Related Post
The narratives and short stories of any nation were not devoid of dealing with part of its diaries and annuals, and mentioning its events and facts, whether current in their time and those whose writers struggled with them, when they listened to their makers and saw them and witnessed their actions, or participated in it themselves, or those that occurred in a previous time, and they read about them. In history books, they recovered incidents that carry a well-established ideal, whether their expression was lost in modern and contemporary individual creativity, or was produced by popular wisdom or “the collective imagination and mind” through tales and legends.
The Palestinian people are not an exception to this rule. Rather, they are located in its heart, and have written many poems, novels, stories, and plays in its context, or were narrated by grandmothers to children, in a way that depicted their suffering, struggles, and longings for freedom and justice, in a deeper way than what the daily newspapers mention, or Historians and political analysts mention it.
The moment of breaking
When we get a novel by Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, and the mastermind of the “Al-Aqsa Flood,” the first thing that occupies us with it is its content, which will bring us closer to the inside of its author, so that we can understand his awareness of himself, his cause, his nation, the enemy that confronts him, and the world that surrounds him.
Here we turn a blind eye to the novel form, where the aesthetics of the text and its structure are concerned, especially since its author – although his narration is not devoid of what formalists care about, such as linear structure, expressions, combinations, linguistic metaphors, attractiveness, and celebration of details – it is his motivation, as it appears from the beginning of his text and its later course – he was interested in By showing our eyes the feet of the people of struggle on the land of Palestine, and explaining, through characters, stories, and detailed descriptions of facts, places, and souls, how the issue developed in a third of a century that extended from the defeat of 1967 until the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000.
Al-Sinwar wrote this novel in prison, where he spent twenty-three years after being sentenced to life imprisonment, after he was accused of planning to kidnap and kill two Israeli soldiers, and the killing of four Palestinians who were agents of the occupation.
Because it was written in this miserable place, and at a time when its author was facing the choice of remaining in prison until he died, he had to dig deep into his memory, to recall the minute details of the life that “Ahmed,” the novel’s hero and its all-knowing narrator, spent, in order to plead with them to help him tame the heavy time. Breaking boredom, facing forgetfulness, or clinging to the gifts of life, which is taking place outside the walls as they are.
Al-Sanwar says at the beginning of his novel: “This is not my personal story, nor is it the story of a specific person, even though all its events are true… The imagination in this work is only in turning it into a novel,” to tell us that he has chosen the novel, as a literary genre, to narrate the history of Palestinian society that He lived it from the time he became aware of this world until the conclusion of his novel, a period that extends from the 1967 war until the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000, and sometimes delves, by way of recall, martyrdom, and rooting, further in time until the Nakba in 1948.
At first glance, it seems that Al-Sinwar is narrating his experience, or his biography, but he preferred to present it in a narrative form, for several reasons, so to say; It is a novel that exempts him from mentioning people by name, whom he did not ask for permission while in prison to write about them, and there are convicted figures who are agents and spies of the occupation, and who are sitting or losing their resolve.
The narrative form also exempts him from displaying the secrets of his society, especially those of the resistance, and protects him from the Israeli authorities taking this content as new incriminating evidence against him, for his participation in “guerrilla action” since the prime of his youth, and perhaps it will be easier for him in prison to say; He is writing a novel, to say; He records his biography.
Al-Sinwar, most likely, is the narrator, “Ahmed,” whose biography we trace from his childhood until his involvement in the ranks of “Hamas,” and he is the witness to everything around him, from the moment of defeat when Israel occupied the Gaza Strip in the 1967 war, which he expressed in two scenes:
The first: The Egyptian officer’s treatment of him changed. After he had been giving him candy and patting him, he rebuked him to stay away so that he would not be harmed after the outbreak of war.
The second: Israel gathered everyone over the age of 18 in the Beach camp, and pushed them in front of an intelligence officer to examine them and choose the toughest among them. They would be shot, while the rest would be taken to the Egyptian border, and they would be ordered sternly: Run forward, and whoever turns behind him, we will shoot. Fire on him.
