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Bilal Tanweer’s essay reads Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis alongside the killing of Palestinians in Gaza, asking what happens when a person is treated as less than human. It is a personal literary-political reflection, not a report on the conflict: Tanweer connects Gregor Samsa’s uncertain personhood to the moral consequences of dehumanizing language.
What Tanweer’s essay is about
Published by Scroll.in on 21 January 2024, Tanweer’s essay begins with two experiences: his memory of a bomb blast near him in Karachi and his reading of Kafka while following the bombardment and siege in Gaza. He turns to Kafka not to explain the conflict, but to consider how people’s humanity can be denied in the language used to describe them.
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The essay makes an interpretive comparison between Gregor Samsa, whose body becomes insect-like, and Palestinians whom Tanweer sees as being dehumanized. The comparison is Tanweer’s moral and literary argument; it is not an equivalence between Gregor’s fictional transformation and the actual violence Palestinians face.
Why Gregor’s humanity is uncertain
Kafka repeatedly writes human-animal figures in stories such as “Jackals and Arabs,” “Report to an Academy,” “Josephine the Singer, or Mouse Folk,” “The Burrow,” and “Investigations of a Dog.” In The Metamorphosis, the central difficulty is that Gregor’s body changes while his inner life continues. He retains memory, consciousness, personality, and attachment to his family, even as they increasingly respond to him as an animal.
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Tanweer describes the story’s central drama as “the indeterminate nature of Samsa’s humanity.” The question is not simply what Gregor has become physically, but whether his family—and the reader—will recognize the person who remains within the altered body. That gap between inner life and outward treatment is what gives Tanweer’s comparison its force.
Dehumanizing language and the political reading
Tanweer links his reading of Gregor to the Israeli defence minister’s description of Palestinians as “human animals.” In the essay, that phrase is not incidental rhetoric: it signals a language that can make violence seem permissible by placing its targets outside the circle of human concern. Tanweer also argues that Palestinian voices are marginalized in Western media.
These are claims and interpretations advanced by Tanweer, not a neutral overview of Israeli or Western media. His point is that Kafka’s story makes readers confront the stakes of recognition: if a person’s continuing consciousness and relationships are ignored because of how they appear or are labeled, the denial of their humanity can become easier to accept.
Grete’s rejection, and the story’s unmarked death
The essay’s moral hinge comes when Gregor’s sister Grete insists that the family must stop thinking of the creature as Gregor. Tanweer reads her declaration that he is no longer her brother as the moment that makes his death and disposal possible without the family having to acknowledge them as such.
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After Gregor dies, the family returns to ordinary life with relief. Tanweer emphasizes the absence of mourning: “Except for the readers. The death of Gregor Samsa is noticed only by those reading the story.” In this reading, the reader bears witness to a death that the characters do not memorialize. The story’s discomfort comes partly from that contrast between a person’s lost inner life and the ease with which others move on.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Kafka’s place in Israeli and Palestinian literary contexts
Kafka’s political and literary reception has also been discussed in scholarship on Israeli and Palestinian writing. A Cambridge University Press chapter summary by Iris Bruce says Kafka influenced writers from both communities whose work criticizes the Zionist state. The chapter page gives an online publication date of 10 February 2023 and a print publication year of 2011.
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That broader context shows Kafka’s work has been taken up in more than one political and literary setting. It does not independently establish Tanweer’s specific analogy between Gregor and Palestinians; that remains the essay’s own reading.
Quick Recap
What to keep in mind when reading the essay
- It is a personal essay. Tanweer writes from memory and from a particular moment of reading during the Gaza war, rather than offering a current-events explainer.
- The analogy is interpretive. Its focus is the moral consequence of denying personhood, not a claim that fictional metamorphosis and political violence are the same experience.
- The translation is unspecified. The essay does not identify which English translation or edition of The Metamorphosis it uses, so its quoted wording cannot be matched confidently to a particular edition.
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