McCann does not therefore presume that their deaths should be used to justify a false equivalence and/or further the (entirely false) pretence that settler and colonised are equally responsible rather, he instead proceeds from their deaths to issue a stark indictment of colonization, land fragmentation, restriction of movement and checkpoints, while painstakingly setting out their human consequences.

In direct opposition to the rationale and guiding spirit of reconciliation-based activities, he is quite clear that his intention is to “forgive but not excuse”. He fought the army in the civil courts for four years to prove that his daughter had been shot dead, and was eventually victorious. The seven years that he served in an Israeli prison only intensified his desire to fight the occupation and injustice. However, he is quite clear that he does not seek ‘reconciliation’ with Israel or Israelis. In depicting their agony and pain, McCann does not appoint himself as judge or arbiter rather, he is quite clear that the deaths of Abir and Smadar, and the ensuing agonies of their parents, are products of colonialism.īassam cofounded Combatants for Peace, an organisation that works with Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the occupied territory. Ten years later, Bassam Aramin’s 10-year-old daughter Abir was shot dead by an Israeli soldier when she went out to buy sweets. In 1997, Rami Elhanan’s 13-year-old daughter, Smadar, was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber while out shopping with her friend. I was impressed from the start by how McCann did not impose himself on their narratives, or seek to impose or sustain an artificial ‘balance’.

McCann visited Palestine and Israel in 2015 where he heard the stories of two fathers, one Israeli and one Palestinian, who had lost their daughters to the conflict. The proposition that an outsider could understand, rather than experience, this colonial reality appeared to me to be as redundant as the notion of an ‘objective’ or ‘neutral’ account of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I had always been of the view that the colonial experience had been so deeply engraved on Palestinians that any attempt by an outsider to depict this ‘lived experience’ would be artificial, contrived and even futile. I must confess that I did not come to this novel with high expectations. “Apeirogon: A Novel”, which was written by an Irish author, Colum McCann, and which engages with the experience of bereaved parents on both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, could possibly be viewed as a further chapter and extension of this controversy. Cultural appropriation has recently become a hot topic in the publishing industry, and it has dovetailed with wider controversies about race relations and the right of any one individual or group to speak on behalf of another.

Mccann colum apeirogon