Misfortunes bring together the afflicted
Then the details of the life of “Ahmed”, his brothers, his mother, his cousins, and his grandfather follow, so that we can stand with them on the case of a Gaza family that suffered for a long time from oppression and poverty, so they resisted it by educating the children, until they obtained university degrees, and by joining the ranks of the resistance, relying on the rule established by his older brother, “Mahmoud.” When he said one day: “If men are determined and willing to die, then nothing can stand against them, and victory must be their ally.”
The novel presents, through this family and its neighbors – and even the residents of the entire Beach Camp, and by extension the rest of Gaza and the people of the West Bank and the Palestinian diaspora in Jordan and Lebanon – the sequence of facts of the Palestinian issue, both at the level of its senior leaders, some of whose names the novel mentions, such as: Yasser Arafat, Ahmed Yassin and Ahmed Jibril are from the Palestinians, or at the level of the political and struggle forces that carried the issue on their shoulders, such as: the Fatah movement, the Hamas movement, and the Popular Front.
With the narration, we learn about the distribution of the ideologies of the Palestinian youth among the nationalist, leftist, and Islamic trends, and the competition between them that extends from debate to controversy and confrontation in schools, universities, and prisons, which the Palestinians have turned into schools to learn politics and study the history of their country and the days of its struggle, as well as the concerns that bring them together that make them come together. Rather, they are largely united in matters.
The scene of unity reached its peak, as the novel tells us, when the 1987 Stone Intifada broke out, when “masked men from the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades took to the streets in their well-known green uniform, lining up in endless rows.” And with them came the followers of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades with their yellow banners, and the Al-Quds Brigades with their banners. Black, carrying various types of weapons and waving them in the air.
Outside of the factions, we know how the general public coalesced with the uprising, as the novel portrays it in the father who prevented his son from participating in the struggle. To avoid harm, he storms into his room to wake him up at ten in the morning so he can go out and join the angry people. He is so astonished at his father that the narrator himself makes him say: “When the hour approaches, the genie will set out again.”
Transformations of the Palestinian issue
There is something that wounds this sweeping national spirit, as the novel tells us, because of those collaborating with the occupation, whom the narrator describes as a “swamp of agents,” and then preoccupies himself with how to get rid of them. To a lesser extent – but it is understandable in light of human weakness – come those who do not want the resistance to arouse the wrath of the occupation so that it does not prevent them from continuing to enter Israel in search of work that will help them support their families. There are also those who fear for their children from being imprisoned or killed, which prompts them to avoid engaging in resistance.
The novel also recounts the transformations that the issue witnessed, from those who placed it in a general national and humanitarian framework, as an issue of liberating land and people, to those who added a religious dimension to it. Here is the narrator saying when he listened to the explanation of his brother Ibrahim, who joined Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s group: “We began to understand that the conflict has a different face than what we were aware of before. The issue is not only an issue of land and people expelled from this land, but rather it is a matter of belief and religion, a battle of civilization, history and existence.”
Then he adds to this, saying: “I wonder to myself: Is there Saladin for this stage?” And he listens carefully to Ibrahim’s words: “Our turn to resist has come.”
Ibrahim tells us that the Palestinian issue is different from other issues of armed struggle waged by movements in the east and west of the earth. He says: “Our story is different from the Irish, the Vietnamese, and the Khmer Rouge, because it has the Al-Aqsa Mosque, sitting at its heart.”
During this period, the names of the fighters changed from “fedayeen” to “resistance fighters,” and armament evolved from simple bombs that were bombarded with matchsticks and mixed with shards of chilled iron, and an ignition wire borrowed from an electric lamp, to Molotov cocktails and improvised bombs, and from old, dilapidated rifles that were repaired and left with ammunition. Limited to automatic rifles and light machine guns, supplied by new ammunition boxes.
