The Message, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hamish Hamilton, 240 pp., £18.99, ISBN: 978-0241724187
Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, by Isabella Hammad, Fern Press, 96 pp,  £9.99, ISBN: ‎978-1911717379

Human-made catastrophes are usually a long time in the making. They are processes, not events, such as we have seen and are seeing again in Palestine, in Sudan, and in Myanmar now; as we witnessed in Rwanda leading up to the genocide of 1994; as Black Americans experienced from slavery through Jim Crow and beyond; and as Germans orchestrated against the Herero and Nama from late nineteenth century South West Africa and against Jews and other groups from 1933 through WWII. We learn from Black activists Paul Robeson and William and Louise Patterson in their UN petition ‘We Charge Genocide’ that such viciousness — material, structural, and symbolic, wrought against bodies and against images — is undertaken with a slogging insistence on fomenting terror and despair among the victims and ensuring disregard among the perpetrator group.

As scholars and witnesses of genocide have recorded, much effort goes into helping bystanders look away from the cruelties, until indifference is the natural stance of generations. In the case of Germans, Primo Levi explained, they were not ignorant of ‘the existence of the enormous concentration camp apparatus’ and the vast suffering and death it produced, but they ‘didn’t know because they didn’t want to know. Because, indeed, they wanted not to know.’

‘Shutting his mouth, his eyes, and his ears, the typical German citizen built for himself the illusion of not knowing, hence of not being an accomplice to the things taking place in front of his very door,’ Levi observed.

A price of Germans’ looking away was paid in reparations to some of their Jewish victims, money which helped build Israel’s merchant fleet, its electric grid and its railways. Some day, restitution will be demanded for the free pass given to Israel in its campaign against Palestinian existence, and those who have been looking away from the carnage in Gaza will have to atone. Not to launder the reputation of genocidaires, but to mark their acts abhorrent.

Dolefully or otherwise, we’ve all been looking through our screens at great violence against Palestinians. In the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Isabella Hammad, we’re being invited to confront how we are implicated in this as bystanders. Our inability to stop this genocide will be a puzzle for the next hundred years. Rather than inducing guilt, Coates and Hammad invite readers into a stance of solidarity as a first, necessary, but insufficient step in solving that puzzle.

In Coates’s influential 2014 essay ‘The Case for Reparations’ this celebrated American writer used Germany’s reparations to Israel as a ‘roadmap’ for the fix needed to address the structural effects of slavery and segregation in the United States. He garnered criticism for his mistake in ‘selecting the wrong model’, overlooking Israel’s foundations in the dispossession of Palestinians. His desire to get beyond what he later recognised was the ‘default Zionism’ of his context pushed him to visit Palestine/Israel in 2023. There he discovered the work that has gone into maintaining ‘the illusion of not knowing’ what Israel is doing to Palestinians. It’s an illusion that has lit the way to the genocide that has claimed more than 70,000 Palestinian lives in Gaza so far. (Fatality estimates in The Lancet are much higher.)

In his latest book, The Message, Coates records his conversion to a new understanding. It is the story of an epiphany of the type that Palestinian-British novelist Isabella Hammad discusses in her extended essay Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, which was published a week after The Message. Recognising the Stranger shows Hammad’s path to similar conclusions — albeit with more ambivalence — about the need to recognise ourselves in the other. Both writers analyse the ingredients of willful ignorance and hold out hope in the possibility of acknowledgment and recognition. Neither offer much guidance on how to propel action towards justice after that recognition is achieved, but they insist that acknowledging the humanity in others, grasping the mutual responsibility entailed in that, is at the crux of humanity itself. We might call it solidarity as moral principle.

At the centre of Coates’ thought is a belief in the power of representation. It propels him ‘[t]o write like this, to imagine the enslaved, the colonized, the conquered as human beings’ because it has ‘always been a political act… [T]his tradition of writing, of drawing out a common humanity, is indispensable to our future, if only because what must be cultivated and cared for must first be seen […] It’s hard for human beings to do horrific violence on other human beings with their eyes wide open. Knowing does matter.’

