Khaled's trauma-driven hatred of Israelis and Jews

Khaled's trauma-driven hatred of Israelis and Jews is presented as both the consequence of catastrophic loss and a force he has made central to his survival. The narrative traces it from his family’s deaths at Shatila through years of armed struggle and exile to his work in Bombay, where money and influence give his old anger a new home. In his exchanges with Lin, that hatred is not simply an opinion to be corrected: it is Khaled’s explanation of how he endured, and a source of conflict that neither man can make disappear.

Origins of the hatred

Khaled’s history reaches back to a family engaged in the Palestinian struggle for an independent nation-state. His parents were renowned scholars and prominent in that cause. His father died in an Israeli prison; later, Khaled’s mother, sisters, aunts, uncles, and maternal grandparents were killed at Shatila in Lebanon. The loss was not only personal: the people closest to him belonged to a refugee community with nowhere else to go. When Khaled recounts what happened, he emphasizes that the relatives left behind after the fighters’ departure were killed and that he never learned where their bodies were. The absence of a known resting place makes the loss feel unresolved in his account, rather than safely contained in the past.

Before that catastrophe, Khaled had trained with Palestinian guerrilla units in Tunisia, Libya, and Syria. He fought for nine years across dozens of operations and many conflict zones. After the deaths of his family and others at Shatila, his commander in the Fattah Group recognized that Khaled had broken down and released him from duty. The account makes a distinction between his continued verbal devotion to Palestinian statehood and the force that now directs his life: he has become fixed on the suffering he endured and the suffering he inflicts. His hatred is thus rooted in political violence, but it has outgrown any single political objective.

Exile, work, and the return of anger

Khaled eventually came to Bombay on the recommendation of a senior guerrilla fighter who knew Abdel Khader Khan. Abdel Khader Khan took him in, valued his education, languages, and intense dedication, and advanced him within the organization. Three years after Shatila, Khaled was running its black-market currency operation and held a place on the council. His position gave him money and power, but the narrative connects that change in circumstance to the return of the hatred he had long kept outside himself. Exile had not removed the wound; a new life had given the anger a different setting and greater force.

When Lin begins studying the black-market money trade with Khaled, he sees the hatred not only in what Khaled tells him but in ordinary gestures. On one occasion, Khaled waits beside their cab, with its doors open, and ten cigarette butts lie on the ground. Lin reads each crushed butt as an imagined enemy and a sign of the violence Khaled rehearses in his mind. Khaled has told him that these images can become so vivid they make him feel sick; anger is a constant burden, and hatred occupies his waking life. The cigarette ends give that inward pressure a visible trace, turning a brief wait into a small, repeated enactment of hostility.

Conflict with Lin

Khaled’s hatred of every Israeli and every Jew becomes the one subject over which he and Lin repeatedly disagree. Lin’s objection is grounded in his own history: he grew up among Jewish friends in Melbourne, including children of Holocaust survivors, and remembers sharing books, films, music, and political causes with them. Some remained loyal to him when his life collapsed in shame, and a Jewish friend helped him escape from Australia after he broke out of prison. Lin therefore refuses to treat Jews as a single guilty group. He asks Khaled to consider the difference between condemning those who harmed him and hating all Indians because some Indians tortured Lin in prison. Khaled rejects the comparison.

The disagreement is sharpened by Khaled’s account of leaving Shatila. After an agreement, the fighters departed with their weapons, firing into the air in a scene he remembers as resembling a strange parade. Some people were killed while watching. Once the fighters were gone, Khaled says, the promises were broken and the Phalange entered the camps; the older people, women, and children left behind were killed. He presents this sequence as the reason he cannot simply set his hatred aside. The memory is personal testimony within the novel, but it also explains the moral divide between the two men: Lin’s life has taught him that the actions of some cannot justify condemning an entire people, while Khaled treats the scale of his loss as an answer to that appeal.

Hatred as survival

Lin warns that hatred can destroy the person who carries it. Khaled answers with a different account of its function: hatred, he says, saved him. For years he concealed it because others could not bear its intensity. He describes it as having been displaced outside himself, like a refugee accompanying his own exile. The parallel makes hatred more than a reaction to bereavement: in Khaled’s telling, it too has been uprooted, hidden, and sustained in separation from its bearer.

His account then turns on a return. While working for Abdel Khader Khan, with money and power, Khaled felt the hatred coming back inside him. He welcomes that return and describes the hatred as stronger and braver than he is. The declaration does not resolve the conflict with Lin or indicate that Khaled has recovered from his losses. Instead, it shows how completely he has joined identity to grievance: he treats hatred as a survivor and a protector, even as Lin sees it as a danger. The narrative leaves that contradiction intact. Khaled’s anger gives form to a history of dispossession and loss, but its transformation into indiscriminate hatred also places it beyond the limits of the specific violence that first produced it.