Terrorism

Terrorism is a persistent condition in the novel, not a single isolated attack: it shadows ordinary life, turns private histories into political stakes, and tests whether peace can survive the demands of security and accountability. The narrative places planned attacks and bombings alongside military violence and the deaths of civilians, without treating these forms of harm as interchangeable. Its central pressure is the struggle over who gets to name violence, explain it, and bear responsibility for it.

A climate of ordinary danger

The threat is present in the everyday landscape of the narrator’s memories. During his first stay in Israel, the invasion had ended, but flare-ups continued in South Lebanon. Armed soldiers rode buses and walked through town; once, a soldier younger than the narrator fell asleep against his shoulder, his gun resting on the narrator’s knee and pointing toward his crotch. The narrator remembers being afraid to touch it in case it fired. Terrorism belongs to this same atmosphere of recurring danger, rather than arriving as a wholly separate interruption.

Years later, the violence also shapes the choices available to public figures. Zehava Lerner’s political standing had grown through her eloquence and activism during an uprising, and Charlie describes her as having credibility with both Sharon and Arafat. Her proposed role in a possible peace initiative is discussed against a background of ongoing bombings. The possibility of negotiation therefore appears not outside the atmosphere of violence but inside it, vulnerable to the next attack and entangled with political calculations about security.

Kamal’s intended attack and inherited grievance

Kamal’s recorded account gives terrorism a specific personal and historical motive. He says that his target was a Sbarros restaurant in Hod HaSharon, less than a twenty-minute drive from the Dheisheh Refugee Camp where he lived. He traces his revenge to his grandparents’ expulsion from Sylia during the Nakba of 1948. His grandfather, who had been studying medicine at Cairo University, could no longer attend after becoming a refugee; he later worked as a janitor at a Christian school in Ramallah and died young of a heart attack that Kamal describes as a broken heart.

Kamal presents his planned suicide bombing as revenge for that loss, intending to kill as many Jews as he could. His account also makes the intended attack a concealed family crisis. He says he did not tell his parents where he was really going, claiming instead that he was visiting his fiancée, Milah, in Jenin. Yet he believes they understood: they heard him recite martyr verses, watched his anger intensify, and saw him leave in a bulky coat. Michal translates his words while Hannah conducts the interview, giving the account a divided form: Kamal’s dramatic telling is relayed in Michal’s steady, matter-of-fact voice.

Military violence and the burden of naming responsibility

The novel places such attacks beside the contested language used to describe violence by armed forces. In one account of a military case in Southern Lebanon, a speaker reports that Yoav Lerner suffered a breakdown and shot two ten-year-old children. The initial report is hearsay, including the claim that Yoav said he did not remember the shooting. Later, Yoav’s own account describes an attack in an unnamed village: after stones and then live fire, he says he heard an order to return fire and shot at two targets he believed were armed fighters. He says he killed two boys, not fighters. The movement from rumor to personal testimony changes what the reader knows, while leaving the deaths themselves as the account’s fixed and devastating fact.

Yoav’s narrative also invokes the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut. He describes Israeli forces hearing the gunfire and screams, learning that hundreds of civilians had been killed, and not intervening. He sharply disputes reports that Israeli forces themselves carried out the massacre, but also insists that they stood by. The distinction between carrying out violence, permitting it, and failing to stop it is central to his argument about how responsibility is assigned. His account rejects the easy conclusion that the massacre caused his father, Chaim Lerner, to die by suicide; it instead exposes how a journalist’s neat causal theory can obscure the particular events and moral failures being described.

Attacks, negotiations, and what endures

Terrorism repeatedly breaks into scenes of attempted explanation. During an interview with Interior Minister Meir Alon in a police headquarters office in the Russian Compound, the questioning is interrupted by three blasts, screams, and sirens; smoke begins seeping through the door, and Charlie rushes out. The sudden change from interview to emergency makes political discussion feel physically exposed to the violence it seeks to understand.

Zehava’s secret talks with Palestinian negotiators in London offer a contrasting effort to contain that violence through agreement. The parties exchange maps, with Israel offering roughly 95 percent of the West Bank and the Palestinians seeking the whole territory with limited border adjustments to accommodate most Jewish settlers. Pisgat David appears on the Palestinian side of both versions. Although the territorial proposals seem like a promising start, the talks collapse a week later amid disputes over Jerusalem, refugees’ right of return, recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, connecting Gaza with the West Bank, and Hamas. The conference’s eventual newspaper coverage draws little attention, and the novel leaves the promise of negotiation sharply at odds with its limited public consequence.

The later history does not bring a clean end to the threat. Suicide bombings dwindle as Israel builds its West Bank barrier, but violence continues: missiles and sometimes flammable kites come from Gaza, followed by Israeli bombs, tanks, and new settlements; the West Bank grows quieter without becoming free of terrorist violence. Nor is Israel itself untouched. A bomb outside the Russian Compound kills Charlie, the narrator’s friend and the head of Israel’s police homicide division. The death gives the novel’s political danger a personal endpoint while resisting the idea that a barrier, a negotiation, or a single explanation can make the wider conflict disappear.