‘The bombs are still falling. My heart breaks every day’: novelists Sally Rooney and Isabella Hammad on the Israel-Palestine conflict
In the middle of November, as the catastrophe in Gaza intensified, I was asked to take part in a public event with theBritishPalestinianauthorIsabella Hammad. We were invited to discuss our work as novelists, and the role of writers and artists generally, in the context of current events. I was unable to travel at the time, but I suggested that we might conduct a conversation over email instead, with the intention of publishing our exchange.
In both her novels and her nonfiction – such as her recent Edward Saidmemorial lecture,Recognising the Stranger,delivered atColumbia University, New York, in September–Hammad writes about Palestinian life with profound intelligence, insight and subtlety. Her firstnovel, The Parisian, wasbased on the story of her great-grandfather,Midhat Kamal, who as a young man returned fromFranceto his hometown, the Palestinian city ofNablus, at the end of thefirstworld war and the start of the British occupation of Palestine. Hersecond novel,Enter Ghost, is about anArabicproduction ofHamletin the West Bank in the summer of 2017.
Over the course of two weeks, into early December, our exchange ran to almost10,000 words. What follows is an excerpt from our correspondence, edited for brevity and clarity.
Sally Rooney: Hi Isabella. I want to thank you, in advance, for making the time to have this conversation with me. It’s difficult to know how to begin talking about the scale of the present situation in Palestine and Israel: the scale of the violence, as well as the moral gravity, and the political and historical significance of these events.
First and foremost, of course, I’m thinking of the mass killing of civilians, both in Israel on 7 October and on a far more colossal scale in Gaza ever since that date. The intensity and breadth of the violence against civilians in Gaza, and the level of international consensus on the acceptability of that violence, feels like something unprecedented in my lifetime. And I’m also thinking of the simultaneous and related destruction of Palestinian culture and history – the demolition of universities, mosques, streets and neighbourhoods, particularly in Gaza City.
One of my instincts, as you and I begin our exchange, is to acknowledge my own position as an “outsider” to all of this. There’s a part of me that wants to say I should stay silent and leave these conversations to people who know better. But in another way, as a European, I am very much implicated in what’s happening. Israel’s geopolitical power is partly founded on its relation with its ally and largest trading partner, the EU. Of course you know all this. In your fiction, you dramatise in very interesting and openended ways these relations between Palestine, Israel and Europe.
Your recent novel, Enter Ghost, includes a beautiful scene in which two women are talking about the relations between art and political resistance. One of these women, Mariam, is directing a stage production of Hamlet to be performed in the West Bank; the other, our narrator Sonia, is an actor playing the part of Gertrude. Mariam speaks in this scene about the danger “that art might deaden resistance, by softening suffering’s blows through representing it”. Sonia suspects that, in fact, Mariam doesn’t believe this; what she really wants is for Sonia “to supply the counter-argument, because the counter-argument was what she wanted to believe”.
But this exchange is left curiously – and I think productively – unfinished. The “counter-argument” both characters seem to want to hear, and which the reader probably also wants to hear, never quite makes it on to the page. Maybe the novel itself is the counterargument, in the sense that it stages its Hamlet scenes side-by-side with scenes of appalling political and military repression, and still succeeds in making us care about the success of the play.
I wonder if you might want to talk a little about this relationship between artistic-intellectual work, and political organising and resistance, as it strikes you at this moment. What is the role of artists and intellectuals at a time like this? Even as I use that phrase, “a time like this”, I feel I’m getting something wrong. I don’t think there ever has been a time exactly like this before. But maybe you can tell me what you think.
Isabella Hammad: Hi Sally. A few people have asked me versions of this lately – the question of what artists in particular are supposed to do at this moment. I wonder if the question is partly a way of expressing horror not only at the sheer tremendousness of this violence, which is being enacted on an industrial scale – a scale that brings humanity so close to inhumanity that I think that for many it shakes the very sense of what we, as humans, actually are – but also at the way violence can make art-making seem quite futile and feeble, something easily crushed. Basically, it’s easy to feel useless, and from there it’s a short leap to despair. But I don’t believe we can afford to despair, nor do I think despair is ethical.
