Normal View Dyslexic View
Conversation
The hope of a handshake
,
Abstract
This conversation lays the ground for the reading of Vered Lev Kenaan’s article, whose starting point is the now famous photograph of Yocheved Lifshiftz shaking hands with her Hamas captor. Rachel Bowlby asks Lev Kenaan about what led her to write the piece and about its relation to her own situation living in Israel, and working at the University of Haifa. The interview also explores the suggestion, within the article, that a horizon of future reconciliation has to emerge from the place of a woman. The themes discussed here are developed in greater depth in Lev Kenaan’s accompanying research article, ‘Hospitality in times of war’.
Keywords
photographsYocheved LifshitzhandshakeUniversity of HaifawomenreconciliationAt the beginning of your article, you describe how the photograph of Yocheved Lifshitz turning round to shake hands with her Hamas captor on her release started you thinking. Could you say something about how that process gave rise to the essay? Did you know right away that you wanted—or needed—to write about this?
The article, as I see it now, is a homage to Yocheved Lifshitz, an 85-year-old woman, a photographer, a mother of four children, a grandmother, and a peace activist who was kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, 2023. Hamas released her after seventeen days in captivity. Recently, at the beginning of March 2025, Hamas returned the body of her husband, Oded, who was kidnapped and killed in captivity. He was a journalist and peace activist volunteering with the Road to Recovery organisation, which transports Palestinian children to hospitals in Israel for treatment (https://www.theroadtorecovery.org.il/our-story).
Writing the article on Lifshitz’s handshake was therapeutic. I felt compelled to write it. I wanted to say something meaningful in an unfathomably difficult situation. Writing provided a shelter but it also restored the faculty of hope. The psyche was under attack from the traumatic history of its own nationality. And in this sense hopelessness marked the political condition of the soul.
A political crisis of the soul occurs when enduring foundations, such as family, home, statehood, democracy, and citizenship, are no longer safe. The experience of this unstable condition attracts past pathologies. And so we see the present moment inundated by previous traumas. The catastrophe of October 7th was connected in an unmediated way (unconsciously) to past disasters, which were summoned (in a non-chronological order due to a chaotic state of the psyche) and allowed to converge in the present: Israel’s wars, terror attacks, rockets and explosions, the occupation, the demolition of Palestinian homes and confiscation of land, the illegal expansion of settlements in the West Bank, Palestinian refugees, Jewish refugees in WWII, Israel’s blockade of the Gaza strip, Israel’s Independence War, the Palestinian Nakba, the Holocaust.
Another important aspect of the political condition of the soul relates to the shocking experience of being caught by surprise. We were surprised, but unconsciously we had been unguarded for a long time. This is the paradoxical nature of a colossal disaster: to be surprised by something anticipated. Indeed, the alarm had already been raised during the beginning of the coup d’état embarked on by Netanyahu’s government with the euphemistically named judicial overhaul. We were invested in the huge protest movement. And yet, despite the evident impact of civil resistance, I had a strong intuition that something horrible was lurking on the horizon: A civil war? A disastrous invasion? I associated a name with this dreadful trepidation—Phobos, the Greek god, son of Ares and Aphrodite, who escorts his father to wars. Evoking this mighty ancient power helped me register the effect of the enormous disorder caused by the government’s rage against its own citizens.
It was hard to think straight after the unthinkable massacre. Hamas destroyed communities, demolished their homes and fields, killed, tortured, raped, and took hostages, among them peace activists who had good relations with their Gazan neighbors. The drums of war sounded out and violence escalated. The complete blockade of Gaza caused starvation and led to a humanitarian crisis amid deprivation that was already chronically severe. Gaza was annihilated. Many cities in Israel have been under constant missile attack, including Tel Aviv where I live, and Haifa where I teach. The poster faces of the kidnapped children, women and men on every street corner turn to us: ‘Is this the end of humanity?’ One morning, I woke up with a disturbing dream image. I saw a pale baby, actually unborn, a fetus that was throwing up—prenatally disgusted, as I interpreted it, by the brutality of this world.
You teach at the University of Haifa, in a city and a university both known for the co-existence of Jews and Arabs. Do you think that has a bearing on your perspectives in the piece—in particular, on your urging us away from the rigidity of entrenched binary separations and divisions?
