In Wild Thorns, Sahar Khalifeh uses the absurdities of war to emphasize how the Palestinian Occupation is a war within the Palestinian community, and between the Palestinian and Israeli community. The product of such an environment is the psychological factors of tension, helplessness, sacrifice, and solidarity. Khalifeh’s characters from the Palestinian city of Nablus express these behaviors. Through her bittersweet novel, she invites readers to assess how the Occupation creates an individual to distort cultural values, and how their selfish acts destroy the loves of the group of people they surround themselves by.
During the 1972 Occupation, it was common for Palestinian youth to leave the country to ones in the Gulf for better socioeconomic
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The psychological dimensions both ideologies experience are significantly different from one another. Usama as the main idealist character presents an implication in the ideology; through the romanticism of his, "love and yearning for the very earth of this green land ” (Khalifeh 9), it causes him to blindly follow radical fantasies of peace, and hence puts himself and others such as Adil, in danger. Such beliefs resulted in Usama to lose his life, and Adil to nearly die in the bus explosion. On the other hand, the implications of pragmatism are the means of only ensuring survival. This traps believers such as Adil in a state of timelessness, because his course of action and lifestyle will never change as long as he is alive. This state of living continues on until he is completely depleted from the consequences of war and hence, becomes helpless. Such a behavior will cause Adil to eventually condition himself to lose the will to resist, and fail to see the potential for hope in hopeless situations. Overall, both courses of ideologies have their downfalls if explicitly followed. Yet, such courses of actions are seen in modern examples of systemic racism against Muslims in Western societies, such as the United States. Pragmatic Muslims enjoy the liberalized Western culture and ensure their means of survival under oppression by liberating their religion. This course of action similarly enhances tension between idealistic Muslims who continue to stay devoted to their religion, and hence find a means to project that through radicalized courses of actions. The product of conflict is danger to entirety of the group involved, and hence it is best to find sympathy and solidarity between the oppressed and