When this started, by which I mean when this latest most astonishing round of violence started, thinking coolly or analytically felt impossible to me. I had this feeling that I should simply feel what was happening and engage with the tragedies and killing and the loss, and that any expression other than grief was somehow perverted. But the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, which began in 1948, continues at staggering speed, including attempts at mass transfer not only in Gaza but in the West Bank too. And I am increasingly certain that racism and the forces that lead to this kind of genocidal violence are, in essence, non-thinking. Racism, it seems to me, is usually not calculated but is rather a form of stupidity: it’s the absence of thought. That’s why it is very important to think and speak as clearly as we can.
Of course I do also believe in the political value of slow forms, of artmaking, even if this value is quite intangible and unpredictable, and even if I fairly regularly experience crises of faith. People with different professions and temperaments might be more suited to quick action; the present extremity of violence will eventually crest (even though this is actually very difficult to think about right now) and the tempo will shift and the slow people will become useful again. And at the same time there are shorter-term things we can all do, like speak truth to power when power is lying. We can try to lift up the voices that are being suppressed or drowned out. We can insist on history, and on facts, and on humanism.
But, also, artists and intellectuals are just people of the world. We need to hold on to the very basic democratic principle that the exercise of individual agency becomes powerful en masse. I think there has been a real apathy in the past few decades about the importance of maintaining consensus around democratic principles, as if these will just continue to exist on their own without us fighting to keep them. People in the global north have short memories. These principles and institutions were really hard-won, and they arrived on the back of colossal global violence. The Geneva conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – these have been around for less than a century and they are becoming meaningless. This terrifies me. And it should terrify everyone – it has implications for everyone, not just Palestinians.
As for that scene in my novel where two characters debate the role of art in political struggle, I actually think it plays a very important role, so I don’t agree with Mariam there. But I think it’s misguided to believe a single work of art can, by itself, act quickly and significantly on the world; this seems like a category error. Is this something you think about?
And could you tell me a bit more about Irish solidarity with Palestinians, and maybe, if you don’t mind, your own?
Best,Isabella
SR: The Irish situation is a curious one. On the one hand, there is a real and widespread solidarity with Palestinians among the people of Ireland, which is reflected, to an extent, in our political class. But on the other hand, Ireland as a nation state is integrated very much into the institutions of the dominant powers. So there’s a tension there. For instance, in the past few years, the Irish parliament passed a piece of legislation criminalising trade relations with illegal Israeli settlements. But under international pressure, particularly from the US, our government blocked that legislation. Trade with the illegal settlements is still going on now. Maybe that offers an illustration of Ireland’s position, in a way. We are at once a former (and partly current) colonial subject, with all the ideological sympathies that implies; and at the same time we’re a wealthy European country, with a very close relationship with the US, and all that entails. That was always a contradiction, but the intensity of that contradiction is definitely heightening now.
In my own experience as an Irish writer, I always felt relatively free to “speak out” about Palestine. Nobody, as far as I know, ever seriously objected to anything I said or wrote. It was only when I decided to join the cultural boycott – by declining a book deal with an Israeli publishing house that was complicit in the occupation – that my opinions suddenly became controversial, if not at home then certainly internationally. That was interesting to me, because it seemed to show where the real political lines were drawn, at the time. It showed that my former sense of freedom to “speak out” had been grounded in the simple fact that nobody cared what I said.
It occurs to me that that situation seems to be changing now. Speech – even very moderate speech – from cultural figures in Europe and the US is becoming a site of more intense political repression. You have actors and writers and athletes losing their jobs just for signing petitions or putting up social media posts. At the same time, we’re seeing unprecedented levels of public protest and demonstration against the violence in Gaza. I wonder whether the increasing movement to suppress public speech on this issue might indicate that solidarity with Palestine in the global north is becoming a more serious policy problem for Israel. Do you think that’s the case? Or am I being too optimistic about that?
You mention in your message the danger that international humanitarian law is losing meaning now. I agree that does feel dangerous. But then, as we both know, Israel refuses to ratify many of the key agreements that make up international law, and also flagrantly violates even those treaties it has ratified (very much following the playbook of the US). And no one does anything. International law has proven completely ineffective to prevent the crimes of the US and its allies, and equally ineffective at imposing any consequences after the fact. If I’m right about that, what do you think there is to salvage from the project of inter