…but unlike her Israeli counterpart, the Palestinian woman must renounce nothing, least of all her headscarf, which marks her as authentic, imbued with real cultural identity (that is, an identity that is not a choice, an identity admired for its very reality though we would wince at adopting it for ourselves), a believer, sitting squarely on the vectors of history, lines of force, subject to these vectors in a way we no longer believe possible for ourselves but fetishize, need. She is a bastion of belief which we outgrown ourselves, though we have not outgrown the need to know that it exists. Faith held in our stead. Last gasp nostalgia for what we believe to be the infinitely receding tides of history, tides which have left us for good. Hammas is accepted as an inevitability, and therefore blameless, the determinant output of factors which can only be added to the equation by Israel and the West, who have the only agency in this model. (It takes a suit to do business after all.) The logic here is something like ‘how can we expect them to do otherwise?’, which is also ‘how much can we really expect from them?’. We are left as either benefactors, or the voice of the voiceless, keeping a vigil of conscience for those whose conscience we will not recognize. And are the larger features of the Palestinian woman proportional relative to any ethnic variation that might be insisted upon? Indeed one can imagine a more truly incisive rendering of the image in which two identical women are backdropped by the flags of opposing nationalities. But the existing model requires this difference, requires this difference to be ethnic in addition to national/political. This is a gaze that requires difference in general, and engenders difference in doing so. We are meant to identify with the one (in her guilt — which, remember, requires conscience — and who, like us, must renounce her nation) and but sympathize with the other, which is to say sympathize with her otherness.
