AS NEWS BROKE that a ceasefire agreement—tenuous, immediately delayed by Israel—had been signed, celebrations filled Gaza’s streets. People allowed themselves to take in this victory: the naked force of the entire West had failed, for over a year, to break their will. When news of the ceasefire reached me, via phone notification, I started crying. But where I’d anticipated feeling some sense of closure, I felt instead like I was finally allowing myself to look through a door that I’d left open. During the acute phase of the genocide, there were questions many of us hadn’t allowed ourselves to ask. Among the heaviest: What will happen to these children? A small boy with dark circles under his eyes was asked recently what he would do on the first day of the ceasefire. “I want to go to [see] my mom,” he answered. “My mom died—I want to visit her grave and read al-fatiha [a prayer] for her.”
A question that has for years been posed by Arab writers found new urgency, as people tried to help end the genocide: Why must we prove our humanity?The question probes Western consciousness for a switch that might prompt self-reflection, and lead, finally, to Arab-life-as-nondisposable. While the question is rhetorical, and generally well-meaning, it turns tens—or, more likely, hundreds—of thousands of people killed into a backdrop: it is a distraction. The logic here goes, if they only saw us as people, they wouldn’t kill us. But the idea betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the order of things. For empire, dehumanization is one tool among many—they don’t see you as human, in order to steal your land and resources. And they kill you because they have to, to sustain themselves. None of it can be about you, as a person, at all. Every time I hear the question, I think, prove to whom? The question preserves at its center a gaze that (hopefully) isn’t its writer’s, a gaze belonging to people disinclined to see people as people.
British Palestinian author Isabella Hammad’s work proceeds from a place of human-already. In her novels, Hammad has so far chosen the self as her center, which isn’t to say that she writes about Palestine and Palestinians—although she does—but rather that her writing does not read like an exercise in legibility.
Her first novel, The Parisian—what Hammad describes as a “disguised biography”—was published in April 2019. It traces the life of a protagonist based on her great-grandfather Midhat, born in a Palestine before Israel. By removing the principal force of dehumanization animating Palestinian life (and narrative) today, Hammad creates room for her characters’ interiorities, for thoughts and limitations and questions that in the shadow of a killing machine are difficult to see. Of course, there are other colonizers. The novel opens with Midhat off to Montpellier to study medicine, “like the protagonist of a European bildungsroman, leaving home to define himself as an individual in the world.” Despite Midhat’s best efforts, however, this “classical narrative is disrupted by [his] awakening to the fact that he is not considered an equal . . . in French society.” In France, he is not “an ‘individual’ but rather a type of a person—racially, culturally, religiously.”
Midhat, a colonial subject, is nonetheless obsessed with France. He might have at least picked an obsession that made sense: it was the British, not the French, who colonized Palestine. In The Parisian—with its title that almost winks at the reader in amusement—that Midhat is Palestinian is significant, first because it is a fact, and second because it situates the reader in a particular world. But from there Hammad writes like she expects her reader to recognize themselves in this world, and in her.
Hammad’s second novel, Enter Ghost,published in April 2023,is set in contemporary Palestine. Here, Israel exists, and the novel opens with the protagonist, a UK-based Palestinian actor named Sonia Nasir, landing in Tel Aviv and having to endure a strip search by Israeli airport security:
Surely this isn’t necessary, I said in a haughty voice while a third woman officer ran her detector over my bare flesh, as though I might have hidden something under my skin, and dawdled over the straps of my bra and knickers, which I had matched in preparation, blue lace, and as she knelt before my crotch the laughter began to quiver in my stomach. I put my clothes back on, surprised by how hard I was shaking, and ten minutes later they called me to a booth, where a tall man I hadn’t seen before gave me my passport and told me I was free to enter, Welcome to Israel.
It’s as if Hammad is priming the reader, showing them where the story has to start, before it can. After a short detour, Sonia drives to the West Bank, where she gets roped into a production of Hamlet. Again, what constraints are lifted when we consider Palestinians among one another? What constraints remain? Hammad’s characters come from ’48 (occupied Palestine) and the West Bank and the diaspora, and their interactions expose the reader to Palestines of varying degrees of separation from the land itself; their understandings of Palestine are informed by this distance. Hammad said in an interview that she didn’t include among her cast of characters a Palestinian from Gaza, because to have done so given Israel’s restrictions on their movement would have been too unrealistic. In Enter Ghost, Israeli checkpoints and soldiers puncture the text with a violent countercurrent. They destroy stage equipment; they injure and kill people. Still, the specter of Zionism is not totalizing. The novel creates a world within a world, one that is not quite beyond Zionism’s reach but reaches to be.
