War is Called Many Things Essay Example

as a laborer, if that’s what is necessary to make ends meet. Adil is a pragmatist not because it’s the ideology that he finds most attractive, but because it’s the likeliest method to keep food on the table.

For his part, Adil’s position was certainly not unique. Faced with limited economic opportunities in the West Bank, high inflation and crippling Israeli taxation, an enormous number of people undoubtedly did what he did. To Usama they are of course collaborators and traitors, but it is likely that they would have been equally happy with an independent Palestine, had they seen a means of achieving that did not require their families to starve.Usama and Adil’s beliefs to fortify the thesisIt is this difference in attitudes that forces many social cleavages within Palestinian society to the forefront of the book.

Usama is repeatedly derided for his neat clothing. To many, his attire indicates that he is well enough off that he can afford to ‘make revolution.’ They on the other hand cannot, and they resent having their patriotism questioned. This comes out again and again.

Usama’s encounter with the bread seller is a perfect example of this. Usama assails him for selling bread made in Israel. The bread seller responds:“Look friend, we’re not the first to work with them. While we were still   wandering the streets of Nablus looking for bread to eat, your kind were running around Tel Aviv looking for companies to award you franchises so you could sell     their products (68).”The upper class is fatally compromised in the eyes of

the bread seller.

They form a ‘comprador bourgeoisie’, always willing to put Israeli pounds before Palestinian people. They are illegitimate. obviously the problem with this is that with the traditional community leaders thoroughly discredited, who will move in and take their place?Interestingly enough, Usama would probably agree with many of the bread seller’s criticisms. He has no patience for his grandfather who spends day and night complaining to journalists. A grandfather, it may be added, who was a member of the pre-occupation elite. Usama wants action, not talk, and he chides Adil repeatedly for this.

In point of fact, Usama is supposed to be part of a new resistance movement. The PLo was founded in 1964, and certainly once Yasser Arafat took over, it remained largely free of the taint of the previous generation of failed leaders. As a representative of this emerging organization, Usama is supposed to stand for the new, not the old. (Nazareth, 1980, 67-86)The obvious background to all this is the occupation, which added its own dose of absurdity. Palestinians were taxed heavily with ‘liberty taxes’, which went to pay for their continued occupation.

The taxes they paid for food went to subsidize Israeli agriculture. The money they were supposed to contribute to the Histadrut was used to maintain high wages for the Israelis. The list goes on.Adil and Zuhdi highlight the impossibilities of the situation. Adil realizes that even the Jewish workers are not treated well, in absolute terms. They too are being exploited, he decides.

Yet when Zuhdi and Shlomo end up in a fight, and Adil is unable to stop it, he

becomes an eager participant, enraged that his efforts at “Middle east peace” had been rebuffed so rudely. It is later Adil who comforts the Israeli wife of the officer that his brother, Usama, had killed. Yet it is also he who tears the epaulets off the dead officer’s uniform, because of what they symbolize. Further, it is Adil who in the end pays the price of Usama’s recklessness, and it is the house he worked so hard to keep that the Israelis demolish. (n.

page 1998)Concluding thoughtsSurvival within Wild Thorns boils down to navigating the many treacherous conflicts afoot in the occupied territories. on the one hand all fought Israel, since all attempted to continue to live in the area. even passive Adil was fighting, for by keeping his family alive, and in Palestine, he was opposing Israeli policy. At the same time, Palestinians were fighting each other, over strategy, over leadership and over the means of resistance. From these struggles to achieve the (nearly) impossible, the absurd emerges as a natural outgrowth. It is in such a situation that war between those who should be friends becomes as vicious as war between enemies.

Fortunately, Sahar Khalifeh indicates, Palestinians in the occupied territories in 1972 had adapted to surviving the almost impossible situation. If they could not completely reconcile black and white, they came as close as was humanly possible