Summary

Chapter 7 opens with Jamil and Basil Murad, the brother of Hani, hiding out in a house near the Nablus Sports Club, which had been taken by the British after their forced had bombed out the resistance movement in Jaffa. The Arab nationalist movement in opposition to what it viewed as a dual British-Zionist threat had taken on a more organized form and was made up of an armed resistance by the fellahin—peasants—and a civil disobedience mechanism fueled mostly by urban elites and city dwellers. Jamil viewed himself at the linking point of these two branches of the fight. When he went home to his mother and Teta that day, Teta pushed Jamil and his mother to help her get Midhat out of the mental hospital. On his way into the next battle, Jamil reflected upon his relationship with Midhat over his...