Ghassan Kanafani ends his brilliant novel, “Men in the Sun” with the line, “Why have they not knocked on the walls of the tank?” The question is uttered by the truck driver who finds three Palestinian refugees dead inside the water tank in the back of the truck. He failed to keep his promise of getting them out in a few minutes. They had been hiding from checkpoints they needed to pass while illegally migrating to Kuwait — the land of their dreams. They couldn’t endure the deadly, suffocating heat of a desert summer, and they perished while the driver was trapped in absurd conversations with checkpoint officials, who mocked and bullied him.
The driver’s resentment and bewilderment stem from the fact that it was their last checkpoint before they finally reached their destination. Why couldn’t they withstand a few extra minutes, or if the heat was so intolerable, why did they die silently? When I first read this novel, I interpreted the ending as a portrait of despair, that the men were so hopeless, so drained of the will to live, and that their lives slipped away silently. However, amid a retaliated genocide that shamelessly intensifies with a hypocritically blind international audience, I find myself wondering, what if they had knocked on the walls? What difference could it have made?
Palestinians have relentlessly documented the atrocities committed against them and their land by Israel and its allies since the occupation began. In the context of the latest aggression, we’ve witnessed the bravery of Gazan voices like Bisan, who states, “Hi everyone, my name is Bisan from Gaza, and I am still alive” — an echoing knock on the walls of the tank. Yet, nobody listens. We have seen Anas Jamal's coverage of the horrors unfolding in the north, his tweets crying, “we are being ethnically cleansed right now” — another powerful knock against the genocidal walls, and still, the world refuses to hear. The amount of documentation and live proof of Israel’s actions against the Gazan people demonstrates the Palestinians' fierce determination to tear down the walls of the tank, compelling the world to bear witness and intervene. But the international community remains mired in its own absurd, meaningless conversations, deaf to the desperate calls rising from Gaza.
Many parallels can be drawn from Kanafani’s symbols and applied to reality. The driver, who was also a Palestinian, represents the Palestinian authority, which has been passive about the genocide and takes its seat among the audience. The checkpoint officials are cowardly, self-absorbed Arab leaders who are internally divided, distracted by repressing their own people. The checkpoints themselves are shameful institutions, claiming to protect innocents’ rights while remaining complicit in the violence. It’s unfair to assume Kanafani’s men died without one last fight. I am now certain they had knocked on the walls many times; the driver and his fellow mates just did not bother to listen.
Had Kanafani witnessed the tragedy unfolding in Gaza, would he have rewritten the ending of “Men in the Sun,” imagining the men shattering the tank with the full force of their defiance, refusing to be silenced? The realities may differ, but the metaphorical tank of death remains the same. The cries for help, the demands for justice, are the echoes of the past and the present. For over seven decades, Palestinians have been pounding on the walls of the tank, only to be drowned out by a world that has outfitted itself with earplugs of indifference.
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