What do they have in common? Something very simple and at the same time very painful: both of them have lost a daughter because of “others.” Rami and his wife had a 13-year-old daughter, Smadar, who was killed in a suicide attack in Jerusalem. One is Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian the other is Rami Elhanan, an Israeli. What, then, is the intent of this book? The author spent months meeting two men at length. It is neither a novel nor a work of fiction, neither a work of history nor an academic essay it does not claim to offer solutions or explanations. The book has an enigmatic title, Apeirogon, a term that indicates a geometric figure with an infinite number of sides. And now an Irish author, Colum McCann, has written a book that approaches it from an original perspective and looks at the conflict in depth.

To underline only the most evident aspect of this conflict, the religious dimension was hardly present in either the first Zionist movement or the Palestinian nationalist organizations of the 1960s or 1970s. Meanwhile, it has evolved, year after year, as national identities, as well as narratives built around conflicts, keep changing over time. Nevertheless, countless pages of geopolitical reflection and narrative have been written about it.

It is certainly not the most harrowing conflict that humanity has known since the end of the Second World War, nor is it the most deadly or atrocious. For decades now the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been in the news and on our minds.

Book review apeirogon