'Much of Genet's book attempts to memorialize the various personages he encountered or who aided him in his efforts to understand the Palestinians, from the "young lions" to various leaders who either survived or died; from the rich Palestinian familes who supported liberation to the ones who preempted it by selling their lands to the Jews; from anomalous volunteers to heroic doctors, such as the Cuban doctor Alfredo, who thought that perhaps by dying in Jordan he might be able to change his nationality to Palestinian; from Abu Omar, [1] who had been a student of Henry Kissinger's in America but who later thwarted the first wave of Syrian tanks moving into Lebanon against the PLO only to be caught, tortured and executed by the Syrians later, to the poet Khaled Abu Khaled, who first clued Genet in to the murderous animosity between Palestinians and Jordanians in the early 1970s, to Dr. Mahjoub, founder of the Egyptian Communist Party (White 609); from Ali whom Genet loved, to Mubarak, the Sudanese volunteer soldier to whom Genet was attracted because of their shared difference from the other fedayeen and their mutual recognition as component parts of a sexual algebra they couldn't solve; and finally, again, from Hamza, whom Genet eventually learned was living in Germany after escaping the Syrians who had captured and tortured him, to Hamza's mother with whom Genet was briefly reunited in 1984 and who continued to live in Jordan in the house where they had first met.'
1. As Edward Said reports, Abu Omar was the Palestinian movement name for Hanna Mikhail, a contemporary and friend of Said's who attended graduate school at Harvard at the exact same time as he, only in Middle Eastern Studies instead of comparative literature. He also says that Hanna was committed to Arab nationalism and more at home than Said in the Arab world, actually giving up a good teaching post at the University of Washington to join the Palestinian revolution.
