by Dylan Baun and Andrew Scott

[T]he Palestine I saw bore so little likeness to the stories I read, and so much resemblance to [the inhuman] systems I’ve known

~Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

When I first went there [to Palestine] in 2002 after the 2nd Intifada started, I remember saying to my mother back home ‘This is genocide by Chinese water torture,’ but now we are seeing genocide on steroids

~Mother Agapia Stephanopoulos, The Tucker Carlson Show 

What can we do to help and save life [in Palestine]? First, everyone should acquaint oneself with the facts of the case, not simply the propaganda in news-papers

~Daniel Oliver, 1949 letter to the Society of Friends in the United States

While African American public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates may be a household name and the Greek-American orthodox nun Mother Agapia Stephanopoulos became one a month ago when she sat down with infamous American political commentator Tucker Carlson, Daniel Oliver is not well-known. A Scottish Quaker missionary, Oliver operated in British Mandate Palestine, particularly from 1930 to 1948. 

Though worlds and decades apart, these three figures are united by their experiences on the ground in Palestine as “outsiders.” Whether through journalism, church work, or missionary activity, what they saw made them painfully aware of the conditions in Palestine.

That they were not already aware of these conditions is tied to the context in which they experienced them. For someone like Oliver, from the west in the 1930s, one could go an entire life without ever engaging empire beyond one’s borders. For Coates or Mother Agapia, ignorance is a product of intentionally uncritical platforms that still saturate American public schools and private universities alike. But what of the properly educated and exposed in our digital world? When facts on the ground in exploited nations like Palestine are witnessable, as they are today, there is no longer any reasonable excuse for inaction. In this context, outsiders can bring about action, both in the imperial centers and the places and people they subjugate.

Based on my prior work on Oliver, alongside an investigation of the politics of representation on the question of Palestine today, I have found that when paired with Palestinian voices, outsiders have the power to change popular opinion in the west on Palestine. But who those outsiders are and what platforms they use matters. In particular, supporters of Christian Zionism in top positions such as Oliver can speak to those whose views on Israel in the west are most entrenched and uncritical.

From Skeptic to Advocate for Self-determination

Daniel Oliver (1870-1952) was a Quaker missionary—first in Morocco and then Palestine and Greater Syria. Perceived as an asset for his knowledge of the region and missionary work, the British facilitated a number of Oliver’s visits to Palestine in the 1930s and 40s. His papers highlight his attempts to educate American Quakers (who were some of his largest donors) on the question of Palestine, as well as his change of heart on the solution.

In 1932, Oliver writes assuredly on who he believed was in the right. Jewish settlers he met were “willing and ready and convinced” for peace, he wrote, “as long as [they did not] have to concede any vital principle to the setting up of the National Home for the Jews in Palestine.” “But with the Arabs,” Oliver contends, “it is a very different matter indeed.” Those Arabs he met, like Hajj al-Amin al-Hussein, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, did not actually want peace. Instead, “they consider they are themselves the only judges of their destiny and that of their country.” To be clear, Oliver didn’t find this to be a good thing. He concludes: “[T]he work has to be done amongst the Arabs, not the Jews.” Oliver was not aware of the double standard here, at least at the time. Unlike the Zionist project, which he appears uncritical of, Arab self-determination was not noble, but a hindrance to peace. 

By 1936, Oliver had started to shift his outlook. He wrote, categorically, that “[i]f the Arab demands [for statehood] are granted it will be undoubtedly a permanent peace.” No longer an obstacle, Arabs sought “justice” as they “fought for their freedom and deliverance” against both the British and Zionist settlers. This was in the face of unchecked Jewish immigration to Palestine. “Unless immigration is radically dealt with,” Oliver pleads, “there is no peace now or in the future in Palestine.” 

A Change of Heart 

What changed for Oliver? Simply put, it was the facts on the ground that complicated his Christian Zionist sentiments. Oliver witnessed and reported on the Great Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, and in its first year Oliver writes that “over one thousand [were] killed in the struggle. The prisons are full to over flowing, and there is a concentration camp in Palestine where people are put for having liberal ideas.” The death, destruction, and suppression of Palestinians would only grow. By 1939, the year the revolt was quashed, British soldiers had killed over 5,000 Palestinians alongside inflicting mass infrastructural destruction, including the bombing of over 2,000 Palestinian homes. Several crushing years for Palestinians were matched by an awful period for Jews in Europe. In 1938, Oliver lamented the plight of European Jews, as “man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.” “Yet,” he counters, “I do not think that it can be right to create this comparatively new desperate situation in the Near East between the two races, Arabs and Jews.” For Oliver, Jewish suffering in Europe did not trump Palestinian suffering, and there could no longer be any serious consideration for the total settlement of Jews in Palestine, which “can only take a very limited number.” Instead, Oliver fully believed that the Zionist cause would fare better “in countries such as Australia, Madagascar, and several big countries in Africa.” While an equally problematic solution, at the very least Oliver was concerned about how settler colonialism in Palestine would affect the indigenous population.

