Hamas

Hamas is a Palestinian organization whose role in the novel is defined through two connected pressures: the personal desperation that Kamal says led him toward a suicide attack, and the armed conflict that persists after diplomatic efforts have briefly raised hopes of peace. It is therefore not treated as a single explanatory label. The organization appears both as an institutional source of material inducement and as a participant in the wider cycle of violence that repeatedly overwhelms individual lives, theological arguments, and political negotiations.

Material Incentives and Kamal’s Account

Kamal rejects the idea that religious visions of paradise were the decisive reason for his attempted mass killing. When asked about the promised virgins, he dismisses the number as a story used to attract recruits and says that heavenly rewards meant little to him. The more immediate inducement, he explains, was money that Hamas would provide to his family—enough perhaps to leave the refugee camp and move to Ramallah, London, or Detroit. In his account, the organization’s promise is directed beyond the attacker himself: his death could produce a material improvement in the lives of relatives who remained trapped in poverty.

Kamal also describes revenge as part of his motivation, but he places the strongest emphasis on significance. He had lived in a muddy, foul-smelling refugee camp and believed that his ordinary life had no meaning for his people. Death, combined with the killing of innocents, seemed to offer a way to turn private insignificance into a public message. He says that the attack was meant to appeal to the whole world, including America, Russia, China, Egypt, Syria, and Israel, and that the attackers recorded videos to transmit that message. Hamas thus enters his testimony as an organization connected to a system in which money, communal grievance, religious language, revenge, and the desire to be remembered can converge without becoming identical motives.

Kamal’s account also complicates any purely theological reading of Hamas’s violence. He concedes that religion may have supplied an additional justification and that he could imagine God approving his actions, but he insists that religion was not the primary cause. His testimony presents the organization’s promised reward as earthly as much as heavenly, and political communication as important as doctrine. The result is a portrait of recruitment shaped by deprivation and the hunger for significance, without excusing the deliberate destruction of innocent life.

Hamas in the Continuing Conflict

The organization’s later appearance belongs to the aftermath of the secret London Israeli–Palestinian peace meetings. Those talks began with a measure of warmth and hope, and the territorial gap initially seemed relatively narrow: Israel offered approximately 95 percent of the West Bank, while the Palestinian side demanded the whole territory with limited border adjustments to accommodate most Jewish settlers. The negotiations then broke down over Jerusalem, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, the connection between Gaza and the West Bank, and the role of Hamas.

Hamas is consequently associated with one of the central unresolved questions of the peace process: whether an agreement could be made durable while the organization retained a role in Palestinian politics and armed resistance. The talks collapsed a week after the London meetings, after the atmosphere had shifted from tentative cooperation to bitter accusations. Both sides privately explained to Judah why the other was responsible for the failure, leaving him to wonder whether the meeting had partly functioned as a political performance in which each side could claim willingness to sacrifice while portraying the other as permanently unreasonable.

The organization remains part of the novel’s post-negotiation landscape rather than disappearing when diplomacy fails. After Israel constructed its West Bank barrier, suicide bombings diminished, but the broader conflict continued. Hamas missiles and, at times, flammable kites came from Gaza, followed by Israeli bombs, tanks, and new settlements. The West Bank became quieter without becoming free of terrorist violence, and Israel itself remained vulnerable. Hamas therefore signifies the persistence of armed confrontation after the apparent tactical success of security measures and after peace talks have lost their momentum.

Political and Narrative Significance

Hamas’s significance is sharpened by its contrast with the novel’s competing institutions of meaning. Chaim Lerner seeks to rescue God through theology, arguing that Jewish consciousness cannot be separated from its covenantal language and that the urgent theological task is to explain God after the Holocaust. Hannah later embraces Jewish spirituality and studies Chaim’s idea of a God possessing infinite love but limited power. Against these efforts to create meaning through inquiry, teaching, and religious life, Kamal describes an organization through which death is made into a public statement and family compensation.

The novel does not reduce the conflict to a contest between faith and secularism. Chaim’s teaching presents spirituality as inquiry, while Kamal’s testimony shows religious language being used alongside poverty, political frustration, and the wish for significance. Hamas therefore belongs to the same crowded field of meaning-production as theology, journalism, nationalism, military doctrine, and private spiritual searching, but its methods are coercive and lethal. Its promises attempt to give an otherwise constrained life a consequence that can be recognized by family, community, and the world.

The organization also helps sustain the book’s argument that violence cannot be contained by the labels assigned to it. Kamal is not explained solely by religion, revenge, or payment; his motives overlap and conflict. Likewise, Hamas is neither merely a source of doctrine nor merely a military actor in the narrative. It is linked to the family economics of martyrdom, to the political status of Gaza, to the collapse of negotiations, and to the recurring retaliatory pattern that follows attacks. Through that accumulation, Hamas becomes one of the forces showing how institutions can convert personal despair into collective conflict, while the consequences return to civilians, families, and any fragile attempt at peace.