What is the relationship between Palestine and the rest of the world? In Global Palestine, John Collins argues that rather than an exception, a stubbornly irresolvable anomaly, a leftover from a colonial past that modernity has left behind, this particular country should be seen as a monad, in Walter Benjamin’s sense of the term. Forces operating worldwide are crystallised inside it. They come together with extreme ferocity in the land of Palestine, which works as a kind of laboratory or ‘prophetic index’, holding clues to the future others will face. ‘Are we all becoming Palestinians?’ Collins asks; a list of global tendencies – the proliferation of walls, the rise of drone warfare, generally accelerating technologies of repression – tempts him to answer in the affirmative. He also mentions the destruction of the natural environment, or ‘the war on the milieu’. But it is Naomi Klein who has looked deepest into this particular mirror of the monad. In her recent Edward Said lecture, ‘Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World’, she suggests that the Palestinian experience of displacement and homesickness is poised for universalisation in a warming world:

The state of longing for a radically altered homeland – a home that may not even exist any longer – is something that is being rapidly, and tragically, globalised … If we don’t demand radical change we are headed for a whole world of people searching for a home that no longer exists.