It’s been hard to start work on this letter, indeed to even find a beginning.
The documentary evidence of Israel’s genocidal aggression coming out of Rafah in southern Gaza has been simply blood-chilling. What is there left to say?
The butchery of children, facilitated by the US government and funded by US taxpayers, while every institution of liberal democracy bends over backward to repress and silence anyone who dares question the Israeli state narrative.
We saw in a previous letter about the monograph on Zionist Literature by Ghassan Kanafani how these repressions express themselves in the cultural sphere. The events of October 7 and after sparked its own wave of “cultural sanctions.”
One of the earliest instances took place in Germany, when the scheduled award ceremony for the Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli at the Frankfurt Book Fair was cancelled. Because of the Zionist handwringing about Hamas’s military operation, Shibli’s celebrated novel Minor Detail was pilloried by the prize organizers and complicit journalists as somehow promoting violence against Israelis.
Minor Detail is the occasion for this letter.
Just looking at the opening passage, with the ridges of the hills "trembling silently under the heft of the mirage," this novel was looking very good. It begins in the Negev desert, in the southern wedge of Palestine, being combed by Israeli soldiers in the wake of the Zionist state’s formation, in the exterminatory war known as the Nakba.
A nameless CO goes about his routine patrols.
His breath became strained again, his body trembled and he quickly moved his gaze across the desolate hills besieging him from all sides.
The soldiers come a cross a group of Bedouin Arabs, who they shoot to death. The only survivor is a young woman.
They found no weapons. The two sergeants and soldiers combed the area several times, to no avail. Eventually he turned to the still-moaning black mass and lunged at her, grabbing her with both hands and shaking her vigorously. The barked louder, and she wailed louder, and the sounds merged as he pushed the girl's head into the ground, clamping his right hand over her mouth, and her sticky saliva, mucus, and tears stuck to his hand. Her smell invaded his nose, forcing him to avert his head. But a moment later he turned back toward her, then brought his other hand to his mouth, raising his index finger to his lips, and stared directly into her eyes.
The story develops by the soldiers bringing the girl back, where they gang rape then murder her.
The dispassionate narrator keeps mentioning the pervasive heat of the Negev, the "besieging" hills, the "invasive" smells. The CO whose POV the narrator aligns with most gets a scorpion bite in the middle of the night, which progressively gets worse. As you read on, you have to ask: what are these people even doing over here?
We get a sense from a rousing speech of colonial arrogance given by the CO. Notice the contrast of the Bedouin people’s nomadic way of life with the settled agriculture and terraforming project of Zionism.
“We cannot stand to see vast areas of land, capable of absorbing thousands of our people in exile, remain neglected; we cannot stand to see our people unable to return to our homeland. This place, which now seems barren, with nothing aside from infiltrators, a few Bedouins, and camels, is where our forefathers passed thousands of years ago. And if the Arabs act according to their sterile nationalist sentiments and reject the idea of us settling here, if they continue to resist us, preferring that the area remain barren, then we will act as an army. No one has more right to this area than us, after they neglected it and left it abandoned for so long, after they let it be seized by the Bedouins and their animals. It is our duty to prevent them from being here and to expel them for good. After all, Bedouins only uproot, they do not plant things, and their livestock devour every bit of vegetation that lies before them, reducing, day by day, the very few green areas that do exist. We, however, will do everything in our power to give these vast stretches the chance to bloom and become habitable, instead of leaving them as they are now, desolate and empty of people.”
But then, the novel breaks into the second and last chapter. The narrator is first person present tense, a Palestinian woman who knows about the Bedouin girl’s story — perhaps the previous chapter was her own mental dramatization of it — and is quite fixated on it.
The incident took place on a morning that would coincide, exactly a quarter of a century later, with the morning of my birth. Of course, this may seem like pure narcissism, […]. It’s something else, something related more to that inability of mine to identify borders between things…
She goes on a quest toward the south and Gaza to find the truth, which is not easy for a Palestinian woman in a different Area. She has to borrow someone else’s ID to rent a car with the proper license plates that can use the road.
Imagine going through these kind of bureaucratic loops just to be able to travel by road within an area the size of Maryland. And speaking Arabic or even standing in the wrong place is liable to get you shot. Such is just one aspect of Israel’s apartheid system.
As the novel goes on you can admire what Shibli is doing with these two POVs in terms of representing history, and who gets to control such representations, officially and unofficially.
This short novel is definitely worth reading and merits more discussion. Readers are urged to check out Shibli’s own piece in response to the cultural sanctioning of her novel, which dares to not offer any simple or easy interpretation of the Palestinians’ national oppression.
It includes these thought-provoking lines:
In Palestine/Israel, you grow up realizing that language is beyond being a tool to be instrumentalized to communicate or tell. It can be attacked, it can be broken, and it can be abused. The question is, how can you trust language when it also causes you pain, when it deserts you, and when you must face cruelty alone, speechless? This made me search for narrative forms that such language can allow, for the endless possibilities it can hide between its layers, and for all that may emerge from the love you have for it and from the love it may still have for you.