Teaching at the University of Haifa with its diverse community of students has always been a great source of hope for me. I usually tell my students that reading Homer, Hesiod, or Virgil brings special rewards. I suggest to them that they regard the act of reading together as an opportunity to create a community of shared interest. The foreignness and remoteness of classical antiquity can prove productive for a diverse group of Israeli students. Being ancient and mythical, epic poetry appears to students as belonging outside history, and in this sense can be seen as offering a potentially neutral (third) space where commonality, perhaps even a civil partnership forged among this diverse group of students, can be imagined. Reading an ancient classical text which at first glance seems to lack any direct bearing on their own complex political identities and situations, can strike familiar if separate chords in the collective memory of Jewish and Arab students; the ancient text can thus help students to acknowledge each other’s traumatic memories being different and similar.
I always insist that when we read the ancient texts in class, we read them in both Hebrew and Arabic translation—translations inevitably involve questions about the translatability into the target language of the collective experiences registered in the poem. This bilingual method has proved productive. For example, teaching Virgil’s Aeneid in both Hebrew and Arabic engages students in a joint exploration of the foundation myth of Rome. The myth is threaded through with themes of national destruction, forced exile, the tribulations of refugees, and war between natives and settlers.1
My thoughts on ‘Hospitality in times of war’ initially took form as I prepared to give a talk to students at the University of Haifa. It was indeed my intention to encourage thought to move away from the rigidity of entrenched binary separations and divisions that were so intensified by the occurrences of October 2023. Because of the state of emergency, the university did not open its gates until the end of that December. We teachers were disconnected from our students, worried about their safety, and also about the fate of their studies. In times of war, the humanities is the first subject area to be relinquished, and the benefits of intellectual and cultural life seem to evaporate, as if they have no justification.
But beyond these acute problems, a major concern also had to do with relationships between Arabs and Jews in what had become an intensely inflamed conflict zone. There, everyone is liable to be the object of hostility and suspicion, especially the Arab students. In my talk on Zoom, I wanted to show the students that the humanities are vital, now more than ever. My guiding inspiration was the image of Yocheved Lifshitz’s handshake, and through it I wished to stimulate the students’ capacity to imagine, which had been damaged by the brutality of the initial attack and the Israeli response motivated by the force of revenge that dangerously took over the public space. In order to do this, I had to link Lifshitz’s handshake, which provoked public criticism, with a history of similar images connected to culturally distant narratives. This allowed my audience to examine Lifshitz’s gesture from a distance. The Greco–Roman images provided a shared cultural context, common ground for the diverse community of students, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Druze, and this enabled them, I hope, to imagine something blocked by their particular situatedness.
You draw on your knowledge of both classical iconography and modern photographic theory, making a rich meditation on the changing relationships of past and future times with a present moment of representation. Of all the writings and images on which you draw, did any strike you in new ways this time, as you wrote focused on this historic moment?
I found the Homeric episode describing the handshake between two enemies, Glaukos of the Trojan army and Diomedes the Greek, especially striking. The two warriors coincidentally find out that they are related by xenia: that is, that their forefathers were connected by the special ties of hospitality. But they also realise that they share collective memories of exile and uprootedness. This shared experience of suffering is key, in my view, to future reconciliation between the two peoples. In general, I believe that any approach to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict that insists on strategies of sharing, eschewing the temptation to compete about suffering, would prove productive. In this context, I find the dichotomous discourse about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict currently dominating international public debate powerful but flat. I’m thinking especially of the pro-Palestinian slogan chanted all over the world—‘Free Palestine from the river to the sea.’ I’m firmly against the occupation and I believe in a diplomatic resolution to the conflict paving the way to a Palestinian state. But I cannot agree with a slogan that in practice evokes the fantasy of eradicating Israel from the globe. International discourse is stuck in dichotomies of colonisers–colonised, victimisers–victims. The coloniser–colonised dichotomy in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict should be revisited with the understanding that the coloniser, the one who has the power, has in itself always been colonised. We really need to destabilise these categories by employing a more dynamic framework resisting national and religious ideologies of identity and difference.
The article builds, at the end, to a powerful and profoundly moving argument about the place and role of women in history and in changing history. Did this aspect impress itself on you increasingly as you wrote, or were you aware of that direction from the outset?
