After reading a book like Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa you got the feeling that in fact, no matter what there should not be peace in the Middle East. It´s a deep feeling of despair that do not gives any chance for a future for young Palestinians other than got beaten by the ´colonizers´ and blow themselves up. It is a narrative embraced by some academics too, just another proof that sometimes academic research is not only ideologically biased and hate-fuelled but equally inadequate. But when it is ideologically biased it is clear that searching for truth it´s the last concern of the research. Instead it serves a narrative enslaved to various political plots.
Those who put their pen and intelligence - the writing of Susan Abulhawa who also wrote Mornings in Jenin is so good sometimes until you are brought back to the ideological message when one of the (Palestinian) characters is from the buttom of her heart ´destroy the Jews´ - enjoy their victim status. And they got their credentials from insisting that the people they supposedly represent - the Palestinians - should continue to maintain this status because otherwise they will not win any popular contest of world victimization any more. It sounds so fancy to keep telling that there is the world - including the Muslim world - against the Palestinians. There should be no way out and the Palestinians themselves are against themselves as they suspect the traitors and the informers - the ´birds´ - among themselves.
The narrative of ´resistance´ carries the self-fulfilled profecy of a land where only one people live. The others, the ´colonizers´ should probably go to those countries who tried to destroy them. No answer to the question from where, historically, those Jews came from? Therefore, it is justiciable to poison the water in a settlement, and to kill other humans by individuals whose only vital energy is given by the pathetic frustration of not considering themselves worth of a better life.
This is the message of the story of Nahr - river in Arabic - born in Kuwait, in a Palestinian family displaced from Haifa - after the European Jews stole everything, including their books...From Kuwait, where she also worked as a sex worker to support his brother´s medical dreams she lands in Amman, following the Emirate´s offensive against the Palestinians accused of collaboration with Saddam´s Iraq during the invasion of the country. As she decided to get divorced by a husband that actually was gay and in love with an Israeli soldier, she meets her brother-in-law who will lately marry her and introduce her to the ´resistance´. She ends up in solitary confinement in an Israeli prison - The Cube - but will be freed after a couple of years in a prisoners´ exchange.
The book is indeed heavy of symbolisms and carrying an ideological message that outlines several times that there is no way out of this. But this is what a discourse of hate wants you to hear. It wants you to hate everyone because the whole world doesn´t care about you, as an individual whose destiny can develop outside the political and ideological patterns. And what a loveless world it is...