Asserting that ‘knowing does matter’ is at the heart of The Message.

In testing this claim, ‘knowing does matter’, Hammad considers where knowledge comes from, how understanding arrives, and where it lands to alter perspective — or not. She focuses on the turning points of narratives, the ‘ah-ha’ moments when epiphanies in literature and lives appear: ‘the truth pops out: Oedipus has already killed his father and married his mother’, Darth Vader turns out to be Luke’s father, identities are unmasked and everything looks differently clear in the rearview mirror. In ‘recognition scenes’ like these the puzzle pieces fall into place. The Message is Coates’s record of how those pieces fit together; Recognising the Stranger wonders about the effects.

Framed as an encouragement to his writing students, The Message is also an account of Coates’s journeys through Senegal and the history of slavery, and to North Carolina, where he observes an encouraging fight against censorship. As he told Democracy Now! the lesson from his trip to Dakar is about ‘moving past myth, moving past the idea of constructed narratives … to see the people themselves.’ It’s this movement that he undertakes most powerfully in the second half of the book, which is about his trip to Palestine/Israel.

There he shares his surprise as he learned about Palestinians’ conditions, something he had perhaps perceived in rough outline but not recognised in its technicolor depth until seeing it in person. He comes to understand what has been held in the negative spaces of mainstream journalism: the vast apparatus of erasure and silencing that facilitates the feigned ignorance of Palestinians’ plight. It’s this part of his book that provoked the liberal US media to ‘jump up and down and not sit down’ — a rough translation of an Arabic saying that captures the frenzied offence of people caught in the act of something. Most every podcast, morning chat programme and East coast magazine vied to talk with or about Coates and sometimes to challenge him; CBS’s Tony Dokoupil compared him to an ‘extremist’. Such was their defensiveness cloaked in an ad hominem attack. They seemed bothered that this respected author has exposed their journalistic thimblerigging. Maybe some were relieved that a colleague was brave enough to say it all.

During his ten-day sojourn in Palestine/Israel, Coates talks to a witness of the massacre by Zionist forces at the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin in 1948, one of the many mass murder events that have eliminated Palestinians. He describes how Israeli archaeology fashioned ‘evidence’ of The City of David, fabricated out of nationalist fantasy and settlers’ obsessions with land confiscation. Touted as Jerusalem’s birthplace and Israel’s crucible, it is now a theme park where excavations have become an excuse to evict Palestinians from their homes in the village of Silwan. As anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj has shown, archaeology produced ‘facts on the ground’ corroborating the Zionist narrative of ancient Jewish ownership of the land. Coates also brings the reader with him to Hebron, where Palestinians are barred from certain streets, harassed by settlers, surveilled and policed by soldiers and armed security cameras. It is a stark example of Israel’s broader apartheid system, a steely geometry that narrows Palestinian lives in direct proportion to its expansion.

Coates grasps that Israel’s supporters in the United States media have been a crucial cog in the machinery of silencing that has curtailed Palestinian lives, conmen keeping the shell game going at speed — whether by lies, by disregard, or by rationalisation. He excoriates the journalists, his colleagues, for ‘playing god’, muting the voices of Palestinians who have been trying to tell the truth of their subjection for decades.

In the face of a vast and multiplex machine designed to produce such human destruction and hide the suffering, Coates felt compelled to write, to bear witness to the horrors. ‘Tell them what you saw’, echoed the voices in his head. 

He is embarrassed and angered, as any victim of a scam would be. The Message is his testimony to his experience of shame. Primo Levi, the moral chronicler of humanity pushed to its limits under Nazi outrages, in The Truce described shame as a disposition ‘that the just man experiences at another man’s crime; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defense’.

