Recognizing the Stranger

And a short word on short books.

For my Palestinian friends. -JRS

I’m a big fan of the small book. Always have been. When done well – or done right, perhaps – it feels as if the writer has, by reducing the volume of their words, concentrated their force and focus. This explains the enduring power of the tract or manifesto, I suppose. But I also see the small book (done right) as adjacent or akin to poetry, i.e. concerned not only with content, but with form, as well. And, let’s be honest: In the algorithm- and crisis-addled fugue state in which many of us now swim, brevity has an added appeal.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve read three such books: Recognizing the Stranger by Isabella Hammad, The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives by Adolph Reed Jr. The first of these ranks as the best, in my view, on the merits of both craft and content; the others have their purpose and place, certainly – while I would recommend either to fans of the respective writers, The Message, I would suggest, is largely for liberals who, after a year of genocide, feel the need to speed-run “The Palestinian Question” in a voice both familiar and non-threatening (i.e. non-Arab).

But it is Hammad’s book that I would prioritize, if you’re looking – and not only for its qualities, but for the fact that, right now, Palestinian voices deserve centre stage. 

On that note. I’m going to get out of the way, and let Hammad speak, briefly. (This won’t spoil the book, I promise.) The following excerpt is from the first part of Recognizing the Stranger, which comprises an essay that the writer delivered as the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University.

The date, crucially: September 28, 2023.

We are at a moment when elementary democratic values the world over have eroded and in some places almost completely disappeared. I feel it as a kind of fracturing of intention. The big emancipatory dreams of progressive and anti-colonial movements of the previous century seem to be in pieces, and some are trying to make something with these pieces, taking language from here and from there to keep our movements going. 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 normalisation with Israel by Arab states is a symptom of the ways Palestine has been abandoned in the region.

The question of Palestine, couched often in the question of antisemitism, has torn up political debate in the UK, and while increasing numbers in the Democratic establishment in the United States openly express support and solidarity for the Palestinian cause and condemn the Israeli regime, speech in support of Palestinian rights is punished at the highest levels.

Until recently, Palestine had all but faded from diplomatic view under a quagmire of successive unsuccessful peace negotiations brokered by the United States, while right-wing and neoliberal forces pushed out the progressive left across the world – even as the question of Palestine continues to capture more of the mainstream of that left, even as more and more people cotton on to the realities of settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing, to the fact that 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.

(Note: I have added line breaks for ease of reading in this format.)