Palestinian political failure was culturally reframed as a question of failed witnessing.

Evidence

The question of whether the Palestinians tried well enough to have their case presented to the world was often addressed in the cultural sphere. In Ghassan Kanafani’s ( 1999) foundational novel Men in the Sun, the truck driver – in whose tanker truck three Palestinians hid in the scorching heat of the desert sun to get to Kuwait from Iraq and who die after the driver stops for border customs – asks the Palestinians after he finds out about their death, “Why did you not knock on the walls of the tank?” This became a cultural metaphor for the Palestinian effort to present their case. A response came in Elias Khoury’s (2019) Children of the Ghetto: My Name Is Adam, that the question is not so, but why the world doesn’t want to hear the loud knocks. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized, 467

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to Islamophobia and the Novel’s theme of who gets heard and why — the world failing to hear resistance narratives.