Normal View Dyslexic View
Research Article
Hospitality in times of war
Abstract
‘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.
Keywords
handshakeYocheved LifshitzhospitalityhostageIliadpacifist resistancegestureantiquityhumanityI
On 23 October 2023 a unique photograph appeared in international news media. It was taken from a video made by Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. In the video, an Israeli hostage is being transferred to the Red Cross, helping her on her way from captivity in Gaza back to Israel. The photograph shows Yocheved Lifshitz at the very moment in which she turns and shakes hands with her captor (the full video is available via The Guardian at www.tinyurl.com/jba-13-2-a24-video).1
My thoughts on the image began to develop shortly after its appearance in the media. Under the sway of the horror and brutality of the October 7 massacre, life seemed to stand still. Everyday communication between people was frail. Conversations were limited to the very experience of lacking words and of the diminishing powers of language. Then a cruel and bitter war broke out, catastrophic and petrifying. The war brushed away the muteness inside. No more was it a matter of no words; now language was politicised, subjected to the dictatorship of right and wrong.
The 85-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7 during the brutal massacre perpetrated by Hamas in the Southern District of Israel.2 She was dragged onto a motorcycle and beaten in the ribs. After driving her off through the fields surrounding Nir Oz, the kidnappers carried her into a network of underground tunnels. There Lifshitz met other kidnapped members of her kibbutz. After walking together for several kilometres through swampy passageways, they were separated and confined in different cells. Lifshitz was given a mattress, watched over by a guard, and treated by a medic.3 After seventeen days in captivity, Lifshitz was released. On the night of her release, many people in a heightened state of tension watched the video of Yocheved Lifshitz, dressed in a Palestinian robe, being handed over by Hamas to the Red Cross. They saw her pause and turn back, her hand reaching out to the Hamas man, whose face was covered. He recoiled or froze for a moment. Then, for less than a second their hands clasped in a strange handshake.
In Israel, the unexpected gesture brought up many unsettled, even critical, responses. Some ruled out the possibility of seeing Ms Lifshitz’s handshake as a sign of rapprochement. Her true motivation, it was argued, was her concern for her husband, who had yet to be released.4 The Jerusalem Post reported on the event in the following way:
World-renowned counterterrorism expert Lt.-Col. (res.) Dr. Anat Berko rightly pointed out, ‘Hamas beheaded babies, raped women, and carried out mass killings. So, they gave her some vegetables and a kind doctor saw her daily. Does that make everything okay? […]’ Furthermore, Lifshitz’s husband remains in captivity. Imagine her preparing to leave her captivity with Hamas reminding her, ‘We have your husband.’ Under such circumstances, anyone would be concerned about retribution on their loved ones, and every word Lifshitz utters must been seen in that context.
Jaffe-Hoffman (24 October 2023)
The shock of the Hamas atrocities on October 7 was still fresh in Israel. The feelings of anger and humiliation left no room for sympathy toward any sign that might hint at future negotiations with Hamas. The impossibility of imagining an encounter in any way conducive to the possibility of peace between captor and captive, free of hostility, led some viewers to see Lifshitz’s gesture as a reflection of a confused state of mind resulting from her stressful situation. Some attributed her bewildering reaction to dementia, or to Stockholm syndrome, implying that the traumatic experience had led Ms Lifshitz to develop misplaced feelings of trust and an emotional bond with her captor. Others were not able to listen to parts of Lifshitz’s description. Lifshitz described the horrible ordeal she had been through, but also mentioned specific details that shed some positive light on how she was treated in captivity.5 For many Israelis the association of the Hamas captivity with hospitality was an intolerable message that had to be unrelentingly rejected. In times of war, there is no patience for impartiality, which is easily equated with being unpatriotic. Other voices, however, were appreciative of Lifshitz’s gesture. They linked it to her socialist values and her lifelong peace activism. Yet such explanations made the extremist responses among Lifshitz’s critics even more resentful.
The international press was much more open to regarding Lifshitz as a free agent. The multiple accounts of her release conveyed the aura of an outstanding event dispersing its mythic seeds. In the British Guardian, the description of the captive’s handshake focused on the word ‘shalom’ uttered by Lifshitz:
At the precise moment of her deliverance from a hellish ordeal Lifshitz paused and turned to grip the hand of one of the masked Hamas militants who had kept her captive. ‘Shalom,’ she said. The handshake and the Hebrew word for peace were a remarkable gesture by the 85-year-old Israeli who later spoke of brutality and mercy during her 16 days as a hostage in Gaza.
Carroll & Burke (24 October 2023)
The image of a peace warrior was refined by Reuters press agency, reporting that Lifshitz said the word ‘shalom’ in Arabic—‘salam’—to her Hamas captor:
In the video, a man carrying a long gun and wearing a bullet proof vest emblazoned with a Hamas flag escorts Lifshitz to a white ICRC van. Before entering the van, she reaches out her hand out to the man and tells him ‘salam,’ Arabic for peace.
Costas Pitas et al. (24 October 2023)
By exchanging the Hebrew word ‘shalom’ (the word that Lifshitz actually used) with the Arabic ‘salam’, the report intensified the political sense of Lifshitz’s handshake. The translation and the physical transition coincided in a bidirectional movement. Lifshitz was carried from the Palestinian to the Israeli side, but at the same time transferred a message from her mother tongue, Hebrew, to Arabic speakers. Yet, the phonetic resemblance between ‘shalom’ and ‘salam’ shows why translation strikes one in this case as redundant. Most Palestinians and Israelis are aware of the affinity between these two Arabic and Hebrew words, which derive from the same Semitic root. Both ‘salam’ and ‘shalom’ are employed as words of greeting (‘hello’) and farewell (‘goodbye’), and in both languages they mean ‘peace.’6
The fiery controversy around Lifshitz’s handshake was inseparable from the Israeli reaction to the spontaneous press conference held at the Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv immediately after her release:
Lifshitz’s outreach to her Hamas guards will seem beyond charitable to many Israelis. It could not be further from desire expressed by many here for justice and retribution. … Lifshitz’s comments make her an outlier and perhaps more representative of the Kibuzzim near Gaza, many of whose residents were progressive peace activists like her and more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than many other Israelis.
