Adam Shatz

When​ Richard Wright sailed to France in 1946, he was 38 years old and already a legend. He was America’s most famous black writer, the author of two books hailed as classics the moment they were published: the 1940 novel Native Son and the 1945 memoir Black Boy. By ‘choosing exile’, as he put it, he hoped both to free himself from American racism and to put an ocean...

Privately, Netanyahu and the Israeli army have always had an interest in keeping Hamas in power in Gaza. Israel allowed the movement to flourish in its early years as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the PLO. Hamas’s rule in Gaza kept the Palestinians divided, and Palestinian political fragmentation has always been a key Israeli objective. Several Israeli pundits have suggested that Netanyahu deliberately provoked Hamas in order to prevent his opponents from establishing a governing coalition. Israel has had four elections in two years, and if he fails to hold on to power, he could face corruption charges and a prison term. In the lead-up to Hamas’s rocket barrage, he pursued a series of flagrantly reckless policies. Oppression alone seldom detonates revolt; humiliation – what the Algerians call hogra – is also necessary. Netanyahu supplied it in abundance. The war was more of a gift to Hamas than he bargained for, however.

Edward Said wrote of Palestinians as witnesses to a century defined by ethnic cleansing, wars of national liberation, and migration, in restless, nomadic pursuit of freedom: ‘a counterpoint (if not a cacophony) of multiple, almost desperate dramas’. Said’s Palestinianism exemplified the qualities he admired: open-ended and exploratory, resistant to the doctrinal and racial fixity – the dark historical fatalism and exclusionary fear of the other – that Zionism embodied. If Zionism was the song of a single people, Palestinianism held out the hope of a non-sectarian future for both peoples. Palestinian freedom, whether in the form of a sovereign state neighbouring Israel or – the position he defended after Oslo – a binational state, represented ‘a beginning’, a dynamic intervention in history, rather than a return to origin. And yet his vision also looked to the past, betraying a wistful attachment to his childhood memories of colonial Cairo, where Arabs and Jews, Muslims and Christians had lived beside one another.

When France pulled out of Algeria in 1962, the remaining appelés came home to a country that was no longer the one they’d left. The Nouvelle Vague was at its height and most people had already moved on from ‘the events’ on the other side of the Mediterranean. Many of the returnees shared the desire to put Algeria behind them, some to the point of deliberately ‘disaffiliating’ from other soldiers. But it wasn’t easy to forget what they’d seen and what they’d left behind.

So this​ is how it ends. Four years of rage and lies; four years of racism and xenophobia so coarse and inflammatory Richard Nixon might have blushed; four years of dismantling economic and environmental regulation, packaged as a populist revolution on behalf of the forgotten (white) American; four years of ‘law and order’ indistinguishable from moral and political disorder; four...