Listening today to the mild-mannered social anthropologist Emmanuel Todd on Glenn Diesen’s substack, I was struck by the fact that he does not claim to be a political scientist. Yet he reaches conclusions similar to those posited by the political scientists I have been following, who focus on economic, diplomatic and military observations of the geopolitical chessboard.
Emmanuel Todd uses the tools of his field, the science of social anthropology. Similar conclusions are reached in an article on the role of energy over the past five centuries by means of another scientific field, that of the historian Alfred W. McCoy.
I am stressing the word “scientific”, because what we hear and see in the media regarding geopolitical issues does not even pretend to be scientific and is often divorced from reality. Is it fiction? In a sense, yes.
On the other hand, much of what I have learnt in life, I have learnt from fiction, i.e. from novels and short stories. Science is not supposed to be ideological. We can like or dislike its findings, but like it or not, science is heartless. Science will not tell you that genocide is evil. Treatises, scientific papers, statistics, etc. can support or dismiss hypotheses about human interaction, but only fiction can flesh out the real thing.
Let me spell it out: If your wife breaks your heart telling you she wants a divorce, statistics won’t heal your heart; far less give you a clue as to how you can reignite her attachment to you. Fiction will be your best bet.
So my third source for today is the 2024 novel Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad. The protagonist is a British actress, whose father is a Palestinian. She feels British, but visits, almost reluctantly, her father’s family in Israel/Palestine and gets involved in a theatre production of Hamlet on the West Bank.
I chose to read the book because it seemed innocuous. There would be no explicit genocide, no horrors of Gaza. What there was, however, was in a sense worse; the day-to-day humiliation of Palestinians. This undramatic aspect of life under Israeli subjugation was actually not really known to me. I was forced to feel what Haneen, Ibrahim, Wael and the others felt, for example at IDF-controlled checkpoints. Only an accomplished writer of fiction could force me to continue reading after having cringed at the insults of a 19-year-old Israeli brat with a gun.
The worst part, for me at least, is that the Palestinians cannot, must not under any circumstances tell the brat what they think of him.
If you have been following me here, you will know that I feel very strongly about Palestine. I ask myself: Had I suffered as much compassion with the protagonists if they had been from Sudan or Yemen?
Alas, no. Why? Because I know Palestinians! I have witnessed their grief, shared a little part of their pain. For decades I have known that Israel was committing genocide! I know no Sudanese and nobody from Yemen.
One of the characters in Enter Ghost tells a disheartened compatriot: “[No] we haven’t won, but it doesn’t exactly look like they’ve won either.” That’s just it! Palestine is occupied. Yes, But the diaspora of the Palestinian people is alive and well. They have lived to tell the story. Israel tried but could not silence them. Israel will for ever be compared to Nazi Germany. That is not “victory” and it never will be.
There is no diaspora from Sudan or Yemen. Alas. I truly wish there were!
My conclusion, then, is that knowledge requires both science and fiction. However without compassion, knowledge is hollow. Compassion requires people with whom we can bond.