By the 1940s, the facts on the ground continued to pile up. 1948 saw the violent realization of a Jewish state, Israel, leaving nearly one million Arab refugees and the fading notion of Palestinian statehood in its wake. Oliver was at loss with the refugee crisis he witnessed in Lebanon. He paints the following scene for American Quakers in 1949:  

I drove up the hill-top above the town of Sidon and there, in tents with a fairly strong wind blowing from the sea in clouds of dust, we met hundreds of those poor people, men, women and children, lying on the ground in the tents and sitting around on stones, miserable, looking miserable. 

While narrated differently, Coates was also deeply affected by facts on the ground in Palestine. No, he was not a Christian Zionist before this visit, but, by his own admission, Coates only had a “vague notion” of the injustices Palestinians have faced. In a CBS This Morning interview promoting his book The Message, Coates reported, “What I saw in Palestine, what I saw in the West Bank, what I saw in Haifa in Israel, what I saw in the South Hebron Hills, those were the stories that I have not heard and those were the stories that I was most occupied with [telling]…[.]” Interestingly, in her recent interview on The Tucker Carlson Show, bluntly titled “Here’s What It’s Really Like as a Christian in the Holy Land,” Mother Agapia mentions Coates’ awakening and how facts on the ground “got him to understand we have to make some changes.”

A Change of Policy?

You cannot act upon what you cannot see. And we are plagued by dead language and dead stories that serve people whose aim is nothing short of a dead world.

~Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

And what are they [the Israelis] trying to hide [in Gaza and the West Bank]? The only way that’s going to break [an Israeli control of press on the ground] is by enough influencers going over there and saying, ‘I want to see what’s going on and then report back.’

~Mother Agapia Stephanopoulos, The Tucker Carlson Show in 2025 

In these choice quotes, Coates and Mother Agapia link witness and representation with action, and by extension, policy. In the 1930s and 1940s, I would like to think Oliver had a role in changing British policy: curtailing Jewish immigration to Palestine in the late 1930s and eventually backing away from an ardently Zionist position. But in Oliver’s case, the timing was poor, given global sympathy for Jews who had faced the horrors of the Holocaust in Europe, and regardless, it was too late. A slight shift in British policy could not lead to international support for a Palestinian state. 

While I am not sure that Coates’ books or notoriety can sway policymakers, personalities like Tucker Carlson, whose platform boasts nearly 4.5 million subscribers, could. As demonstrated in the 2020 pandemic and the last two U.S. elections, alternative media is impactful. Podcaster Joe Rogan’s audience of 20 million subscribers has brought unprecedented donations to candidates, sales to authors, and credence to the misinformed. Carlson, who once topped the ratings in legacy news media, now harnesses a similar influence. What narratives these alternative, often right-wing, personalities like Rogan and Tucker decide to platform, in this case Mother Agapia and Palestine, can make a difference. 

Coates has a New York Times bestseller with Between the World and Me. Oliver helped influence thinking on imperialism and human rights within the Quaker community, which over the decades has represented one of the most supportive faiths vis-à-vis Palestinian rights. Yet, Oliver and Coates only ever reached a fraction of the audience boasted by figures like Rogan and Carlson. Not to mention, Oliver, Coates, and Mother Agapia had to actually visit Palestine to get the memo. The online (in this case, right-wing) medium represents a crucial, if fraught, opportunity and forum: a matter-of-fact narrative delivered by screen and sound to the eyes and ears of Israel’s most reactionary supporters, Christian Zionists. With pressure from those on the ground and alternative forms of online media, western policymakers and citizens alike can see Palestine and Palestinians in life, death, suffering, and survival as never before. Though admittedly many remain ignorant, critical, and even spiteful of the Palestinian cause, this becomes more difficult the more people witness the facts on the ground.

One of Oliver’s biggest missteps was serving as the messenger himself—the white savior for displaced Palestinians. As Coates rightly argues today, “[I]f Palestinians are to be truly seen, it will be through stories woven by their own hands—not by their plunderers, not even by their comrades.” In this vein, I want to end not with the outsiders, but with one of those many Palestinian voices who speak of the facts on the ground that are forced upon them. In Perfect Victims, Mohmmed El-Kurd takes up the politics of representation and cautions against a flattened humanization that sanitizes, subdues, and defangs Palestinians. This is because, he writes, “Humanization diverts critical scrutiny away from the colonizer and onto the colonized, obscuring the inherent injustice of colonialism.”

While Oliver is an example of the west’s capacity to change in the past and Coates is a standout contemporary advocate for that change, direct action through policy will forever remain at the whim of larger audiences. These western audiences can be motivated by individuals like Mother Agapia and the real experiences of people on the ground in Palestine. Per El-Kurd, when advocating for Palestinian representation, allies must fight to normalize a diversity of voices as Palestinians reckon and reflect on the conditions of colonialism and genocide. And the same platforms that drive online engagement between the ignorant and the informed must be harnessed for the propagation of Palestinian perspectives. Only then, with facts on the ground exposed and Palestinians telling their stories of hope and despair, can we even dream for a true shift in the west’s position on Palestine.

Dylan Baun is Associate Professor of History of the Middle East and Islamic World at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Andrew Scott aided in the research and writing of this piece.

(photo/photo/photo)