Isabella Hammad. Photograph by Alice Zoo.

I wrote this lecture in August 2023 and delivered it at Columbia University at the end of September. Nine days later, on October 7, the military wing of Hamas, the organization in power in the Gaza Strip, launched a surprise attack by air, sea, and land on the Israeli military stations along the partition fence, a nearby rave, and several kibbutzim. Around 1,400 Israelis were killed and more than 200 were taken hostage.

Since then, the Israeli war machine has roared into action. As of this writing, more than 7,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed so far, almost 3,000 of them children (the average age of inhabitants of the Gaza Strip is eighteen). More than 1,600 are trapped under the rubble. Entire families have been wiped out. The bombing has not stopped. On October 13, Israel ordered the inhabitants of the north part of the Gaza Strip—nearly 1.1 million people—to evacuate. The photographs of those who did leave chillingly recalled the photographs of the refugees of 1948, when Zionist militias drove more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. This event is known in Arabic as the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” and is considered by many to be ongoing. The Israelis proceeded to bomb this safe route, killing many of those who were attempting to flee to safety. Israelis continue to bomb the north and are now also bombing the south. The Israeli professor of Holocaust and genocide studies Raz Segal has called these events “a textbook case of genocide.”

Clearly, the numbers I cite in this lecture have rapidly become out of date: according to Al Jazeera, the number of Palestinian political prisoners has doubled since September, to ten thousand. I drew my initial statistics from reports by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza. Raji Sourani, the director of the center and Gaza’s leading human rights lawyer, is said to be alive, but his house was bombed earlier this week. It is difficult to get clear information, as Israel has cut off all electricity in Gaza as well as access to water, food, and fuel. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights has not published an updated report in over two weeks. The figure I cite of $158 billion given by the United States to Israel, largely in military aid, also requires updating: the Biden administration has just pledged to send Israel an additional $14.3 billion in military support.

Two questions come to me as I think about this lecture now: the first is about turning points, which is how I begin. I claim below that we can only identify turning points in retrospect. I do think we can at present agree with relative certainty, given the speed and violence with which the cogs are rotating, that we are in one now; what we do not know is in which direction they are turning.

The second question is one of humanity, and humanism. I begin with Said’s idea of humanism, one that expands beyond the term’s discriminatory origins which described humanness only in relation to the nonhumanness of Europe’s various others. The Western media has offered an abundance of proof that this colonial principle of selective humanity has never gone away. The Israeli minister of agriculture, Avi Dichter, as he justified bombing the strip, said, “Hamas ... behaved like animals hunting other animals. We are going to target those human animals, whether during the war and after the war. Nobody is going to escape.” Ben-Gvir has long used similar language to dehumanize Palestinians and justify their oppression and killing. International law, the law and language of human rights, is evidently not being applied equally, and in their unwavering public support for Israeli military action, the United States, the UK, and many other European countries risk being implicated in genocide.

I am looking for gaps in this reality, for proof that not everyone in the West subscribes to this vision of the human—a vision that allows, for example, Ukrainians to resist their occupation but not Palestinians. According to organizers, as many as 300,000 people took to the streets in London last weekend, the highest turnout for a Palestinian solidarity march in Europe in twenty years, which encouraged me. Videos of the streets of Baghdad, of Cairo, of Tunis, even more, give me some—not solace, exactly, but they give me something. I don’t know where this is going. But I do know that we are the many.

—Isabella Hammad, October 27, 2023

When I was wondering what to talk about in this lecture, I started thinking about Edward Said and lateness as a point of departure. Then I went back to his early book Beginnings—and then I decided after all that I preferred to start in the middle, and more specifically that I wanted to talk about the middle of narratives—their turning points, which I’ll relate to the shifting narrative shape of the Palestinian struggle in its global context.

It’s difficult, in life, to pinpoint with any real sense of confidence where a turning point is located. As Said 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. We can see these moments quite clearly from the vantage of hindsight, we can assert the significance of past events with relative confidence. In the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov’s recent novel Time Shelter, the narrator notes that history becomes history only after the fact: “Most likely,” he says, speaking of the beginning of World War II: “1939 did not exist in 1939, there were just mornings when you woke up with a headache, uncertain and afraid.” But if we cannot always know the significance of the moment in the moment, it is also true that our moment, the one in which we now live, feels like one of chronic “crisis”: political, economic, and climate crises besiege us, along with other existential crises posed by the exponential development of artificial intelligence, and the recurring nightmare of nuclear war. In narrative time, the crisis should suggest the encroachment of the end, even if, in real life, the end is a receding horizon. The flow of history always exceeds the narrative frames we impose on it. Generations continue to be born, and we experience neither total apocalypse nor a happily-ever-after with any collective meaning beyond the endings of individual lives. Yet this narrative sense remains with us, flickering like a ghost through the revisions of postmodernism: we hope for resolution, or at least we hope that retrospectively what felt like a crisis will turn out to have been a turning point.