Alexander Smith (24 October 2023)
To the international ear, however, Lifshitz’s moderate mode of speech was approachable and understood as congruent with the gesture of the handshake. One reporter exclaimed: ‘Mrs. Lifshitz did what polite elderly ladies do and offered her thanks.’7 But how is this portrait of an elderly lady who keeps the rules of etiquette even in extreme situations compatible with her socialist values and her lifelong peace activism? The abundant interpretations of the handshake suggest an array of conflicting senses: was it a gesture of good manners or a token of peace activism? Was the handshake an expression of gratitude or a plea? Was it an act of farewell performed in the wish to bring closure to her ordeal, or a gesture of greeting intended to open us, the viewers, to a future horizon? Images, even though they are enigmatic, belong to concrete settings which need to be considered in their immediate contexts.
Let us turn back to the image of the handshake between the hostage and the Hamas man, and ponder its meanings. Should we look for its meaning only in the time and place of its occurrence? We need to distinguish between the handshake as an event and as the image of the event. An interpretation focusing solely on the event cleaves to the agent’s intentions.8 It would demand that the hostage’s action be understood from her point of view as well as from those of the other participants. An interpretation focusing on the image would seek to inquire into the relation of Lifshitz’s handshake to another one: this is the famous image of Rabin and Arafat handshake of 1993 in the White House (Figure 1).
Figure 1.
Left to right: The Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Rabin, the US President Bill Clinton, and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, at the Oslo Accords signing ceremony, on the White House lawn, 1993. ©Vince Musi/The White House. Public Domain.
Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, shaking hands. Bill Clinton stands between them with his arms spread, smiling.
The image of Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister, and Arafat, Chairman of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), shaking hands stands out in stark contrast to the hostage’s spontaneous handshaking. The official photograph commemorates a historical event. The handshake is staged as a promise, a visual statement about a future reconciliation between perpetual enemies. Conversely, the image of Lifshitz’s hand reaching out caught the viewers by surprise. There was nothing in the build-up to the return of the two Israeli hostages that prepared the spectators’ visual expectation for a handshake. And yet, Lifshitz’s handshake displays cultural meanings common to various iconic images of handshake, such as a gentlemen’s agreement, a contract without a document, mutual trust, or friendly gestures of saying hello or goodbye in a semi-formal way.
We should take into consideration that ceremonial gestures can be spontaneous, automatic, unconscious; they do not necessarily reflect coherent intentions. Yet, even when they are not orchestrated or planned in advance, handshakes are nonetheless performative, and should be considered as ritual gestures whose meanings partake of a zone between the private and the public, emerging from somewhere that lies between conscious and unconscious understanding. Shaking hands is an action involving another, and in this sense belongs to the relational sphere. As a call for an encounter between two people, it creates an intersection between difference and similarity. The diagonal structure of the encounter, typically involving the right hands, compels both individuals to face each other and look each other in the eye. At the same time, this gesture is always already tied to its opposite: breaking apart and walking away. A memory of a clenched fist lingers within the open hand extended towards the other. Stretching the right hand toward the other overcomes, uncovers, and even anticipates that other gesture of power and resistance. This face-to-face encounter is, in fact, a Janus-face. And, it furthermore embodies a Janus dialectic of open and closed doors, which in the architectonic enclosure dedicated to this ancient Roman god signalled transitions between war and peace.
A history of the image matters. Being mindful of the ancient origins of the handshake allows us to move from the past to the scene in the present as more experienced viewers; perhaps then we could observe the event of the handshake by standing back from the overwhelming present. The event of the handshake between the captive Israeli woman and the Palestinian armed man joins the two poles of an ongoing deadly conflict and hence tricks the act of interpretation into the agitated and bleeding present. The handshake consists of a temporal complexity where past and future coincide and memory and hope summon one another. The intersection of past and future obfuscates our visual field and makes the event of the handshake perplexing: can the promise of a handshake contain the burden of the past and bring a better awareness of the coexistence and interchangeability of the otherwise polarised positions?
The present time blurs our vision and dulls our reading-sensitivity. Transcending the temporal boundaries of the event and distancing the image from its immediate context, the ambiguities of the image gain depth. In conflict zones, ambiguities are instantly crushed into dichotomies, and the visual field is automatically divided between friends and enemies, between victims and victimised, colonisers and colonised. To sustain the unsettled space of Lifshitz’s handshake, the relation of this image to its own history of ambiguities should be reclaimed.
In the global history of diplomatic handshakes, Lifshtz’s gesture is marginal and ephemeral. Its lifespan is short, that of an oddity. In restoring to the woman’s gesture its own history, we refuse to let it go unrecognised, and wish also to evoke the gesture’s political significance. An alternative history of this kind requires a process of restitution through which Lifshitz’s gesture would retrieve its own distinct features.
The earliest known depiction of a handshake provides us with a visual archetype, an arche (in Latin, principium), denoting both a beginning and a guiding principle in the handshake’s genealogy.9 The image conventionally taken to be the first visual appearance of a handshake is from Mesopotamia in the 9th century BCE. It discloses an archaic complexity of power relationship typical of official handshakes. And it propounds the idea that official handshakes traditionally belong to the public sphere and are performed exclusively by powerful and authoritative men. Within this socio-political trajectory of representation, the hostage’s handshake is an anomaly. Deviating from the origin-image, Lifshitz’s gesture is not simply external to the archetype but remains connected to it through a matrix of difference that invites interpretation.
II
Figure 2.
The front panel of this dais depicts Shalmaneser III (r. 858–24 BCE) (on the right) handshaking Marduk-zakir-shumi (r. 855–19 BCE) (left), King of Babylon. Both are surrounded by guards and stand below a fringed canopy supported by poles. The scene commemorates Shalmaneser’s support of Marduk-zakir-sumi against his rebellious brother, Marduk-bel-usati, and the ascent of Marduk-zaki-shumi to the throne. Its place on the dais reflects its importance as one of the great achievements of Shalmaneser III. This dais was found in the eastern end of the throne room (T1) at Fort Shalmaneser in the city of Nimrud (in modern-day Nineveh Governorate, Iraq) in 1962 CE. The front and sides of the dais were carved in relief depicting various tributary scenes. The dais was completed around 846–5 BCE (which would be the king’s 13th year of reign). On display at the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, Iraq. Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP (Glasgow). Public Domain.
