Tale of Palestine in Yahya Sinwar’s Novel (Part III)

TEHRAN – Sinwar begins his novel with the earliest memories of his protagonist. The 5-year-old Ahmed observes his father digging an underground shelter beneath their home. It is the 1967 war, and hundreds of Palestinian families — Nakba survivors and their descendants — are living in squalid refugee camps with nowhere to run from Israeli bombardment other than makeshift underground trenches. The images evoke Hamas’ vast underground tunnel network, which has expanded over decades of Israeli occupation. They are also a reminder that the use of tunnels in warfare is not a Hamas novelty, with ancient roots and modern parallels in Vietnam and North Korea.
The family huddles in this dark pit in al-Shati for days, following news of the 1967 defeat via a radio placed near the entrance of their hiding place, awaiting a military victory that never comes and hoping for a return to the homes they were displaced from in 1948.
In the introduction to his novel, Sinwar proclaims that it is not the story of a specific person, “even though all its events are true.” At the same time, he exerts little effort to completely distance the story from his own life, and glimpses of it appear; the narrator is the same age as Sinwar and may have sought shelter, like hundreds of other families at the time, in trenches beneath the worn-out floors of their homes in Khan Younis camp during the 1967 war.
Sinwar’s family had settled in Khan Younis after being displaced from al-Majdal, which Israel occupied in 1948 and ultimately renamed Ashkelon, after the nearby ancient port. Little is known about Sinwar’s father, Ibrahim al-Sinwar, who passed away two years ago. He belonged to the same generation as Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was born in the same area and migrated to Gaza at the age of 12, and possibly knew him. Glimpses of Sheikh Yassin’s story are echoed by the narrator of Sinwar’s novel, Ahmed. Like Sheikh Yassin, who lost his father at the age of 3, the narrator becomes an orphan at 5. Both grew up in al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza.
The disappearance of the father and uncle in the novel highlights the emergence of a new generation of Palestinians, whose political consciousness was shaped in the aftermath of the 1967 defeat and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Al-Quds, and to which Sinwar belongs.
Palestinian resistance at the time was politically and geographically distant from Gaza, which woke up one morning in the summer of 1967 to find the Egyptian army camp near al-Shati deserted, before news of the defeat had arrived. Sinwar describes a symbolic scene he may have witnessed himself: the Israeli army, having seized military vehicles and tanks still bearing Egyptian flags, opening fire on the Palestinians running toward them for help.
The withdrawal of the Egyptian army from Gaza in 1967 marked the end of nearly 19 years of Egyptian administration. This period gave Gaza its specific status, which would be set by its eventual transformation into a massive refugee camp for Palestinians displaced from territories occupied after 1948. By 1967, more than half of Gaza’s population — roughly half a million people — were refugees displaced by Israel.
The details of daily life in the camp during that time resonate with many of the harsh realities in Gaza today, often described in international reports as “catastrophic.” The Gaza in which Sinwar grew up is portrayed in the novel as a wasteland: a conservative and isolated refugee community where camp homes resemble “chicken coops” with tiled roofs that barely protect their residents from torrential rain. The diet is meager, consisting mainly of vegetables and what the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) monthly ration cards provide — flour, cooking oil and some legumes. Long queues form in front of the only water tap installed by UNRWA in the camp’s courtyard, where water is available for only a few hours each day. The children have nothing but worn-out clothes distributed by UNRWA twice a year. A favorite game among them is “Arabs and Jews,” where one team plays Palestinians (“Arabs”) and the other Israeli occupation soldiers (“Jews”). Electricity is a luxury, available only in the homes of the relatively “well-off.”
The “new shoes” that Ahmed’s mother buys for him to wear on his first day at the UNRWA school, which bring him great joy, are inevitably used, his school bag made of tattered cloth. The family experiences the “touch and smell” of new clothes only when the eldest son returns from his university studies in Egypt and buys them some for the first time. Yet the narrator describes their financial situation as relatively good compared with other camp residents.