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As the hostilities between Israel and the Arab world grind on with ever-greater loss and blame, it's not difficult to see how the perceptions of an outsider can often fathom both the broad and intimate gestures of a raging civil and cultural conflict. Most who do glimpse the relentless insanity rampant across the present-day Holy Land (with the additional complications of Lebanon) either recoil in horror or exploit its afflictions with cheap and incendiary journalism. Another suicide bombing in the news; today a restaurant, tomorrow a bus, next week...who knows?
In THE ATTACK, which viscerally details the prolonged detonation of just such a bombing, Yasmina Khadra has taken the brave (perhaps even brazen) approach of turning the wretchedness of generations-old enmity into very personalized fiction. He --- former Algerian army officer Mohammed Moulessehoul, who until recently used a female alias for protection --- leaps the cultural and geographical gap between North Africa and the Middle East with little awkwardness, compared to the immense challenges of accompanying and revealing the deep psychological trauma of his protagonist.
Dr. Amin Jaafari, an eminent surgeon, is among more than one million Arabs who, in real life, are full citizens of Israel. They rarely make news headlines, for they live in a peculiar kind of shadow land; never fully accepted by Jewish society, but accorded all the rights, privileges, resources and opportunities that their brothers and sisters on the other side of the cultural (and now very tangible) Wall both admire and envy --- and for which all too many are willing to die seemingly senseless deaths. Jaafari represents those who (like some dear friends of mine) have worked long and hard to attain skills that make them grudgingly indispensable to the Israeli infrastructure.
Jaafari comes across as a convincing composite of many such unsung heroes of this long war, who routinely stitch up Israeli and Arab alike, making no distinction between them when it comes to preserving life and doing no harm. His patients, even in extreme pain, don't always feel the same way, but he's used to that too.
By the time the scenes of yet another suicide attack at an Israeli restaurant begin to resolve into distinct visual and statistical elements of death, dying and survival, Khadra has set up the intense emotional context for an abrupt left turn that takes us into the deepest hell an individual of Jaafari's profession can imagine. His own Palestinian wife has been identified by police as the latest suicide bomber to randomly kill dozens of Jewish men, women and children.
From that point of numbing disbelief on, Jaafari becomes an intensely empathic study in the tortuous journey of human grief. And grief, as any good pastoral or religious counsellor can attest, is perversely messy. Despite its famous "stages" as defined by luminaries like Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, this particular form of spiritual agony follows no textbook ordering, no predictable degrees of intensity or duration. As difficult as it is to follow Jaafari's descent into a maelstrom of self-hatred, denial, anger, confusion, fear, apathy and myriad other shades of emotion that assail the human psyche in the wake of catastrophic loss, this is the real substance of Khadra's story and he handles it with brilliant pathos. (Translator John Cullen must have been tested to the limit in capturing the passion and color of Khadra's original French text.)
Khadra uses the distance of his outsider's eye with sensitivity and intelligence to portray the individual and collective personalities that ebb and flow around Jaafari's erratic quest for understanding, making THE ATTACK a surprisingly even-handed treatment. Both Arabs and Israelis are shown with their due proportion of graces and failings, and both are allowed to reflect on the evils of war and subjugation that have been the story of Israel and Palestine since their modern beginnings.
It's almost redundant to comment that there is no happy ending to this story. And Khadra has offered only the most tentative threads of hope, doling them out at painfully long intervals. Like so many clear-eyed observers, he appears to see few avenues to any long-term structural solution --- at least, not the kind imposed from without --- in this bleeding pocket of the Middle East.
But by focusing on one victimized individual, he has illuminated a few patches of the spiritual ground on which people of vastly different ideologies can (and do) still walk together. They are the ones, Arab and Israeli alike, who work side by side to pick up the pieces, even as bombs and bullets rain around them. Unfortunately, they don't make many news headlines, but Khadra has told their story with unforgettable power and immediacy.
Memo to George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Ehud Olmert, Tony Blair, Stephen Harper and that whole gaggle of folks "at the top" who still seem to think there's a fast, simple, one-size-fits-all solution for a situation of gargantuan complexity and sadness: get a copy of THE ATTACK now, and set aside an evening to read it cover to cover. I'm not kidding!
--- Reviewed by Pauline Finch (paulinefinch@rogers.com), an Anglican seminary student who has traveled in Israel and Palestine. She works as a national media consultant/researcher and copy editor for the Canadian Islamic Congress.
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