Gate of the Sun

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is at the forefront of today’s politics, especially at the moment with the War on Gaza that occurred this past December. Since the state of Israel was conceived in 1948, conflict has been engulfing that region. Through media, literature, news, first-hand accounts, we, the outsiders, are able to see how multi-dimensional, extensive, and immense this situation is.

The plot revolves around the stories that Khalil, the narrator, tells his ‘father’, Yunes, who is hiding in a hospital, but in a coma due to an Israeli attack. These stories, reiterated by Khalil, speak of dreams, hopes, love, and the current reality of Palestine. Moreover, vital historical events that where occurring in Palestine are articulated while also acknowledging what was happening in the refugee camps in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and other locales where Palestinians were dispersed. Furthermore, the Lebanese civil war is an influential event, which has an epic toll on the characters of the novel, is covered in the story as well as the massacres that occurred 1982 at the Shatila and Sabra camps. The significance of this novel is that it not only explains what is occurring to the people of Palestine in Palestine but what was happening to those dispersed in refugee camps.

Elias Khoury spent his time in Palestinian refugee camps interviewing Palestinians to take down first-hand accounts of what occurred in 1948 and throughout. He used the 1948 memories from others because he himself was too young to remember those events first handedly. The accounts obtained he used as the stories that Khalil tells his father. The Gate of the Sun is a conglomerate of the multiple stories obtained from these refugees- grandparents, children, mothers, and lovers all alike each have a tale to tell about the same event just seen through different eyes, hence a different story is obtained. Thus, the mood of the book jumps as different stories are being told, from joyful events to horrific ones. This story also comments how Palestine is more than a struggle of land; it is a struggle of dispersed people to unite, a struggle for young and old to keep their memories alive and their identity, of what was once a unified nation in order to keep the hopes of a bright united future, a state of Palestine.

Palestine is an example of how we are blind sighted because we are ignorant to what is really going on; the obvious oppression we embrace because of political and ideological motivations connected to the other side, the oppressors.