In the face of the disgrace that Israel has introduced into the world, Coates castigates himself for what he had overlooked: ‘I felt my deep ignorance of the world beyond America’s borders and, with that, a deep shame.’ In a passage about Israel’s expulsion of Palestinian families from a neighborhood of Jerusalem’s Old City when the military occupation of East Jerusalem began in 1967, his pity and anguish — for himself as much as for others — pours forth:

‘Standing there, amid all that remained of the Moroccan Quarter, amid a lost world, I felt a mix of astonishment, betrayal, and anger. The astonishment was for me — for my own ignorance, for my own incuriosity … And the anger was for my own past — for Black Bottom, for Rosewood, for Tulsa — which I could not help but feel being evoked here.’

With an empiricist’s insistence on eye-witness observation, Coates ‘saw directly’ the ‘separate and unequal nature of Israeli rule’ that is ‘both intense and omnipresent’. Peering through a lens shaded by the different colour line of the United States, he recounts: ‘what my young eyes now saw of that state was a world where separate and unequal was alive and well, where rule by the ballot for some and the bullet for others was policy … But “Jim Crow” was the language of analogy, of translation, not the thing itself.’

It’s not certain that Coates has fulfilled the ‘mission in Palestine’ he set himself: ‘to grow new roots, to describe this new world, not as a satellite of my old world but as a world in and of itself.’ The world he evokes is thin, populated by characters rather than people. Some descriptions read like textual cardboard cut-outs, figures set up to point the way to what he’s trying to argue. The reader is barely introduced to his guide, Umar al-Ghubari, who told him of Israel’s massacre of Palestinians in Lydd in 1948, another horror in the long history of unpunished butcheries by Zionist forces.

Umar al-Ghubari, for Coates, represented the ‘threat of the storyteller who can, through words, erode the claims of the powerful’. Having made the point, we slide past the Israeli man glaring at them through dark glasses who stood in for all ‘those in power [who] so violently object to words’. Coates doesn’t tell us that Umar al-Ghubari is not just a tour guide but a political educator and member of Zochrot, a group of Palestinians and Israeli Jews working to preserve the memory of pre-1948 Palestine and promote the right of Palestinians to return to their homes. Since we do not meet the Israeli who glared at them from afar, we learn nothing of how words can erode the Zionist edifice. Maybe because we might have learned something else, which could have cast doubt on the political import of facts and narratives. We can’t be sure.

Coates’s essay ‘The Case for Reparations’ changed, for a time, the American conversation about race and publicised the downstream effects of slavery that pool in poverty and struggle, deprivation and mass incarceration. He demonstrated with cold facts and human stories how entangled white economic privilege is with discrimination against black people. He also showed how delusional beliefs underwrite the policies that have sown these patterns deep in that country’s soil. The myths about missing black fathers, for example, that make the murder of their children somehow their fault is the progeny of the creed that black people deserve to be slaves.

And so it goes in Israel, where the exclusion of Palestinian rights, the eradication of their presence in their historic homeland, is foundational to that country. As in the US, the denigration of a people was a national obsession made policy. Enshrined most overtly in Israel’s Basic Law ‘The Nation State of the Jewish People’ that defines Israel as ‘the national home of the Jewish people’ only, Jewish supremacism and apartheid have been woven into Israel’s laws since the country’s birth. In such an ethnocracy, those who object are portrayed as apostates pregnant with existential threat.

When Palestinian members of the Israeli Knesset put forward legislation to make Israel a ‘state of all its citizens’, it was banned from even being discussed in the parliament, deemed by Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein a ‘preposterous … provocation’. Whether one is Jewish or not, those condemning Jewish supremacism are branded heretics. It can get you fired, attacked and beaten up, shunned, harassed, and now deported. As historians Marjorie Feld and Geoffrey Levin have shown, there is a long history of labelling dissenters who oppose Zionism as traitors.

