This book concerns two real-life figures, an Israeli named Rami and a Palestinian named Bassam, who each lost a child to the conflict between the two groups. It was published in 2020.

I had a whole thing written about the style and themes of this book, then I stumbled across this review in Al Jazeera. Susan Abulhawa skewers the book for ‘both sides-ing’ the conflict. To illustrate her criticism, she brings light to McCann’s Israeli lead, Rami:

The reader is told several times that Rami Elhanan Gold is from an “old” family, a “seventh-generation Jerusalemite.” But we are not told what this means.

First, Rami is one of a tiny minority of Jewish Israelis who can actually trace their lineage in the land before World War II. Second, he is part of an even smaller minority whose ancestry in Palestine goes back before World War I. Third, Rami’s ancestors, like all “People of the Book” (those of monotheistic religions) had been welcomed in Palestine and protected under Muslim rule, which lasted over 1,200 years.

Fourth, none of that stopped Rami or his parents from taking up arms against their non-Jewish neighbours when Zionism promised to give them power and property. What treachery.

The stories McCann chooses not to tell are, well, telling.

For the record, I am at least a 22nd-generation Jerusalemite. Israel kicked me out of my homeland when I was 13. For being an “illegal”.

Her piece is worth reading in full, and it’s given me a lot to think about. I’ll surely continue reading other perspectives on the book.

McCann’s book itself contains this bit that I think is useful here. Here is Bassam, the Palestinian, when sharing his story with a crowd in Europe:

They had heard so much, they said, and yet they knew so little. What about the strip malls, the stolen land, the fanatics? He demurred. For him everything still came back around to the Occupation. It was a common enemy. It was destroying both sides. He didn’t hate Jews, he said, he didn’t hate Israel. What he hated was being occupied, the humiliation of it, the strangulation, the daily degradation, the abasement. Nothing would be secure until it ended. Try a checkpoint just for one day. Try a wall down the middle of your schoolyard. Try your olive trees ripped up by a bulldozer. Try your food rotting in a truck at a checkpoint. Try the occupation of your imagination. Go ahead. Try it.

The listeners nodded, but he wasn’t quite sure if they fully understood. The thing about the Occupation was that it never let you decide.

It took away your ability for choice. Banish it and choice would appear.

Abulhawa again:

I asked Bassam if he read it. “I tried, but it was too painful,” he said. I can see why, because McCann stretches the details of the killings of two little girls, spreading little bits here and there over hundreds of pages, adding a new detail with each repetition, until one is not so startled by what was agonising to read the first several times. It is an interesting way to convey the normalisation of violence, if that is what McCann intended.

I spent several weeks in Israel and Jordan in 2007, and I saw a lot of upsetting, baffling and unforgettable things that still bother me. I saw the checkpoints and the settlements. I was scared for my security several times, even though I knew I was safer than almost anyone in the region, by virtue of my Canadian passport and generic last name. I’m glad I went, but once home I knew I’d never return. I’m glad that I have that choice.