I was inspired by the gesture of a woman who, in the dark tunnels, met Yahya Sinwar (the former chairman of Hamas who planned the October 7 massacre) and was not afraid to ask him how he could kidnap and hold people like her. She was also not afraid to throw a question at the Israeli prime minister, Netanyahu: how was it possible that he still hadn’t visited her destroyed kibbutz, Nir Oz? And when asked if she still believed in peace she didn’t hesitate for a second.
At the funeral of her husband, she said: ‘We fought all our life for social justice and peace, and to my sorrow, we were dealt a terrible blow by those we helped on the other side.’ She added that the Israeli government’s primary obligation is to bring back all the hostages still held by Hamas, and that she will continue to fight for their release. Her straightforward voice and ethical stance instigate a new direction of learning aimed at discovering an unknown history of women—of mothers and grandmothers whose perspectives on violent conflicts, most commonly run by men, are regrettably still missing from the political sphere.
In the article, this feminist ethics is encapsulated in the image of a woman’s handshake. In antiquity, as I show, this is a moment in which critical turning points in life coincide: entrance and exit from the world, birth, marriage, giving birth, and dying. A woman’s handshake has many meanings: welcome and farewell, being at home and being a stranger, being a host and a guest. I face this multiplicity of meaning in almost every representation of dead women’s handshakes found on ancient gravestones in the various collections of classical art in the world. These dead women, silent figures carved in stone, anonymous, private, who make their final appearance in public, provide the starting point for uncovering an unknown history of pacifist women’s resistance. For there is an archetypal complexity about being a woman: a daughter and a mother, colonised and coloniser along many axes from prenatality to family relations, class, nation, and other historic formations—it is a plural existence, someone whose marriage, inasmuch as it renders the archetypal, mythical experience of rape, puts her in the position of being a stranger at home. This makes her capable of being in the place of the Other and resisting ideological dichotomies.
Reference
KenaanV.L. & RosenmeyerP.A. (2025), Classics Transformed in Jewish, Israeli, and Palestinian Receptions (Oxford, Oxford University Press). https://doi.org/10.1093/9780191989148.001.0001
1
For a discussion of Virgil’s translations into Hebrew and Arabic, see Kenaan & Rosenmeyer (2025).
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/013.a23
Published on: 12 June 2025
Volume: 13
Issue: Issue 2
Article view count: 549
Article download count: 25
Copyright statement
© The author(s) 2025. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Kenaan, V. L. with Bowlby, R. (2025), ‘The hope of a handshake’, Journal of the British Academy, 13(2): a23 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/013.a23Crossref
Dimensions
Altmetric
Article metrics
View count: 549
Download count: 25
No Data Found
No Data Found
No Data Found
Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
Published
July 2023
Somali experiences of first wave Caabuqa-corona: an analysis of high COVID-19 mortality and infection levels in London’s East End, 2020 Farah Bede, Joanna Lewis
This article focuses on the experiences of a minoritised black Muslim community in London during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020. It shows that many Somali families, living in a high-density area of the East End, experienced acutely high infection and death rates from late March. The reasons for this were found to be late lockdown, a top-down community-insensitive public health approach, and the way that many of the work force were in highly vulnerable occupations. However, high rates were then prolonged due to the legacy of historic poverty, housing density and institutional racism. Culture and locally specific responses were less significant factors but overall had a positive impact in mitigation. However, the situation with regard to mental health remains bleak. This research suggests more trained Somali health experts, community sensitive data, trauma informed care, and use of local networks could help reduce future vulnerabilities and health poverty.
10 March 2023
Hospitality in times of war Vered Lev Kenaan
‘Hospitality in times of war’ is stimulated by a single image, which was too quickly swept away by the relentless flux of horrific war imagery. The photograph, taken during the handover of an Israeli hostage to Red Cross representatives, captures 85-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz—abducted by Hamas on 7 October 2023—turning back to shake hands with her captor. This article examines Lifshitz’s gesture in relation to both official and personal images of the handshake in antiquity, with particular attention to Homeric scenes and modern philosophical reflections on hospitality. Through a close reading of fraught moments in the Iliad, where enemies clasp hands in a fleeting recognition of shared humanity, the article explores the political and ethical resonance of a woman’s handshake, uncovering a lesser-known history of pacifist women’s resistance. This article is published in connection with a conversation between Vered Lev Kenaan and Rachel Bowlby FBA, which reflects on the article’s genesis and broader context within the ongoing realities of conflict and the hope for reconciliation from a woman’s perspective.
12 June 2025
No Data Found