RECOGNIZING THE STRANGER, Hammad’s third book and first of nonfiction, was initially presented as the Edward Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University on September 28, 2023. Honoring Said’s memory, Hammad opens by wondering where to begin. She chooses the place Said shows us, in his second book, Beginnings, is most honest: in the middle. Here, Hammad is interested in middles that mark beginnings: turning points, especially prompted by recognition scenes, where “the truth of the matter dawns on a character, that moment toward which a plot usually barrels, and around which a story’s mysteries revolve.” Where something clicks and the character can see clearly.
As an example, Hammad recounts an experience from her own life, involving an Israeli she once met at a kibbutz, who had previously been a “little colonel”—his words, which Hammad describes as tinged with a “strange modesty”—assigned to the Gaza fence. One day while he was working, he said, a Palestinian man walked toward the security fence holding up an object. The soldier fired warning shots near the man’s feet, but the Palestinian did not stop. As the man got closer, the soldier realized that he was “entirely naked” and holding up a picture of a child. The soldier abandoned his post and deserted the Israeli military. When Hammad met him, he was in hiding and having a bit of an existential crisis. He asked her opaque questions about the nature of man, “whether I thought we humans could ever act in the world purely as individuals, and not on behalf of groups.” He includes her in his “we.” Hammad, reflecting on this encounter, asks why it took a Palestinian’s naked body to “induce” a sort of “epiphany” in the soldier. It’s not hard to imagine, Hammad adds, what might have happened to the child in the man’s photo. Here she illustrates two moments of recognition: the soldier sees the naked Palestinian and drops his weapon. Hammad sees the Israeli seeing the Palestinian, and the gap widens between them.
Hammad gives another example, this time from Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Returning to Haifa. Israel expanded its territory in the aftermath of the Six-Day War of 1967. For Kanafani’s protagonist, Said, the suspended borders presented an opportunity for him and his wife to visit their home, occupied by settlers since the start of the Nakba in 1948. Upon arrival, Said learns that his son, Khaldun, whom the couple left behind “through the force of tragic circumstance,” has been adopted by the European Jewish family now living there. They have renamed him Dov, and Dov refuses his biological parents even as, Hammad points out, he tells them, “they should not have left him behind as a baby, they should have fought with arms to retrieve him.” Kanafani’s protagonist realizes “in a flash of insight” that “kinship is insufficient”: to belong to a people, as a matter of birth, isn’t enough. Instead, as goes Kanafani’s now-famous line, “man is a cause.” Hammad notes how this moment of recognition drives the narrative; what might have moved the plot toward reunion with his lost son, relief, turns us instead toward something else.
Hammad ends the portion of Recognizing the Stranger based on her lecture with a brief discussion of Edward Said’s Freud and the Non-European. The stranger, we come to recognize, is the self. In life, this often looks like self-regard: the Israeli soldier’s concern isn’t the Palestinian but his own moral integrity. The questions that weigh on his conscience at the kibbutz are about what he has allowed himself to become. The feeling triggered by seeing the naked Palestinian man is pity. Which is to say, had the Palestinian man simply been clothed—dignified, perceived as a person rather than a vessel eliciting his oppressor’s pathos—the soldier might easily have shot him. The naked Palestinian serves a different, albeit related, purpose for most Israelis who today, as Hammad writes in her afterword, “show images of undressed Palestinian men and boys kneeling in rows for the purpose of raising domestic morale and concealing the shame of their military losses.” Again, the Palestinian matters insofar as he is instructive, a tool.
WHILE RECOGNITION CAN MARK a moment of change in the novel, and while the dawning of truth might drive internal realization, to know is not the same thing as to act, nor does it have to be its beginning. Nor does one have to move in the right direction. Through groups like Breaking the Silence, an entire infrastructure exists within Zionism to support former Israeli soldiers as they metabolize moments sparked by killing Palestinians—and to help them cling to a version of Zionism, of themselves, that can be redeemed.
In December 2024, the liberal Zionist daily Haaretz ran an editorial called, “Israel Is Losing Its Humanity in Gaza.” First, the verb tense: “lose” is in the continuous present. For Israel—an ethnostate whose foundation is genocide—there is still time. Note, too, the role that “Gaza” plays: as with Times headlines that declare “There Is No Childhood in Gaza” or “The War in Gaza Is Making Thousands of Orphans,” and from which “Israel” is conspicuously absent, Gaza is where humanity (for Haaretz, in the form of Zionism) goes to die.
