Mornings in Jenin

Although Mornings in Jenin depicts the Palestinians’ suffering at the hands of the Israeli military and authorities and deals with the Israeli-Palestinian wars, there are several relationships in the book that offer the perspective that harmony and understanding are possible between members of different religions and cultures. One such friendship is between Hasan Abulheja, who is Palestinian, and Ari Perlstein, a Jewish immigrant. Their relationship begins when they are young boys, brought together through a common love of reading and poetry. Their relationship embodies innocence—it began before the first Zionist attacks on Palestine, and they are children and know nothing of politics and nationalistic fervor—which reflects the way racism and intercultural feuds are taught rather than innate. Their bond is so strong that they remain friends while all around them turn to violence and hatred, and Hasan ends up saving Ari and his family’s life. This relationship sends a message that there are no real differences between people, but politics and indoctrination create the divisions people perceive.

Another relationship depicting this theme is between Dalia, the girl from the looked-down-upon Bedouin culture, and Hasan, whose family owns land and is respected in the Palestinian community. Their relationship is “born of forbidden love” because relationships between these two cultures are frowned upon (12). Through Hasan’s determined and insistent character, the villagers end up accepting and welcoming the girl into their lives. Here, love between members of different cultures is shown as possible, and it has the power to break down barriers. However, the author tempers the idea that intercultural marriage is enough on its own by showing the relationship between David and his wife. Their marriage ends in divorce when she discovers she has been married to a Palestinian man, not a Jewish man, even though David did not know about his heritage himself. This shows that interfaith and intercultural acceptance requires an open mind and a willingness to question dominant cultural narratives, and not everyone is willing to do so.

The compassion for members of all faiths shown by the Christian nun, Sister Marianne, is another positive example of interfaith cooperation. She takes care of Amal and Huda when their home is bombed and explains defiantly to the Israeli soldier who wants to deny them medical care: “You are no different from the Nazis who stood in my way when I cared for Jews in the Second World War” (73). The girls are taken to a church in Bethlehem, a city that is sacred to Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike, where Amal finds temporary peace and an escape from screams, gunfire, and the smell of death. Examples like Sister Marianne offer glimmers of hope in this otherwise negative depiction of relations between different faiths.

While Mornings in Jenin details the loss of the Palestinian people’s homeland and right to self-determination, it also includes the theme of individual loss of loved ones as a result of the conflict over Palestinian territory.

The loss of a child is portrayed dramatically on several occasions in the book. The first is Ismael’s disappearance during the Zionist attack on the Palestinian villages. The boy is kidnapped by Moshe, a Jewish soldier who takes him as a son for his wife, Jolanta. Hasan and Dalia are significantly impacted when they realize their son is gone. Dalia’s pain is depicted graphically: “A loud, penetrating, unworldly scream from a mother’s deepest agony. From the most profound desire to reverse time, just a few minutes” (32). The adjectives in this sentence create the image of something supernatural and inhuman—Dalia’s grief transcends the boundaries of what people can endure, and she never recovers from this loss. Hasan’s pain is compounded by the feeling that he did not protect his family; he not only lost a child, but he lost a piece of himself as a father.

Huda, Amal’s lifelong friend, is another of the many parents who loses a child. She has had three sons: twins, Jamil and Jamal, and Mansour. When Amal visits her in Jenin in 2002, she has already lost Jamal, who was killed by Israeli soldiers when he was 12. Losing his twin brother destroys Jamil’s boyish innocence, and he joins the Palestinian resistance movement to work against the forces that killed Jamal. In this way, Huda loses Jamil, too; he visits infrequently and lives in the shadows. When she can see him, she “kiss[es] him with frantic love” (298), trying to maintain her bond with her child despite the circumstances, though he is later killed by soldiers as well. Huda’s youngest son, Mansour, is captured and tortured at age six, and he never speaks again after returning. After losing her husband as well, Huda finds her grief difficult to bear, but she finds solace in her faith. This ties into the role of hope in the text; just as Palestinians keep hope alive for a return to their homeland, Huda can find comfort in Allah, Islam, and her community.

The loss of spouses is also depicted frequently in the book. Dalia loses Hasan, her beloved husband, to the Zionists. Yousef loses his lifelong love, Fatima, and their child in the attack by the Lebanese Phalange. Amal loses Majid in a bombing, and with him her only hope of love and a future after losing the rest of her family. Amal is at her lowest after her lover, partner, husband, and father of her child: “Majid is the dream that never left me. The country they took away. The home in sight but always within reach” (249). Here, Abulhawa explicitly connects these losses with losing one’s homeland and the ongoing conflict. The loss of loved ones in the book depicts individual sorrow and trauma, but it also shows that by taking away a people’s loved ones, consistently and over time, the intention is to wear them down and erode their collective spirit until they find it harder to fight back.