Antisemitism is ripe in Sinwar’s literary work “The Thorn and the Carnation.”
By Rachel Avraham
Recently, the prestigious Tel Aviv University published its annual report on antisemitism in 2024, ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day. For one of its chapters, the report discussed the late Hamas leader’s Yahya Sinwar’s literary work, The Thorn and the Carnation, which was written while Sinwar sat in a Beersheba prison for murdering Palestinians who collaborated with Israel and is viewed to be a work that gives literary expression to the ideology of the Hamas terror movement.
“In early 2024, Amazon offered for sale an English translation of the novel The Thorn and the Carnation by Yahya Sinwar, then Hamas’ leader in Gaza,” the mastermind behind the October 7th massacre and numerous other war crimes, Tel Aviv University’s annual report on antisemitism published in its annual antisemitism report ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day. According to the report published by Tel Aviv University, “The sale of Sinwar’s translated work on Amazon sparked protests from pro-Israel organizations and was halted within days. The protesters argued that its content incited violence, was full of antisemitic rhetoric, and promoted terrorism. They also expressed concerns that the profits from its sale would ultimately fund Hamas.”
The Tel Aviv University annual report on antisemitism noted that “after Sinwar was killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in October 2024, becoming a “martyr” in the eyes of his supporters, his novel gained renewed attention and was marketed by sympathizers as his final testament. The novel was re-published in Arabic and was translated into Turkish, Kurdish, and Chinese. Within months, The Thorn and the Carnation became the top-selling book at book fairs in Amman, Jordan; Sulaymaniyah, Iraq; and Idlib, Syria. It also did well at book fairs in Kuwait, Algeria, and Egypt.”
According to the Tel Aviv University report, “The English translation was sold in bookstores in Switzerland, Germany, and the United States. Connolly Books in Dublin, which was founded in 1932 and describes itself as “Ireland’s oldest radical bookshop,” regarded the selling of the novel as a political mission. The store’s website praised the author, describing Sinwar as someone who was “martyred while bravely fighting against Israeli genocide in Gaza.” Potential readers were invited to “traverse the corridors of his mind, where the seeds for the heroic ‘al-Aqsa Flood’ operation initiated on October 7, 2023, were sown.””
The author of this report was able to get a copy of Sinwar’s literary work from an anti-Israel activist on X, formerly known as Twitter, free of charge. Sinwar’s work is 400 pages long and is ripe with antisemitic content. In the book, the following chant is given when fighting against Jews: “Allahu Akbar… Allahu Akbar… Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews… Muhammad’s army will return… In the name of Allah, Allahu Akbar… In the name of Allah, the time of Khaybar has come.”
As the Tel Aviv University report on antisemitism notes, “A particularly popular Islamic tradition that recurs throughout Sinwar’s book is the Battle of Khaybar in 628, during which Muslims defeated the Jews of the city and forced them to surrender half of their property to avoid conversion to Islam. In descriptions of violent clashes between Palestinians and the IDF, the book repeatedly invokes the chant “Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, Muhammad’s army will return!” in various contexts: Gaza youths celebrating after damaging the tires of Israeli military vehicles; Arab and Muslim demonstrators rallying in support of the intifada in their capital cities outside Palestine; and a young man named Muhammad, preparing for a suicide attack in Gush Etzion, calling his proud mother for a final farewell and leaving his cellphone line open so she could witness the moment of his martyrdom.”
In the book, the Imam begins to recite verses from the beginning of Surah Al Isra: “And We decreed for the Children of Israel in the scripture: You will surely cause corruption on the earth twice, and you will surely reach [a degree of] great haughtiness” (Al-Isra 4). After discussing a suicide bombing on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, the book proclaims: “the spell turned against the sorcerer, and those who sow thorns reap only thorns.” The book says more than once the following antisemitic Hadith: “The Day of Judgment will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews, and the Muslims kill them. When a Jew hides behind rocks and trees, the rocks and trees will say, ‘O Muslim, O servant of Allah, this is a Jew behind me; come and kill him,’ except the Gharqad tree because it is one of the trees of the Jews.’”
All Jews who live in the State of Israel are portrayed as settlers, even if they live on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv or Kiryat Shmona. The book claims that Israel does not have the right to exist under any borders and opposes Fatah for trying to make peace with Israel, claiming that Israel will withdraw from the territories of 1967 anyways under the barrel of a gun, so there is no need for the Palestinians to provide Israel with any concessions in return. They also claim that Israel will never keep their part of the bargain anyways for historically the Jews never keep agreements: “These do not honor agreements or advance in the right direction unless they feel threatened, scared. History repeats itself; Jews are Jews. You’ll see, Mahmoud, and I’ll remind you if we’re still here.”
The book glorifies the slaughter of all Jews who live in the State of Israel and of Palestinians who collaborate with Israel, even if they belong to one’s family. In fact, the Palestinian propagandist family in the book disowned and even murdered one of its children, Hassan (a cousin of the protagonist), for working in Israel, dating a Jewish girl, and later on, cooperating with Israeli intelligence.
Sinwar’s book also speaks lowly of Palestinians who want to coexist with Jews. The book has a character named Mahmoud, who was a member of Fatah and supported the Oslo Process, and the book was very critical of him. Meanwhile, Hassan, Mohammed and Ibrahim were from the Islamic Bloc, and another relative was from the Popular Front, and they always got into fights in the book, with their mother coming in to calm things down.
The book was also critical of the residents of Hebron for seeking coexistence with the Jews for economic gain. In another scene, Palestinian terror groups rip up the work visa of a Palestinian father with small children to feed, claiming that it is immoral to work in Israel, even if it is necessary to feed one’s family. The book portrays Palestinians who work in Israel in an ugly manner and Jews who provide work for Palestinians were portrayed as fair targets for “martyrdom operations.”
Ibrahim, one of the main characters in the book, was reluctant to get married and have children because he considered it more important to sacrifice himself for the land of Palestine than to devote himself to a worldly woman. In the end, he married his cousin after his aunt, who raised him after his father was killed in battle and his mother abandoned him after remarrying, literally forced him to get married and start a family. This highlights how much value Sinwar’s Gaza attaches to women and children. In their eyes, martyrdom and resistance is the only thing that matters. Women and family are less important, and can be abandoned in an instant if one is given a chance to blow up Jews.
However, on the whole, the book was more a political essay that gave a literary expression to the ideology of the Hamas terror movement than an antisemitic manifesto. As the Tel Aviv University report noted, “The book tells the story of a Palestinian family uprooted from its home in 1948, migrating to the Gaza Strip and struggling with life in the al-Shati refugee camp under Israeli occupation. The mother raises alone three children and two nephews who are separated from their fathers against their will. The sons are divided between different Palestinian resistance factions and disagree on their paths. Ahmad, the first-person narrator, is a science student who gradually leans toward Hamas, influenced by his cousin Ibrahim. The latter is the novel’s second protagonist, symbolically named after both Sinwar’s father and future son. Ibrahim is a Hamas operative and a student at the Islamic University of Gaza, working to instill the movement’s ideology among those around him.”
Nevertheless, even though this book is just a work of fiction, the fact that a pollical literary work has so much antisemitism in it and incites so much violence just demonstrates how much antisemitism is engrained in the Hamas terror movement and in Sinwar himself. As Tel Aviv University noted, “It reflects, unintentionally, the deep immersion of antisemitic perceptions into Hamas’s discourse and ideology, and indeed, among a significant portion of the Palestinian public that supports the movement.”
Photo from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Sinwar#/media/File:Yahya_Sinwar_portrait_3x4.jpg