A carving into the stone of the front panel of the Assyrian throne which depicts the Shalmaneser III and Marduk-Zakir-Sumi shaking hands.
In an Assyrian relief (Figure 2), the front panel of the throne platform presents two kings, the Assyrian Shalmaneser III to the right and the Babylonian Marduk-Zakir-Sumi.10 The handshake is at the centre of a symmetrical scene of eight figures. Two bearded kings, identified by their headdresses, face one another. In their left hands both are holding a royal staff which, according to the archaeologist, Oates (1963: 20) was ‘the mark of royal authority on peaceful occasions’. Their sheathed swords rest on their waists. Behind each king stands a beardless attendant holding a bow and mace with sheathed sword. These four figures stand beneath a ceremonial canopy. On each flank outside the canopy stand two other king’s escorts. The royal handclasp communicates male order and sovereignty. The relief besides being a civic commemoration, was probably also a political tool, Assyrian propaganda directed at securing the king’s interests. To the modern viewer, the presentation of the political treaty through the ceremonial handshake might connote an equal partnership, but a historical contextualisation of the Assyrian relief uncovers a matrix of political considerations and intrigues, as well as different, and even conflicting, perspectives.11
The iconography of the handshake demonstrating an agreement between political allies often depicts a symmetrical encounter between two like-minded partners. But this type of image, as in the case of the Assyrian handshake, presents us with a façade. The visualisation of the treaty creates an illusion of harmony, which dissolves in the light of historical research and iconographical interpretation. A net of conflicting interests, intrigues, and asymmetries disguised under a harmonious façade typically characterises the Athenian representation of an official handshake at the end of the 5th century BCE.
During the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians wanted to honour Samos for its loyalty in opposing the Spartan fleet that was sailing towards Athens. In 403–02 BCE, the Athenians inscribed a stela (Figure 3) recording the Athenian decree granting the Samians citizenship rights and autonomy. (See Shipley 1987: 129–30.)
Figure 3.
Relief inscribed stele with the Samain honorary decree. The relief depicts Hera and Athena, patron-deities of Samos and Athens respectively, clasping hands. According to the inscription, the demos of the Athenians honours the Samians, because they remained loyal to them, after the defeat of the Athenian fleet at Aigos Potamoi by the Spartans, although their other allies had revolted. The text is a copy of the original decree issued in 405 BC, inscribed in 403/2 BC. Acropolis Museum, Athens. Public Domain.
Stele inscribed with an image of Hera and Athena shaking hands.
On top of the inscribed document, the relief depicts the alliance of the two cities through the handshake of two feminine figures, divine personifications of the cities, the patron goddesses of Athens and Samos. The goddesses who shake hands are usually identified as Athena (on the right) and Hera.12 Despite the appearance of female figures, the representation of the handshake does not depart from the masculine convention. The iconography of the alliance between Zeus’s masculine daughter, Athena, and his consort, Hera, grant divine authorisation to the handshake and sanctify the city’s political (male) decrees.
The stela presents an official visualisation of the Greek dexiosis, a term that derives from the verb dexiomai, which means ‘giving the right hand’. Scholars tend to describe the dexiosis between the personified Athens and Samos through the conventional understanding that it is a gesture of ‘friendship and allegiance’. (See Blanshard 2007: 19–20, Elsner 2015: 57.) Yet the relationship between Athens and Samos during the second half of the 5th century BCE was replete with major tensions and crises, along with agreements and alliances. In Samian collective memory, democratic Athens left violent marks of its imperialism. Samos became an ally to the Athenians, but also suffered from their military expeditions, siege, destruction of the city’s walls, political interventions, exile, and captivity.13
The notion of friendship conveyed by the handshake is insufficient to capture the complex relationship between Athens and Samos. Civic gestures of hospitality are not mere signs of good will but strategic acts, instrumental in securing alliances that could ensure the host’s future victories on military and diplomatic levels. The effectiveness of such a civic handshake is expected, therefore, to be tested in the face of a third party. While the gesture signals mutual trust, it also implicitly suggests that a common front against a mutual enemy would be warranted. This implicit meaning also comes to mind as we contemplate the divine handshake between Hera and Athena and recall their peculiar bond in the Iliad, which had no other motivation except for their mutual hostility towards the Trojans (Il. 4. 21).
III
Handshakes connect between strangers who are not committed to each other through loyalty or trust. We rarely see, or hear, about son and father, brothers, or close friends, shaking hands. Handshakes attempt to overcome an inherent distance; they usually forge a bond between strangers, xenoi. In antiquity, the handshake was included as one among various symbolic gestures featuring in the ritual of hospitality: xenia.14 In the Greek world, xenia has an important ethical function. It covers diverse relationships under the sign of hospitality.
Hesiod’s perspective on xenia has a unique edge. In his didactic epic, Works and Days, he considers the relationship between host, xeinodokos, and guest, xeinos, to be the paradigm of a rich framework of social relationships including even blood ties. According to Hesiod (W&D 181–4), dissimilarity and alterity marks our present (degenerate) human condition of the Iron Age, the lowest fifth generation of humanity. For him, the perverse condition of humanity lies in assimilating the category of blood relatives and close friends into the less reliable category of xenoi. Fathers and sons are not like-minded, brothers are not dear to each other, let alone friends (hetairoi) or strangers (xeinoi). An ethic of hospitality is required to restrain the fears of, and projections onto, the other, who is potentially hostile and dangerous. The question of how to make the stranger benign is central to the gesture of hospitality, as well as to alliances and reconciliation between enemies. ‘The meaning of the usages of hospitality’, writes Nietzsche in Daybreak 4.319, ‘is the paralyzing of enmity in the stranger. Where the stranger is no longer felt to be first and foremost an enemy, hospitality decreases; it flourishes as long as its evil presupposition flourishes.’15
The ceremonialism of hospitality is respected among both nomadic and settled cultures. Codes of hospitality are valued by pagan, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and other religions. The Homeric epic of homecoming, the Odyssey, is abundant with various manifestations of xenia in encounters between travellers and their hosts along the way. Xenia is essential for understanding any relation between a person who receives the other and the one received in the gesture of dexiosis.16 This act of receiving literally occurs on the threshold of the host’s home.
