Catching a glimpse of the trembling flame of hope through “i shall not hate”: a gaza doctor’s journey on the road to peace and human dignity

Abstract

I Shall Not Hate is the ultimate thesis on hope, narrating the story of a father who clings tenaciously to the hope of a better tomorrow for a flock of people. It is a memoir by Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Gazan doctor who lost his three young and lovely daughters to Israeli shells in January 2009. Because this is the ultimate thesis on hope this offers much more than a dozen motivational tomes for the war-victims in all the countries. This is the story of a father who lived most of his life in refugee camps, negotiating his plight with surprising determination only to be shaken and shocked further. Still he clings tenaciously to the hope of a better tomorrow for a flock of people who have suffered oppression for decades. The author of this paper finds this book as a human cry for peace and therefore a relevant one for the people in Sri Lanka especially for those who are from Jaffna and Vanni who still witness the post-war currents in their places. The most of the Tamils in northern Sri Lanka have undergone the similar experiences of the Gazan doctor and they have undergone all kinds of sufferings and hardships such as multiple displacements, deaths, injuries, deprivations of basic needs. Their psychosocial and mental consequences are obviously exposure to massive, existential trauma. This paper as a qualitative and descriptive analytical method explores along with some theoretical studies the way in which this book could be a remedy for the Tamils who still possess scarred minds. This paper makes an attempt to shed light on the socio political discourses by paying attention to the narrative, The Broken Palmyrah and the novel, The Whirlwind.