Al-Sinwar.. The story of a man who stood on one foot

On a couch, in the living room of an abandoned apartment, the warrior spent his last moments, sitting covered in a layer of battle dust, masked by his keffiyeh, after being severely wounded: a hand gnawed by shells, a body drenched in blood, a leg with shattered bones, and a stick that was his last weapon, in the face of a war machine, the latest invention of weapons technology, a stick with which he supported his body, and with which he threw it at the face of the reconnaissance drone that had entered through a gap in the wall, to watch the final scene, before the hero threw his stick at it.

There is no metaphor that could be more expressive than this real image, and the strangest cinematic scene could not be this amazing fantasy, where reality surpasses imagination, and metaphor becomes just a pale image in the scene of the lavish truth whose threads the hero wove in the final scene, as if he asked the maker of fate to write the final scene himself, the scene that he wrote twenty years before it happened, while he was still a prisoner of the enemy, in a novel that is great in terms of semantic value, even if it is not considered among the famous Nobel novels.

The hero of the novel “The Thorns and the Cloves” says: “Now the time has come, mother, for I saw myself storming their positions, killing them like sheep, then becoming a martyr…” The scene does not end here, but rather the last scenes of surreal existence in the novel take us to the first scenes of the metaphysical afterlife, after death, which the hero describes by saying to his mother: “And you saw me in the presence of the Messenger of God, may God bless him and grant him peace, in the gardens of bliss, and he shouted to me, ‘Welcome, welcome!’”

How amazing is this artistic hero who was able to emerge from the paper of the novel to the pages of history, and who continued to take shape in the world of imagination until he reached the peak of his realistic formation, in a complete match between truth and metaphor, reality and imagination, where the author became the hero of the novel, and the hero of the novel became the hero of reality, and he who sat on a couch in an abandoned apartment, drawing the final scene he wished for, when he said that “the greatest gift that the occupation can offer me is to assassinate me, and for me to die before God Almighty as a martyr at his hands,” and that is what happened, and what the hero wished for drew with his pen, then with his blood the final chapter of the amazing realistic novel that showed the hero firing the last bullet.

“Surrender is not in his dictionary, and he will fight until the last bullet.” How did Israeli investigation officer Michael Kobi know the hero of the final scene to such an astonishing extent? How did he know that he “will fight until the last bullet”? And how accurate was this officer’s description when he told Israeli radio that he “knows Sinwar very well. He is a tough, stubborn man with a firm belief, and he believes in the necessity of Israel’s demise”!

Sinwar had spoken about the enemy’s eagerness to draw a “victory picture,” a picture showing the hero as a lifeless corpse that the enemy would publish to boast about, announcing the end of the battle. This is exactly what happened, as the enemy rushed eagerly and foolishly to publish a “victory picture,” in order to achieve a number of goals that the opposite of them achieved, including humiliating the hero and breaking the resistance’s strength by showing its leader as a lifeless corpse, so that the “victory picture” would fly across the horizon and turn into an immortal “icon,” contrary to what the enemy had planned and wanted.

Here the gap between the enemy and his army on the one hand, and the hero and his audience on the other hand, appears, as there is a big difference between two mentalities: one mentality saw in the image of the hero on the couch the surrender and humiliation of the hero, in contrast to the superiority and strength of the enemy, and another mentality saw in the image the meanings of heroism and immortality of the hero, in contrast to the cowardice and terror of the enemy, in a reflection of the difference between two cultures: the culture of weapons, technology and material power, in contrast to the culture of will, faith and spiritual strength that embodies the dilemma that Israel and the West in general face in defeating peoples who are less technologically and armed, but who insist on confrontation, despite the big difference in the balance of power.

While the Israeli lens tried to humiliate the hero by publishing a photo of his corpse, it unintentionally gave him the final scene that he had been dreaming of and striving for throughout his life, the final and realistic scene that the greatest film producers could not have presented more eloquently than it was, the scene that - in a single moment - demolished an entire year of false Israeli propaganda about the leadership of the resistance moving from one place to another, underground, using hostages as human shields, before the photo/icon exposed the lies of the media machine, when the hero appeared “fighting until the last bullet,” as Michael Kobe put it.

Elior Levy, a Palestinian affairs analyst for Israel’s Channel 11, mocked Israel’s attempts to focus on the image of the hero in order to send messages of insult to the resistance, stressing that the Israeli mentality cannot understand how the Arab and Gazan masses received the “image of the hero” in his last moments, as “the people of Gaza and the Arab world view these images in a way that is opposite to the Israeli view, where he appears to be a fighter until the last drop of blood,” which erases the impact that Israeli propaganda wanted to establish about the hero, whom Levy said was “a more than legendary figure, and the impression of him and everything he did will accompany him for years and generations to come.” The image did not constitute “an insult to Sinwar,” as the Israeli media machine planned, but rather raised him to the ranks of global heroes who sacrifice themselves for the sake of the freedom of their homelands, or in the words of the Japanese spiritual expert Mihikawa Sei, who said, “Mr. Sinwar sacrificed his life for the cause of Palestine itself, and we Japanese admire those who die fighting for the right until the end. He is a true samurai.”

Sinwar was sentenced to 426 years in prison, and was released in the “Israeli prisoner Gilad Shalit” deal, and began working to achieve his goal, and drew his final scene, after sending implicit messages that made the Israelis believe that he was seeking power in Gaza, and heading towards prosperity, instead of resistance, before the hero surprised the world with the “Al-Aqsa Flood” that swept the world, which Michael Kobi warned about, saying that releasing Sinwar was “the worst sin in the history of the State of Israel.”

Sinwar, the man who once said to his fighters: “Be patient, we will stand on one foot,” has passed away. And here the Middle East and the world are standing on one foot, holding their breath, anticipating the outcome of things, after the prisoners tore down the wall, the dam collapsed, and the flood that Sinwar had threatened came when he said on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the founding of Hamas, “We are coming with a roaring flood,” without anyone picking up on the signal of the flood that represents a suppressed cry, a means of a prisoner, a weapon of a besieged person, and a memorial of a people living under occupation for more than seventy years, while the “free world” supports the occupation, in a strange contradiction that reflects the will of a world that made international laws to apply them to others, and made military power to protect itself from adhering to those laws.

Although Israel wanted the final scene of Sinwar to embody the end of the long Palestinian novel, or to draw the curtain on the Palestinian cause, the hero had mentioned in his novel “The Thorns and the Cloves” that what we saw was just the beginning, and that his death means his immortality with the spirit of his prophet, on a personal level, and the continuation of his people’s struggle on a national level, and that drawing the curtain on his scene does not mean the end of the story, but rather that every end is a beginning, and that the thorn of resistance is the destiny of those searching for the clove of freedom and emancipation, or as Al-Mutanabbi said:
You want to find high things cheaply
Without honey, you need bees' stings.

*Quoted from Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper