Imprisonment

Imprisonment in the novel is not a single, fully documented legal outcome but a condition attached to two different stories of violence: Kamal’s failed bombing and Yoav Lerner’s shooting in Lebanon. Kamal is presented as a prisoner interviewed for Hannah Loeb’s history project; Yoav invokes his own time in jail while the military investigated the Lebanon shooting. Their circumstances place custody between violence and its explanation, without supplying a complete account of charges, verdicts, or release.

Kamal’s Imprisonment

Kamal is already in jail when Hannah interviews him, nearly ten years after his attempted attack. In the recording, he sits on a concrete bench with his hands cuffed in front of him. Hannah asks questions in English, and Michal translates both the questions and Kamal’s Hebrew answers. The framing makes imprisonment visible before his account begins: the story reaches the family through an incarcerated man’s testimony, translated and replayed on a small screen.

Kamal describes a failed attempt to bomb a restaurant in Hod HaSharon. He says he meant to avenge his grandfather, who was expelled from a village during the Nakba and lost the chance to study medicine at Cairo University. Kamal recounts traveling from Ramallah in the trunk of a van and then taking a bus while wearing a bulky coat. At the restaurant entrance, a passing soldier noticed him, grappled him to the ground, and pulled him away. Kamal says he found the bomb’s trigger but nothing happened when he pulled it: the bomb was a dud. He interprets the failure as an act of God that saved people in the restaurant, the soldier, and himself. The interview gives the imprisoned man room to narrate both the intended violence and the failure that led to his arrest, but it does not specify his sentence or the precise circumstances of his detention.

Yoav Lerner’s Military Detention

Yoav’s imprisonment is connected to an investigation by the Israel Defense Forces into a shooting in Lebanon. A report circulating among people familiar with service there describes his case as well known: the account says that, after a breakdown, he shot two ten-year-old children and later claimed not to remember doing so. The report is presented as hearsay, including speculation about what his lawyer may have advised him to say.

Yoav’s own later account gives a different description of the shooting. He says that during an attack on his unit he heard an order to return fire, rose from cover, and shot two people he identifies as Hezbollah fighters. He adds that he was a notably poor marksman and had failed his firing examinations, but says he hit both targets. The narrative does not reconcile this account with the report about the children. When challenged in an argument about murder and asked where he had been, Yoav replies that he was in jail while the army investigated the Lebanon shooting. His statement establishes the detention and its connection to the investigation, but the account does not establish the investigation’s outcome.

Custody, Testimony, and Unresolved Responsibility

The two cases give imprisonment contrasting narrative roles. Kamal’s confinement is the setting from which he recounts an attempted attack and its failure; the cuffs and concrete bench make the interview an encounter with a prisoner, not merely a retrospective explanation. Yoav’s jail time, by contrast, enters a dispute about what happened in Lebanon and where he was during a later accusation. In both cases, custody is clear while the surrounding legal record remains incomplete.

That incompleteness matters to how the stories are told. Kamal frames his actions through revenge and religious belief, while the accounts of Yoav’s shooting remain divided between a circulating report and his own version. The novel supplies no definitive judicial finding to settle those competing narratives. Imprisonment therefore marks a point at which violence has come under institutional scrutiny, but it does not, by itself, decide what happened or resolve responsibility.