Although the parallels between the US and Israel are striking, Coates is not attempting to grasp the Israeli version of Jim Crow in full detail. So he doesn’t tell us about one of Israel’s founding texts, the 1950 Absentee Property Law that granted the state the power to confiscate Palestinian properties and assets that the Zionist army forced them to leave behind in the war of 1948. It’s as if Palestinians bought their homes and lands ‘on contract,’ like Clyde Ross, whom Coates described in ‘The Case for Reparations’. The legalisation of strategic plunder props up both systems. 

For black people in America and Palestinians, the system has been rigged to impoverish them and keep them down. It circulates stories and myths to deny their humanity and make them killable in the eyes of potential killers. This is why a desperate urgency to craft a different narrative and a different ‘we’ drives Coates: ‘We have the burden of crafting new language and stories that allow people to imagine that new policies are possible.’

Coates’s previous work has been lumped into the framework of Afro-Pessimism, a critical view of black life as being necessarily looted of personhood, one of permanent social death. This philosophical school has been criticised for denying ‘that there is any meaningful analogy between Blacks and other nonwhites’. But The Message is all about learning through analogy; Coates is hopeful about humanity that has solidarity at its beating heart. As he told Peter Beinart on his podcast, he finds encouragement in his measure of the limits of what it can bear: ‘It’s hard for human beings to do horrific violence on other human beings with their eyes wide open. Knowing does matter.’

Where Coates’s writing in The Message feels rushed, his normally sparkly and multi-layered writing less finely crafted, Hammad brings the eloquent precision that marks her two wonderful novels,The Parisian and Enter Ghost, to full effect in this slim volume. Like the best essays and talks (it is based on the Edward W Said lecture she delivered at Columbia University in September 2023), her reflections in Recognizing the Stranger take you by the hand through a smooth but windy path to new insights and questions. Through discussions of Aristotle and trips to Palestine and encounters with the occasional Israeli, she considers how Palestine and Palestinian perspectives come to be known by those on the outside, ‘strangers’ of various kinds. She registers that ‘[m]any Palestinians have … devoted their lives and careers to actively trying to induce epiphanies in other people … the unaffiliated onlooker, the foreigner, the one who has not yet reckoned with how much they are already … involved in the lives of others.’

Hammad is troubled by what political effects the ‘recognition scenes’ might have. She admits ‘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’. I, too, having spent a few decades studying Palestinians’ and others’ efforts to make their conditions known — through the human rights system, through international law, through representations of their suffering — have wallowed, but uncertainly, in this disillusion for a while.

Of course, Hammad knows that it’s not just Palestinians who have been trying to induce such epiphanies. When I married a Palestinian-British man, I became the daughter-in-law of a rather famous convert, the Beirut-based nonagenarian, oral historian Rosemary Sayigh, who has been so committed to recording Palestinian lives and making the resources for epiphanies available that many don’t realise she is English-born and not Arab by blood. Although Rosemary Sayigh is one of a kind, in becoming devoted to the cause of Palestinian liberation she is not unique — something that she has archived in her latest book, Becoming Pro-Palestinian (2024), which gathers the conversion stories of tens of foreigners across every region in scenes of global solidarity.

I have been wondering, then, why Hammad chose to focus on differently identified actors suspended in the prior moments before reckoning, and the labour of the ‘many Palestinians’ who must coddle them along towards epiphany. She is exasperated: ‘It’s insane to me that human beings should constantly have to humanise themselves’, she said in an interview. She admits to a sense of offence at being asked if her writing is part of this kind of thing: ‘an attempt to teach Westerners’. She finds it a little ‘undignified’.

Indignity seems more relevant to the scenes of parents in Gaza wailing over the limp, dusty bodies of their children, when the rules of appropriateness have been shattered — not by their messy public bereavements, but through the wild scope of Israel’s brutal fury that kills so many children. The indignity — the shame — is ours when we watch feebly from outside Gaza’s killing fields, mired in a mediated kind of false intimacy, left stuttering in the chasm between Palestinians’ engulfment by Israeli violence and what we can do to mitigate it.