In his short 1954 introduction to the Homeric world, Finley (1979: 98) explains that the Homeric epic’s special attentiveness to xenia should be linked to the Homeric notion of the normal relationship between individuals, ‘one of hostility’.17 Xenia exposes the primacy of fear, suspicion, and distrust underlying the encounter with strangers, foreigners, and enemies. Offering the right hand to a would-be ally is a gesture of affirmation through denial. Strangers in denial. This may also explain the fragility of such alliances. As relationships and bonds rupture, intrinsic differences and aggression erupt more brutally.18 In the Homeric epic, the image of the handshake creates a site where the figures of friend and enemy, hospitality and hostility, converge and the question of how this ancient field of meaning projects onto the future—onto our present—has ethical potential. It is specifically the Iliad, an epic that sings of a war sparked by a violation of the guest–host relationship where the personal and the political intersect, and where the physical touching of hands becomes more complex.19
IV
In the Iliad, the act of receiving relates to any sort of entrance into a new bond between strangers, as can be seen, for example, in the participation of Achaean warriors—strangers—who come from various lands, in a treaty with the Greek commanders who receive them.20 Likewise, in the Trojan army composed of Trojans and xenoi, that is, foreigner allies, a gesture of xenia is required in order to cement the trust between individual warriors and the Trojan King or army commander, Hector.21 In contrast to leaders involved in the conflict, such as Agamemnon, whose brother, Menelaos, was wronged by the Trojan prince, Paris, Hector’s brother, the allies fight a war against people who have never harmed them.22 The Lycian Glaukos, a warrior-ally of Troy, warns Hector that not one Lykian will go into combat for Troy if Hector abandons Sarpedon’s body to the Achaeans’ custody. Glaukos reminds Hector of his obligation to Sarpedon as his xeinos kai hetairos, namely, a foreigner who has been turned, through xenia, into a comrade (Il. 17.150).
The Iliad is central for shifting the focus of our discussion from official to personal handshakes that associate between two strangers in a war zone. Moreover, the Iliad not only installs the drama of hospitality on the battlefield, but challenges it by bringing enemies together to the point of shaking hands. The famous scene—often given as the exemplary case of xenia—shows the Greek warrior Diomedes and the Trojan ally, the Lycian Glaukos, clasping each other by the hand to demonstrate their mutual trust (Figure 4): χεῖράς τ᾿ ἀλλήλων λαβέτην καὶ πιστώσαντο (Il. 6.233). The possibility of abandoning the fight is broached through a dialogue that, unexpectedly, uncovers old ties of hospitality between their forefathers. Diomedes uses the memory of the ancestral bond as plain evidence that sons should abide by their fathers’ xenia and become themselves xeinoi patroioi, foreigners, or rather enemies with ancestral connection, open to receive each other, to discover each other as dear strangers, philoi xeinoi.23
Figure 4.
Diomed giving welcome to Glaucus (engraving). English School (19th century) ©Look and Learn/Bridgeman Images.
Print of an engraving showing Diomedes and Glaukos shaking hands.
Glaukos’ lineage turns out to include a Greek ancestor, Sisyphus of Ephyra (the ancient name of Corinth). Sisyphus’ grandson, Bellerophontes, Glaukos’ grandfather, was exiled from Argos. It was during this crisis that Diomedes’ grandfather, himself an Aetolian exile who took refuge in Argos, offered hospitality to Bellerophontes for twenty days. On the battlefield, Diomedes and Glaukos discover not only that their grandfathers were connected by ties of hospitality, but also that they had had the shared experience of vulnerability as exiles forced to become fugitives. The figure of the xeinos, as Georg Simmel says in his 1908 essay ‘der Fremde’ on the modern stranger, contains a duality between remoteness and affinity.24 The Lycian Glaukos is a Trojan ally but he is also a Greek–Lycian; his strangeness lies in his ‘closeness and distance, of detachment and engagement’ in relation to Diomedes, the Greek warrior.25 It is the possibility of being open to the stranger’s complex of identities that allows one enemy to recognise in the other shared traumatic experiences that resonate in the family tree.
We may wonder what makes this openness to the other in the intermediate space between the two combatants, possible? We know that the two warriors advancing towards each other are eager to kill. So what brings Diomedes, the one who has just been called by a Trojan prince a savage and most frightening warrior (Il.6. 96–8), to stop in front of Glaukos and inquire about his family lineage? We don’t know the answer. But the Iliad teaches us that even during the blindness of war, hostilities in which men (and women) injure, wound, and kill indiscriminately, there are miraculous events of sudden illumination. The encounter between Diomedes and Glaukos should perhaps be read as a compensatory episode for the unsuccessful appeal for xenia that precedes it in Book 6. That appeal for mercy comes from the Trojan Adrestus whom Menelaos took captive. Adrestos kneels down and grasps Menelaos’ knees with his hands. Menelaos is touched by the plea. And just as he is about to receive him on his ship as a captive, his brother, Agamemnon, intervenes and castigates him for his leniency: ‘No fugitive, not even a baby carried in a mother’s belly! Let them all without distinction perish, every last man of Ilion, without a tear, without a trace!’ (Il. 6. 57–60).26 The Homeric poem is replete with these manifestations of ferocity that are, alas, repeated in the recent atrocities in the October 7th massacre in the south of Israel and in the annihilation of Gaza. The end of the war in Troy brought about its utter destruction. The modern memory of genocide is awakened, although the term does not correspond to archaic ideology. Still, Troy was erased. Most of its people were killed and those who remained alive were forced to live in captivity far from their homeland.
