Cover image of Another Humanity: Decolonial Ethics from Du Bois to Arendt by Benjamin P. Davis (Edinburgh University Press, 2025)
I went to Nablus in May 2023. This was the time when the militant group the Lions’ Den had gained support in the city for its armed attacks against Israeli checkpoints, soldiers and settlements. As a consequence, the Israeli Occupying Forces had increased their surveillance and raids not just of Lions’ Den hideouts, but of the city of Nablus as a whole. Foreigners by and large had stopped going to the city. It was deemed too dangerous.
I was there with a group of academics from the United States. I have breathing problems that can be triggered by many factors, including airborne pollutants such as the exhaust from a car, the mould of an old building, or the fragrance of cologne (or of a plant). So when the other academics toured one of Nablus’s famous soap factories, I stood and waited outside. I looked around and took in all the black water tanks on the roofs of the buildings. Ubiquitous across the West Bank, the tanks collect rainwater for the weeks at a time when the Israeli forces shut off Palestinian access to water. Israel controls over 80 per cent of the water in the West Bank, sending it to settlements, where it is used for pools and car washes while the majority of Palestinians struggle to access sufficient clean water. As I stood outside the factory, a group of Nablusi youths approached me, perhaps wondering if I—like many of the pale-skinned people who remained in the city?—was ultimately there to infiltrate Palestinian organisations on behalf of Israel. I don’t speak Arabic, so I only smiled and waved, wondering myself when my group would finish its tour.
After the soap factory we walked through the densely populated Old City, starting at the Manara Clock Tower, which had been adorned by posters honouring Lions’ Den martyrs—the stern gazes of dead young men, armed with automatic rifles, watching us as we passed under the clock. Our local guide taught us about the Roman history of Nablus as well as how it has been ruled by multiple empires in its history, which includes a history of coexistence, at different times, between Jews, Muslims and Christians. Before we ended our tour with knafeh, a sweet cheese pastry Nablus has made famous, but after seeing the house where a prominent barber had been killed (or ‘martyred’) for his involvement with the Lions’ Den, we walked down another narrow street in the Old City to visit a historic spice shop.
Avoiding strong smells once again, I stood outside the shop and waited. The director of the academic programme joined me outside so she could smoke one of her American Spirits. I desperately wanted to join her in the ordinary pleasure of smoking. The sun beat down on us in the alley, which smelled of exhaust from the scooters many Palestinians use to get around the narrow roads of the Old City. Several young Nablusi boys, their hair cut high and tight in the military fashion of the martyrs, walked by. Then an old sedan turned into the alley.
The narrowness of the alley meant that the director and I had to press up against the stone wall to allow the sedan to pass. We saw that an older man was driving. He approached us slowly, and we remained pressed against the wall.
Smoke from the director’s cigarette mixed with the car’s exhaust and the alley’s gravel dust. The man stopped his car next to us. He rolled down the window. He looked at me. He said something in Arabic. I didn’t understand. He reached across the passenger seat, picked up a small, square cardboard box, and extended it out the window. I stared at the box intently. He looked into my eyes and opened the box. It was filled with raha, a Nablusi sweet made from sugar, starch and sometimes rose or orange water. The director and I each took one and told him shukran, thanks. He smiled and drove on.
I have revisited that moment many times since that hot afternoon, not least to grapple with the fact that, perhaps because I grew up in post-9/11 America, when the man approached us in the alley, and especially when he stopped his car next to me, I was afraid. Essentially, I had feared a man who gave me a snack. I was afraid of someone who was going about his day, and who, upon seeing two people who certainly looked more Israeli than Nablusi, and so might’ve been involved in the death of his beloved barber, had decided the proper approach was to offer us something sweet.
And because he likely has limited clean water at home, the food he shared with us was not just a simple dessert, but a delicacy cobbled together in the face of great constraints.
What that man’s generosity demonstrates, I feel, hints at what it looks like to live beyond the modern categories into which we are born, and in which most of us remain (including me, above all in that moment)—in our thinking and our actions, in our self-understanding and our relations—for the rest of our lives. The man demonstrated an ordinary ethics lived out in the face of tremendous loss and ongoing deprivation. And in that way, his gift might also be understood as an invitation for its recipients to live differently, beyond our own categories and fears with respect to self and Other, friend and enemy, stranger and kin. He offered an example of how, in Glissant’s words, ‘[w]ithin this universe of domination and oppression, of silent or professed dehumanization, forms of humanity stubbornly persisted’.
Caught in Categories
Because that raha might be understood as symbolising a refusal of categorical thinking, because it was offered across the usual and easy distinctions—between citizen and foreigner, native and infiltrator, perhaps even Israeli and Palestinian—when I reflect on that day, I also return to the philosopher Hannah Arendt, whose writing maintained a thoroughgoing critical examination of modern responses to modern problems, yet who personally struggled to realise the promise of her thought. Indeed, it was Arendt who, in the ‘Imperialism’ section of The Origins of Totalitarianism—a section Edward Said almost always included in his syllabi related to empire or postcolonial theory—wrote:
Hitler’s solution of the Jewish problem, first to reduce the German Jews to a nonrecognized minority in Germany, then to drive them as stateless people across the borders, and finally to gather them back from everywhere in order to ship them to extermination camps, was an eloquent demonstration to the rest of the world how really to ‘liquidate’ all problems concerning minorities and stateless. After the war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved—namely, by means of a colonized and then conquered territory—but this solved neither the problem of the minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless and right-less by another 700,000 to 800,000 people. And what happened in Palestine within the smallest territory and in terms of hundreds of thousands was then repeated in India on a large scale involving many millions of people. Since the Peace Treaties of 1919 and 1920 the refugees and the stateless have attached themselves like a curse to all the newly established states on earth which were created in the image of the nation-state.
To respond to the modern ‘problem’ of minorities through the modern ‘solution’ of the nation state, Arendt teaches, only perpetuates the problem. She reiterated this claim later, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, arguing there that the minority problem remained ‘insoluble’ as long as we are living ‘within the political framework of the nation-state’. Importantly, in this line she does not say that the question of living together in right relations is impossible for human beings. Her claim is more specific; it is about the political form in which we have organised ourselves, inherited, and not successfully moved beyond. The form of the nation state creates the problem of the minority. ‘The strength of Arendt’s analysis’, Jacqueline Rose comments, ‘is that she recognises that there is something deadly in the law.’ Such criticism of the nation state does not necessarily equate to pessimism, nor does it entail eschewing law tout court. A different political order, perhaps one in which the human being is indeed found and treated as sacred, remains a possibility. To get there, Arendt proposed in her ‘Prologue’ to The Human Condition, our first task ‘is nothing more than to think what we are doing’.
Excerpted from Another Humanity: Decolonial Ethics from Du Bois to Arendt by Benjamin P. Davis (Edinburgh University Press, 2025). Used with permission.