Hammad wrote of her offence before October 7th, 2023. But in the final section of her book, set down after Israel’s rampage began, the emotional landscape is from a different planet hurtling through a different universe. Her text beseeches us to not look away. It is in seeing the evil happening that we exercise something of our solidarity, which is also for Hammad, as for Coates, at the core of an idea of humanity: ‘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.’

Hammad writes that watching the way Palestinians ‘care for each other in the face of death puts the rest of us to shame’. Bearing witness is a precondition for the speech and action that we must undertake to shed our shame and reclaim the humanity that is found in caring for that of others.

Undignified, shameful, is our reading of the reports about Palestinian political prisoners, the hundreds of people kidnapped, herded, caged, stripped of their clothes and denied access to the most basic human necessities, and tortured while we do nothing much to loosen the manacles that have led to amputation of prisoners’ body parts. The rate by which recognition scenes have been staged over the last two years of Israel’s genocidal rampage across Gaza has intensified in direct proportion to our helplessness in the face of this carnage. That is where shame might rightly emerge.

These scenes, and the videoed, musical, and thundered assertions of Israelis’ genocidal intent that play across the internet and Israel’s mainstream media have prodded the epiphanies along. The eurekas are crystallised in decisions by the ICC (Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, and Yoav Gallant, the minister of defence of Israel, bear criminal responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Palestine), the ICJ (plausibly it’s a genocide), and the UN General Assembly (the occupation should stop). The plummeting favorability of Israel is recorded in opinion polls indicating that increasing numbers of onlookers now feel implicated enough, maybe defiled enough, to revise their opinions of the Jewish state. The hundreds of thousands marching for Palestine prove, as Hammad said in a version of her lecture, that ‘we are the many’. If we listen to her allusion to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s call for freedom, we hear his poem’s following line full of hope: ‘they are the few’.

Despite the vastness of this recognition, the genocide continues in Gaza, the ethnic cleansing continues across Palestine, and Israeli violence continues in Lebanon and Syria. Hammad succinctly describes this dynamic, one that has played out over a hundred years: ‘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.’

A flirtation with what we might call ‘Palestino-Pessimism’ appears. As it does in her characterisation of Edward Said, whose work is an impetus for her essay. For Said, she writes, ‘Palestinianism was a condition of chronic exile, exile as agony’. But that is where the pessimism also dissolves, in this place from which to see oneself in the stranger. Hammad’s exasperation and weariness are tempered by an ongoing faith ‘in at least the possibility of a swift movement from ignorance to knowledge, as a kind of human possibility’. That confidence in the possibility for change may come from Hammad’s commitment to avoiding hopelessness. As she told novelist Sally Rooney in a published conversation, ‘I don’t believe we can afford to despair, nor do I think despair is ethical.’

The epiphanies that light up a night like the northern lights in sheets of weird colour, they propel us outdoors to see that we are all standing under the same sky. ‘Do not give in. Be like the Palestinians in Gaza. Look them in the face. Say: that’s me!’ Hammad exhorts. That recognition is the necessary but insufficient condition for a future that tips into something less awful.

There is, I think, a tension between this demand that we see ourselves in the stranger and Hammad’s suggestion that Palestinians might ‘break into the awareness of other people by talking candidly among ourselves’. Her point is that direct appeals seem ineffective as a mode of political pedagogy. But I am troubled by the boundary between speakers and eavesdroppers, ourselves and others, that is fixed in this proposal that seeks to breach it. Who are the ‘we’ admitted to the space of candid conversation, and who arrogates for themselves the power to define ‘other people’?

In these polarising days, when a holistic view is necessary to understand the global threats to freedom and flourishing, when broad alliances are essential for speaking back to power, cliquishness and tribalism are fatal.

The message of Coates is ultimately that of Hammad too, for whom, as she writes, we are all condemned and encouraged ‘to exist between loneliness and alignment’. These writers give us a glimpse of how we might hold on to solidarity as strategy and human principle.