V
Going back to the Iliad after October 2023 compels us to return to earlier wartime readings of the poem. Two radical essays composed by women philosophers engage Homer’s world from the entangled perspectives of World War II. Simone Weil wrote ‘L’Iliade ou le poème de la force’ in 1939 and Rachel Bespaloff finished ‘De l’Iliade’ by mid-1940.27 The publication of these two essays changed the poem’s routine receptions. These female and Jewish voices introduced an alternative reading of the Iliad, challenging the common understanding of the poem as glorifying war and heroism.28 Both Weil and Bespalloff admire the Iliad. Weil sees the epic genius in teaching its audience ‘not to hate the enemy, nor to scorn the unfortunate’ (2005: 37).29 Bespaloff (2005: 91) sees the Iliad as a poetry of witness that rescues human experience from forgetfulness. Both Weil (2005: 30) and Bespaloff (2005: 90) stress that the Iliad does not create a substantial divide between the victorious and the defeated. ‘Victors and vanquished are brought equally near us’, writes Weil. Both agree on Homer’s impartiality, which does not allow us to identify any personal preference towards one of the armies. Weil draws our attention to how the reader ‘is barely aware that the poet is a Greek and not a Trojan’ (2005: 33).
Weil’s essay compiles many quotations from the Iliad without giving their exact location (book and line numbers). The accumulated quotations illustrate Weil’s notion of force, or violence, as the core principle of the Iliad informing the comportment of Greek and Trojan warriors alike. Force, according to Weil, converts warriors into things, it turns bodies into corpses. Violent force also transforms sensible individuals into automata as ‘they become deaf and dumb’ (2005: 26). The erratic assemblage of quotations recreates an effect of blurring that the Iliad produces in relation to brutes and victims. Violence is indifferent to such categories. The role of victimiser and victim is never static in the Iliad. They exchange roles. Weil concentrates on the poem’s penchant for descriptions of violence, wounds, and death. The questions, ‘who is good in the Iliad? Who is bad?’ remain unanswered, writes Bespaloff, and continues, ‘Such distinctions do not exist; there are only men suffering, warriors fighting, some winning, some losing’ (2005: 50). On the basis of Thucydides’ comment that post-Homeric Greeks were in their turn conquered eighty years after they destroyed Troy, Weil envisions ancient Greek responses attentive to the Iliad’s defeated voices. She speculates that the post-Homeric Greeks were competent to read the Iliad ‘as conquered and as conquerors simultaneously, and so perceive what neither conqueror nor conquered ever saw, for both were blinded’ (2005: 33).30
The exhortation to consider how Homer undoes the polarity of conqueror and conquered did not make sense to some readers, who continued to read him as the poet of the victorious Greeks. Thus, for Mahmoud Darwish, the celebrated Palestinian poet, positioned as the poet of the defeated, the Iliad ultimately tells the story of the victorious.31 When asked in an interview in 1996, ‘is there a place for epic poetry today?’ he answered:
There is no place for the Homeric poet, but there is a place for the poet of Troy. We haven’t heard his poem. We haven’t heard Troy’s account. I’m sure there were poets there. The voice of Homer, the victor, vanquished even the Trojan’s right to complain. I try to be the poet of Troy. Is it painful? I love the vanquished.32
But Weil and Bespaloff suggest that Homer’s Iliad develops an ear skilled in listening to the vanquished precisely at the moment when the other side has the upper hand. Reading Homer their way today in the current context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict could help Israelis and Palestinians envision future possibilities of reconciliation.
Homer stipulates the conditions of reconciliation at the very end of the Iliad, in Book 24. It is during Priam’s visit to Achilles’ tent that another strange variation of a handshake takes place unexpectedly.33 Priam comes to plead with Achilles to return his son’s dead body. Priam is going as a guest in the place of an enemy, and thus experiences the ambiguity of the term ‘host’, denoting both a provider of hospitality and an enemy.
At one point Achilles clasps old Priam’s right hand by his wrist: ἐπὶ καρπῷ χεῖρα γέροντος ἔλλαβε δεξιτερήν (Il. 24. 671–2). It happens after Priam enters Achilles’ lodging and in a pleading gesture kisses Achilles’ hands, ‘terrible, murderous hands that killed many of Priam’s sons’ (Il. 24. 478–9). The touch of Achilles’ hands on Priam’s lips causes huge pain. Priam implores Achilles to recognise his suffering: ‘no other man on earth has ever suffered more than I, who kissed the hand of the man that killed my child’ (Il. 24. 504–6). The emphasis now falls on how a slaying hand yields to an enemy’s plea and turns to perform a gesture of hospitality.
The clasp of hands has the symbolic function of a gesture of truce between two enemies. We know that the agreement between Achilles and Priam achieves only a temporary suspension of hostilities and that Troy’s destruction and Achilles’ downfall will eventually happen. Yet a narration of Troy’s fated downfall is beyond the scope of Homer’s song. The image of the handshake endorses the agreement and guarantees that the funeral ceremonies in honour of Hector’s ransomed body will not be interrupted. Trojan laments and farewells to the dead Hector are, then, the last voices heard by the audience of the Iliad. The positioning of the scene of Achilles’ and Priam’s reconciliation as a precursor provides an exemplary model of emphatic listening for the Iliad’s readers to emulate when reaching the point of hearing the defeated voices at the end of the poem.
Achilles returns Hector’s body to Priam after a long process of psychological rapprochement and promises to maintain the truce during the coming funeral ceremonies. The healing process entailed by the encounter leads the two to recognise, learn more of, and share each other’s pain. They are able to see each other in their respective familial roles as son and father. Seeing old Priam, Achilles is reminded of his own father, while Priam looking at Achilles’ youthful beauty, is able to reconnect to the memory of his dead son. Their shared memories lead them to mourn their losses together.