Hammad writes that the opposite of recognition is denial; this is the case if we look at those seemingly unbothered by genocide. For those of us who’ve witnessed the denialism and moral bankruptcy at the core of Western society, the recognition prompted by this apathy—because, at this point, everyone knows—is that of Kanafani’s protagonist in Returning to Haifa, of Hammad listening to the “little colonel”: alienation.
The afterword of Recognizing the Stranger, which comprises almost a third of the book and wasn’t part of Hammad’s original lecture, is called “On Gaza.” The title can be read as a corrective to others published since the start of the genocide’s accelerated phase, like The World After Gaza or The Killing of Gaza or, perhaps most illustrative, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. These titles accepted Gaza’s annihilation as settled, even while—at the time of their writing—so many people were still alive. And they marked beginnings where there was only an unending, nightmarish present; offered futures prematurely based on lessons learned from a people these authors neither address nor really see. For liberal Zionists Israel might still be what it never was, and the end of Gaza—a world we continue to fight to never reach—inaugurates self-reflection, and lucrative book deals.
Hammad’s afterword opens with a story she once heard of a Palestinian woman in London who, during the second intifada, pointed at her TV “and cried, ‘that’s me, that’s me!’” Hammad was initially moved by the story, then learned that the woman was her grandmother and suddenly—because her grandmother was dramatic—started laughing. Hammad, reflecting on the story again more recently, writes,
I find myself moved once more. What a pure relation, to see herself in the woman on the television, to experience the distance between them not as numbing but as another component of her pain.
Here is not a burst of recognition of self in other but instead what is possible when you see another person as a person already—and intuit from there that their pain should be yours, that you are obligated to each other.
Hammad writes, in the portion of Recognizing the Stranger situated in a world before the acute phase of the genocide, that perhaps we can “break into the awareness of other people by talking candidly among ourselves.” It is clear today—as perhaps it was not then—that the issue is not awareness. Ours is a world that does not intuit others’ humanity. And ours is a world that does. Such is the schism of an Arab living in the West, watching the attempted erasure of your people, as the people around you go about their daily lives. To stay here can mean feeling stuck in the chasm between one “we” and the other.
I admit that Hammad’s book is one of the few I have been able to read from cover to cover this past year. So much seems insignificant, in relative terms. “In what ways,” she asks, “are we mutilating ourselves when we dissociate to cope?” Imagine the violence of a world whose fix for genocide—which one is funding—is dissociation. Imagine the violence of a world that kills tens of thousands of children—with one-ton bombs and butterfly bullets and disease and starvation—and defines as “well-adjusted” those who do not blink.
Instead, if we are to stay here, “to remain human at this juncture is to remain in agony.” In the West most people are not in agony. I wonder sometimes what to make of this, although never for very long. Today the curiosity feels misplaced; the questions it bears are not mine.
THE FAST VIOLENCE has for now, in theory, ended; the slow violence will continue. So many of Gaza’s schools and mosques and libraries and flour mills and wells have been destroyed, and Palestinians’ ability to rebuild Gaza is limited, by design, by the siege. People’s immune systems are tired, people are tired. People are hungry. Every hospital in Gaza has been targeted; thousands of medical staff have been killed. Cancer rates will continue to rise in the coming years: thanks to American weapons a fresh layer of carcinogens now blankets the earth, and thanks to American-supplied immunity Israeli soldiers spent the past year recording themselves among other things destroying the equipment used to detect these cancers at all, let alone before it’s too late. (Many cancer treatment regimens haven’t been allowed into Gaza for years.) And it will take decades to clear the unexploded ordnance Israel has dropped (including one-ton bombs with 360-meter killing zones) to ensure the fast violence will continue after the ceasefire goes into effect.
In that same video with the boy who plans to visit his mother’s grave, other children share that they are excited to sleep, finally, in their own beds, without the sounds of drones buzzing overhead. They know their homes might not exist anymore—some preface their wishes with, “after we rebuild it.” It’s a question of when not if, and, as Hammad writes,
We see clearly what we are up against. Others understood this better and faster than I did, so this may be my own personal moment of recognition. To face a reality that on some level I knew all along, but that I did not want to know.
Alienation can be its own beginning. Theirs is a world that does not intuit other people’s humanity. And ours is Palestine.
Mary Turfah is a writer and resident physician.