finally experience their epiphanies and issue their apartheid reports,

Writing in English about Palestine, I often find myself asked if my aim is to educate “Westerners,” a suggestion I always find reductive and kind of undignified. But I like this idea of breaking into the awareness of other people by talking candidly among ourselves.

That a young man’s hopes for the future were repeatedly, devastatingly shot down, and not just by circumstance but by his own father—whose actions are experienced by the child as an abandonment on the level of that suffered by Oedipus at the hands of his parents, or of Khaldun’s by his—this was an essential wound that, once recognized, ruptures all harmony between the mind and the social world (or exposes their disjunction) and forces a reevaluation of both past and present reality. In other words, it was the revealing fiction. It allowed me to create my own moment of anagnorisis—centered, naturally, on the act of reading; in this case, reading a letter.

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. This is the most I think we can hope for from novels: not revelation, not the dawning of knowledge, but the exposure of its limit. To realize you have been wrong about something is, I believe, to experience the otherness of the world coming at you.

Terence Cave argues in his book on the subject that it is the reader herself who craves the tragic reversal, because fictions have a capacity “to astonish us, upset us, change our perceptions in ways inaccessible to other uses of language.”

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. Such shifts also do not usually come without a fight: not everyone can be unpersuaded of their worldview through argument and appeal, or through narrative.

“pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”

It’s one thing to see shifts on an individual level, but quite another to see them on an institutional or governmental one. To induce a person’s change of heart is different from challenging the tremendous force of collective denial.

And denial is arguably the opposite of recognition. But even denial is based on a kind of knowing. A willful turning from devasta...

alterity

Freud’s late work Moses and Monotheism posits that Moses, the Hebrew prophet, was actually Egyptian, and that “his ideas about a single God are derived entirely from the Egyptian Pharaoh,” Said explains. For Said, this signals Freud’s prevailing Eurocentrism giving way to a model of otherness at the root of Jewishness. He suggests that the work expresses, perhaps even unconsciously, Freud’s reaction to Zionism and his refusal to submit to the ethnonationalism of Zionist ideology. 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. Freud’s is a search for origins that destabilizes, he argues, an alternative archaeology to the Zionist archaeology that is used to legitimize the state-building project. Through looking at this late work of Freud’s, Said dismantles the binaries he was occasionally accused of reifying, pointing to the position of a non-European non-Jew—“the great stranger”—at the heart of the Jewish story.

Crucially, in the light of this, he describes a non-Zionist model of being Jewish that has an “irremediably diasporic, unhoused character.” He adds that “this needn’t be seen only as a Jewish characteristic; in our age of vast population transfers, of refugees, exiles, expatriates and immigrants, it can also be identified in the diasporic, wandering, unresolved, cosmopolitan consciousness of someone who is both inside and outside his or her community.” Said seems here, you might say, to be describing himself.

Thus Said reverses the scene of recognition as I have described it. Rather than recognizing the stranger as familiar, and bringing a story to its close, Said asks us to recognize the familiar as stranger.

He gestures at a way to dismantle the consoling fictions of fixed identity, which make it ...

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.

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.

The world has tolerated violence against Palestinians for a long time, but this attack has exceeded that violence to an extent that has at moments been intolerable even for those who consider themselves total bystanders.

Most crucially and shamefully, the US vetoed the Security Council resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian ceasefire on December 8, 2023. The image of US representative Robert Wood alone raising his hand in dissent should leave a stain on Western consciousness.

The United States is acquainted with the crime, having facilitated genocides in other countries such as Indonesia and Guatemala, for which they never faced retribution;

Ask the questions. Why should anybody have the power of veto in the UN Security Council?