The Homeric description of the reconciliation is moving because it is ethically instructive. It provides an ancient protocol for the Israeli–Palestinian Alternative Memorial Day. This joint memorial ceremony is organised by the Combatants for Peace (CFP) and the Parents Circle Families Forum. The ceremony has taken place every year since 2006 on the eve of Israel’s Memorial Day and stands as an alternative to the mainstream ceremonies that most often reinforce the hopelessness of the conflict in their commemorations of heroism and patriotism.34 Sadly, the violent voices physically demonstrating on the edge of the alternative memorial event every year, wishing to disrupt in a fury of pain and rage, are devoted to burning bridges not to building them.
How does the Iliad imagine a bereaved father coming to meet the person who recently killed his son and ravaged his body? How does it stage the entrance of an old Trojan king to the lodging of his worst enemy, who in madness massacred twelve innocent young Trojans, and savagely killed many Trojan soldiers? The royal guest enters unexpectedly: Achilles has just finished dining. Startled, they gaze at one another. Freud would call such an effect, as they contemplate one other, unheimlich. Indeed, in the two 19th-century German–Greek dictionaries Freud mentions in his famous essay on the uncanny, the word ‘unheimlich’ is translated into Greek as xenos.35 The strange, uncanny, effect of seeing a reflection of oneself in the enemy is impressively attested to in the Homeric simile capturing the mutual shock as Achilles and Priam see each other for the first time in Achilles’ lodging. The poet compares their encounter to an encounter between a man who madly murdered another man in his homeland and finds refuge in exile at a rich man’s house. The simile is concluded: ‘So these men stood facing each other’ (Il. 24, 480–3).
The simile could not be more ambiguous, comparing Achilles both to the host, the rich landlord, and to the exile who is stained by acts of mad murder. Likewise, Priam is similar both to the exile who left his fatherland and to the rich host giving shelter to the mad murderer.36 This uncanny connection between guest and host in time of war is central to unravelling the mysterious epiphany of the enemy in our home. Inviting the enemy in, looking into his or her eyes, the invitation disrupts the fixed roles of host and guest. The interchangeability of these otherwise polarised positions was taken up by Levinas (1999: 112) whose ethics of alterity and responsibility is based, in his later writings, on the concept of ‘substitution’ between self and other. Substitution is the fundamental structure underlying his claim that ‘the subject is a hostage’. For Levinas (1999: 117), ‘it is through the condition of being a hostage that there can be in the world pity, compassion, pardon and proximity’.
Levinas’ paradoxical formulation of the host–hostage was adopted and further developed by Jacques Derrida in his own ethical writings.37 His observation in Of Hospitality (2000: 123) elucidates the ambiguous effect of the Homeric handclasp:
So it is indeed the master, the one who invites, the inviting host, who becomes the hostage—and who really always has been. And the guest, the invited hostage, becomes the one who invites, the master of the host. The guest becomes the host’s host. … These substitutions make everyone into everyone else’s hostage. Such are the laws of hospitality.38
VI
Achilles, as the host–hostage of Priam, agrees to suspend the war as Priam asks. And thus, just before they part for the night, Achilles takes the old man’s right hand to dispel his fear (Il. 24. 671–2). Observing this intimate and personal contact, we return to the woman’s handshake in times of war. Converted into words, Yocheved Lifshitz’s handshake declares: You are a human being; I am a human being; We are human.
The photograph of Lifshitz and her captor shows two individuals caught at a certain historical moment. Ms Lifshitz and the Palestinian man belong to two national groups torn apart by a continuous conflict, incessant acts of violence, and inherited and ongoing injustices and traumas. Their handshake is entangled in competing narratives and collective memories. It carries the stamp of the taboos that haunt the spectacle of this human contact between what the Israeli perceive as a terrorist and a victim of terror and what the Palestinian perceive as an oppressed and the oppressor. At the same time, the photograph gestures towards a secret that is sealed off from the public sphere.
Handshakes take place at thresholds, before entering or leaving the host’s domain. The handshake between the woman and the Hamas man is a gesture of aberrant hospitality. Hostages are forced into violent, sometimes monstrous, hospitality. Hostages and their abductors are connected in a perverse relationship between guests and hosts.39 But the encounter between Lifshitz and her captor has yet another dimension that needs to be addressed. The personal contact serves as a cue to look at this photograph again. The personal is at the core of the gesture. What is the personal significance of a woman’s handshake? Can a woman’s handshake subvert the paradigm of hospitality that, as we have seen, is traditionally tied to hostility, wars, and their hostages?
VII
In the Iliad, handshakes occur only between men. The only place where the image of a woman’s handshake appears in antiquity is on funerary monuments, where, on stelae and vases, there are many variations on the theme of handshakes. Handshakes between two young men, or between young and old, and handshakes between women and their husbands, parents, and other members of the family. These scenes situate the handshake in the moment of saying goodbye.40 The deceased is the sitting or the standing figure, who greets and is greeted before leaving the world of the living and entering the world of the dead. The farewell scenes are conventional. But the appearance of the woman who with her right hand shakes another’s right hand, even though common and typical of funerary representations, is nevertheless disruptive. Take, for example, the Athenian grave relief from the mid-4th century BCE depicting a handshake between a husband and wife, accompanied by a third figure, a young woman in tears (Figure 5).
Figure 5.
A handshake on a funerary stele, marble, ca. 375–50 BC. Antikensammlung Berlin. ©Marcus Cyron. Public Domain.
Marble engraving of Threaseas, standing, shaking the hand of Euandria, who is seated on a stool. A servant woman is between them in the background, cupping her head in her hand.
Looking at the handshake between them, we may be reminded not only that this handshake was atypical of women of her time, but that there was one ceremonial handshake in particular from which she was excluded. This is the dexiosis of marriage, which connects the bride’s father and the groom in a gesture that confirms the marriage agreement between the two families. The handshake between the two men central in a woman’s life represents a turning point. The woman is being transferred from her parents’ house, the home of her childhood, to her new home, the house of her husband’s family. This transition turns her into a xena.41 The woman is doomed to be a stranger in her new home.42 In contrast, on ancient funerary monuments the representation of the woman’s handshake gives the woman the status of an agent. No longer is she a passive bride, an object, transferred from one hand to another. With the handshake, the woman confirms in a direct, brave, and honest manner the fact of her demise.
