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

TEHRAN -- If we consider “The Thorn and the Carnation” to be Yahya Ibrahim Hassan al-Sinwar’s testimony about everything that transpired from his earliest childhood memories in a hole beneath his home to the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000, then it’s possible he integrated elements of his own story into the novel’s characters, some of whom he even named after himself. While Ahmed serves as the novel’s narrator and protagonist, the true hero of the story is his cousin Ibrahim — a self-made young man who is patient, humble, hardworking and deeply religious. He is the first in his family to join the Islamic movement and embodies the quintessential image of Palestinian resistance as Sinwar envisions it.

In the novel, Ibrahim chooses not to marry because he is wholly devoted to the struggle and fully identifies with the battle for liberation. His intelligence and skills make him adept at tracking informants and deciphering the codes they use to communicate. After many years of patience, he does not hesitate to kill his notorious brother, who has been implicated in helping the Israeli security services. When Ibrahim finally gives in to his family’s insistence and marries, he tells them that he will not abandon his work with the resistance, even if it costs him his life or his freedom, or leads to his children becoming orphans.
From its earliest chapters, the novel repeatedly references Palestinian informants, who were often coerced by the Israelis, especially as such activities intensified in the early 1990s. However, it avoids delving into Sinwar’s own experience with Majd, the Hamas intelligence unit he founded. Like his character Ibrahim, Sinwar married later in life by Gaza’s conservative standards and had a son, Ibrahim, shortly after his release.
Sinwar adopts a cautious tone when discussing the phenomenon of intelligence agents for Israel, who were widespread in Gaza in the early 1990s. His novel recounts how agents were met with strong responses from various Palestinian factions, including killing, flogging and even public execution.  
The novel thus shows how it began to seem necessary to establish a fully dedicated security apparatus to handle the rise in agents, using standards developed in the absence of a formal legal framework. This was due to the Gazan judiciary’s connection to the Israeli judicial system after 1967. It was in this context that Sinwar co-founded Majd in 1988, shortly before his arrest.
The discussions among the narrator’s politically divided family members — between those who believe in negotiating with Israel to establish a Palestinian state and those who see such negotiations as futile or even doomed — closely relate to the current debate about the Palestinian gains from the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, after the massive destruction in Gaza.
Ibrahim, Sinwar’s alter ego in the novel, summarizes the issue by stating that the problem with establishing a Palestinian state lies in “the price that the Palestinian people will pay” for it, emphasizing that “there is no alternative to forcing the occupation to withdraw.” He argues that had it not been for the Oslo Accords in 1993, Israeli forces would have withdrawn from Gaza and the West Bank due to pressure from the resistance during the First Intifada, without the need for an agreement that promised Palestinians statehood but ultimately gave it to Israeli settlers.