The novel shows how the Palestinians turned their defeat into pride after the Battle of Karama in 1970, in which they defeated the Israeli army, and how they rejoiced after the 1973 victory, and rejoiced at the arrival of the first Arab missiles to Tel Aviv, launched by the Iraqi army during the Gulf War.
Although these missiles did not carry a chemical weapon – as Saddam Hussein claimed, and they were not accurate in their aiming – the Israelis’ horror at them made the Palestinians pay attention to the weakness of the Israeli state, and here the narrator says: “The image of panic that shook the depths of the usurping entity has increased people’s conviction of the fragility of this the enemy”.
Features of daily life under occupation
Between the moments of euphoria, the novel depicts another of the frustration and despair that prevailed in Gaza and the West Bank following the outbreak of a confrontation between the Palestinians and Jordanians in the Battle of Black September, Egypt’s conclusion of a peace agreement with Israel in 1979, the resistance being forced to leave Lebanon after the Israeli army invaded it in 1982, and then the Oslo Accords, which many considered Of the Palestinians, it is a sign of their struggle to achieve further goals.
But these stations did not prevent the Palestinians from continuing the struggle. With simple capabilities, they were keen to keep the flame of the issue burning, by lurking around the occupation soldiers, wounding or killing them, and keeping their bodies or capturing them alive, to negotiate for the release of their prisoners in the occupation prisons.
The novel depicts the features of the lives of Palestinians under occupation. We know the rituals of their mourning and joy, their relationship with the organizations that give them aid, we look at their schools, their children’s toys, the architecture and simple furniture of their homes, and the types of their food and drink. We feel the pain and fear of mothers when their children are arrested or imprisoned, injured, or their bones broken and martyred.
In conjunction with this, we see well the coercive practices that the occupation follows with them, from strict supervision, by themselves through inspection patrols or by agents they planted among the people, and we learn some details of the investigations, trials, and torture in what was described as “slaughterhouses,” and we know a lot about the desecration and demolition of homes, and the arrogance of The occupation and its exploitation of the Palestinian people by bringing cheap labor to the poor in factories, farms and markets.
In addition to this, the novel depicts us bulldozing the land, burning crops, uprooting trees, and seizing the Palestinians’ land and homes, which is what one of the novel’s characters called “Jamal” depicts, wondering: “Then what about these settlers? They have swallowed the land, and they are not satisfied, and they do not stop at any limit.” “.
Human aspects
On the other hand, we see the work of struggle and struggle that began with what remained of the Palestine Liberation Army, and ended with the current resistance factions. The narrator explains all of this at length, making us live the moments they went through, feel the feelings of anger that were spreading through them, and see the exaggerated reaction of the Israelis whenever one of them was stabbed or killed, or a military vehicle or vehicle was damaged.
The novel is not devoid of a human aspect, in addition to the mothers’ concerns and their generous tears. It places us in the picture of the emotional relationships that arise between boys and girls in the camps, in which young people are divided between those who see that “revolutionaries are lovers,” and those who wonder: “Do we have the right to love?” They believe that this type of love may distract them from greater love, as one of them says: “It seems that our destiny is to live only one love, the love of this land, its sanctities, its soil, its air, and its oranges.” Then he adds: “Our story is a bitter Palestinian story, and there is no place in it.” For more than one love and one adoration.”
Whoever reads this novel will look at the diary of the Palestinian existence under occupation, whether during the days of intermittent wars between the Arabs and Israel or the skirmishes, lightning confrontations, and invasions between them, to realize that the Israeli aggression against Gaza now is merely an intense dose of harm, as Israel has never stopped, For seventy-five years, of killing defenseless civilians, demolishing homes, expelling their residents from them, stealing them, and seizing their land, but all of this did not break the resolve of the Palestinians. Quite the opposite. It increased their challenge, and taught them how to distribute their efforts between deception and going along with the blatant challenge, in order to preserve their lives. Their cause is alive and well.