A woman’s handshake encapsulates an idea which is hard to imagine or even acknowledge. It makes visible the transition from life to death. In the woman’s handshake all the critical turning points in life coincide: entrance and exit from the world, birth, marriage, giving birth, and death. A woman’s handshake bears multiple meanings: a welcome and farewell, being at home and being a stranger, a host and a guest. The image of a woman’s handshake is a challenge. It invites the viewer to resist the grip of dichotomies, to move away from hierarchical categories. It introduces a fluid relationship between hosts and guests. The woman shakes hands and prepares the ground for peace.
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1
See ‘Freed Israeli hostage filmed extending hand to Hamas militant in video released by group—video’ in The Guardian (24 October 2023).
2
Kibbutz Nir Oz is located less than 7 km from the border with the Gaza strip. Of its 427 residents, seventy-two were killed and thirty-eight were abducted to Gaza.
3
4
Oded Lifshitz (1940–2023) was 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.
5
See Bel Trew’s report: ‘Yocheved Lifshitz—the first to offer a picture of the ordeal faced by those taken hostage by Hamas—also spoke of the “care” she received from some of her captors once she was in the tunnels and saying [she] was told she was not going to be hurt, something that may have led to an extraordinary gesture at the moment of her release after two weeks in captivity. A pause and then turning to shake the hand of a masked Hamas militant. “Shalom,” she said, the Hebrew word for peace’ (Trew 24 October 2023).
6
See also the report from The Wall Street Journal: ‘Lifshitz began to walk with them, but then looked back at a masked militant, shook his hand, and said “shalom,” meaning hello, goodbye and peace in Hebrew […] Some Israelis have questioned why Lifshitz would shake the hand of her captor. Some have noted her work as a peace activist, while others point out that her husband, Oded, is still being held captive by Hamas. “I think it is part of our way of seeing things, respecting them, and that came across in that handshake,” said Irit Lahav, 57, from Nir Oz who knows Lifshitz and her husband’ (Anat Peled 25 October 2023).
7
‘A frail grandmother has become an overnight symbol of bravery after her release by Hamas. Yocheved Lifshitz had shaken hands with one of her 6ft masked and gun-toting captors and looked him in the eye before saying “shalom,” the Hebrew word for peace. The 85-year-old later said she had been “treated very nicely” by the terrorists who held her for 16 days. She and her fellow hostage were given shampoo and conditioner, pitta bread and cucumber and daily visits from a doctor to check on their health. The toilets in their Hamas jail were meticulously scrubbed by guards who were very concerned about hygiene. And so when she and another elderly Israeli were freed on Monday night, Mrs. Lifshitz did what polite elderly ladies do and offered her thanks’ (Sam Greenhill 25 October 2023).
8
For an interview with Ms Lifshitz, see The Daily, NYT Podcast with Sabrina Tavernise (New York Times 29 March 2024).
9
In both Greek and Latin, the concept of beginning is tied to an idea of regulation. For Aristotle, the sense of arche is intertwined with that of cause, aition: ‘For all causes (aitia) are beginings (archae)’ (Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.4. 984b; translated by McKeon (1941)).
10
The representation of the Assyrian king together with another monarch is unusual in Assyrian royal art. See Baruchi-Unna (2014: 18).
11
The complicated relationship between Assyria and Babylonia during the first half of the 9th century BCE includes peace agreements and intermarriage between the royal families. At the same time, it is overshadowed by Assyrian empire-building and internal conflict in Babylonia. See Baruchi-Unna (2014: 17). For an interpretation of the handshake as symbol of an international agreement between a vassal (the Babylonian king) and an overlord (the Assyrian king), see Oates (1963: 22).
12
Alastair Blanshard describes the image in the following way: ‘Athena stands on the right wearing a peplos, himation and aegis with small gorgoneion. Her shield rests against an olive stump. In her left hand, she holds her spear, its tip to the ground. Hera, dressed in a sleeveless peplos, faces her on the left. She holds a sceptre in her raised left hand and wears a diadem’ (Blanshard 2007: 19–20). Elsner (2015: 57–63) discusses Blanshard’s presentation and interpretation of the image. Elsner underlines the ambiguities of the image, including those surrounding the identification of the female personification of Samos.
13
The ancient official image of the handshake erases traces of internal conflicts and disagreements within each side. Neither Athens nor Samos were homogenous groups and both were split between democratic and oligarchic forces. Moreover, the image of the handshake hides the vulnerability of Athens after the Peloponnesian Wars.
14
The archaeologist A.B. Sparkes links the representation of the ritual handshake between Athena and Hera to the ‘pact of xenia’ (Sparkes 2003: 19). On handshake in guest–host relationships, see Herman (2014: 317).
15
Translated by R.J. Hollingdale (Nietzsche 1997: 158).
16
See the comment by the Homeric scholion, Didymus (1st century BCE) on xenos in Iliad 4.377: ‘xenos is both the one who receives (ho dechomenos) and the one who has been received (dechtheis)’. The verb dechomai, to receive someone, is pictorially translated into a movement of the right hand, dexia, towards the received, in a gesture of welcome. See the discussion of Didymus’ comment in David Konstan (2022: 34).
17
Homeric xenia complies with the epic’s general conception of human interactions. Xenia is between two individuals and never between cities and nations. Homeric characters, writes James McGlew, ‘act and think in relation to one another rather than the whole of society, nature, or the divine world’ (McGlew 1989: 290).
18
Violence erupts when the truce between Agamemnon and Priam, sealed by an oath, libations, and handshakes, (dexiai) is broken. The agreement between the two armies was intended to lead to the end of the war with the staging of a single duel between Paris and Menelaos. The combat was to determine the war’s outcome to the benefit of both sides. But once the truce was broken by the Lycian Pandaros, a warrior on the Trojan side who attacked Menelaos (Il. 4. 158–9), war was reignited and the violence of the Greek army was intensified. The Trojan violation of the truce on the battlefield is thus a reminder of Paris’s violation of the xenia at Menelaos’ palace. Paris wronged the host (xeinodokon) who had showed him friendship (philoteta) (Il. 3.353–4).
19
For the Homeric reference to Paris’s violation of the code of hospitality (see Il. 13. 622–7).
20
See, for example, Nestor’s speech at the assembly of Greek warriors, where he reminds the warriors of their oath of truce, libations, and the dexiai, the handshakes, through which they accepted their entry into an alliance with the Greek commanders (Il. 2.341). Compare Herodotus (1.22.4): ξείνους ἀλλήλοισι εἶναι καὶ συμμάχους (‘strangers–allies to each other’). Herodotus refers to the agreement after the war between the Lydians and Milesians to become strangers to one other. Herodotus means that their xenia is designated by the alliance. The point is that the xenia cannot cancel the principle of foreignness underlying this relationship. Xenia implies a modification of the relation between two strangers, its modulation into various friendly channels. See Konstan (2022: 52).
21
The Trojans troops’ differences, particularly in terms of their cultural diversity, are emphasised. They come from different places and they do not have a common language (Il. 4.437–8).
22
See, for example, Achilles’ statement before the Greek assembly that he had no quarrel with Troy and that he was not motivated, as were Menelaos and Agamemnon were, by a desire for revenge (Il. 1.152–60).
23
I am indebted to David Konstan’s illuminating reading of this episode (Konstan 2022: 39–40).
24
Simmel’s stranger is inspired by the 19th-century figure of the Wandering Jew. The Jew as a xenos incorporated the mythic ambiguity of the guest; an outsider–insider containing a duality of remoteness and affinity (Simmel 1971: 143–50).
25
The quotation from Simmel’s ‘The Stranger’ is translated by Ramona Mosse (Simmel 2016).
26
Translated by Fitzgerald with modification (Homer 2004).
27
James Porter (2025) examines the temporal and circumstantial coincidence of the two essays and looks at their similarities and differences.
28
Seth Schein (1984: 83) considers readings of the Iliad that interpret the war epic as antiwar, citing the briefly discussed essays by Weil and Bespaloff as major envoys of this view. Schein himself, however, voicing the conventional view of the Iliad, takes issue with Weil’s reading, seeing it as ‘one -sided’, failing ‘to recognize the nobility and glory of the slayers along with the humanity and pathos of the slain’.
29
With this note Weil ends her essay and sadly concludes: ‘How soon this will happen is another question.’
30
Compare Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (1.12.3). Weil comments that this reading possibility is ‘of course […] mere fancy’. In her view, this possibility is a gift to modern readers whose distance from the Iliad makes such a counterfactual thinkable.
31
‘There is more inspiration and human wealth in defeat than in victory. There is great poetry in destruction. If I belonged to the victors, I would turn out for demonstrations of solidarity with the victim … I wrote it. “Let Arafat besiege Tel-Aviv, and I would turn out to demonstrate against him”. Do you know what a pleasure it is to be both victorious and humane? To be in solidarity with the defeated?’ (Darwish 2012: 65).
32
Responding to Darwish, the interviewer, Helit Yeshurun, wryly comments: ‘Be careful, you’re beginning to sound Jewish’ (Darwish 2012: 65).
33
The episode is central for both Weil and Bespaloff. Weil links the meeting between Diomedes and Glaukos to the encounter between Achilles and Priam, and comments that ‘the tradition of hospitality persists […] to dispel the blindness of combat’ (Weil 2005: 28). She describes the encounter between Achilles and Priam as ‘moments’ in which ‘man finds his soul’ (Weil 2005: 28) and as ‘moments of grace’ (Weil 2005: 30). Bespaloff dedicates a whole section in her essay to the episode of Priam and Achilles (Bespaloff 2005: 79–85), characterising it as the moment in which ‘beauty holds out for the sufferer a possibility of redemption’ (Bespaloff 2005: 83).
34
35
The two lexicons are Valentin Christian Friedrich Rost, Deutsch–Griechisches Wörterbuch, Göttingen, (1829) and Dr. Karl Schenkl, Deutsch-Griechisches Schul-Wörterbuch, Leipzig (1873). They are mentioned by Freud (1999 [1919]: 2).
36
See Deborah Beck’s analysis of this simile (2005: Ch. 3).
37
See Levinas (1966: 299). Jacques Derrida (Derrida & Dufourmantelle 2000: 109) refers to these important turning points in Levinas’ ethics: ‘That puts us back on the track of the invisible theater of hospitality, the law without law of hospitality, and even the war of the hostages. Let us recall Levinas’s formulations, which we shall come back to in another register: “The subject is a host”; then, some years later, “The subject is hostage”.’
38
Translated by Rachel Bowlby.
39
Compare Derrida’s concern with the recent hostage war in Chechnya in Derrida & Dufourmantelle (2000: 140–1).
40
41
42
Compare Sophocles (Tereus, fr. 538). The fragment is discussed by Finglass (2016: 61–85).
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/013.a24
Published on: 12 June 2025
Volume: 13
Issue: Issue 2
Article view count: 775
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Kenaan, V.L. (2025), ‘Hospitality in times of war’, Journal of the British Academy, 13(2): a24 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/013.a24Crossref
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29 March 2024
Implementing net zero affordable housing — towards a human-centred approach Jing Zhao
This paper reviews the UK Net Zero Strategy in conjunction with the decarbonisation of the affordable housing sector, with a focus on the key stakeholders involved in the decar- bonisation process. Viewing it from a socio-ŋtechnical perspective, this paper discusses three overarching groups of people in delivering low-carbon affordable housing — affordable housing providers, the supply chain and residents — highlights the range of issues and factors that policymakers should be considering; provides sign-posts to evidence; and discusses some critical gaps, barriers and transition risk factors in delivering net zero policies and potential mitigating strategies that can be learned from exemplary projects. The conclusion of this paper proposes a preliminary structure for a five-step place-based, human-centred framework to implement net zero in the affordable housing sector, emphasising the importance of long-term legislative certainty and funding, localised decision-making with stakeholder engagement, including approaches such as communities of practice, a soft landings framework, and developing monitoring and evaluation matrices.
28 September 2023
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