Apeirogon

In 2004, a West Bank checkpoint installed revolving turnstiles. Technology was used by the Israelis to control passage. Turnstiles would stop with automation and a device recorded even the faintest whisper. In 2012, an Israeli soldier specializing in computer hacking obtained a recording of an entire day’s worth of sounds at this checkpoint. She sent it to her boyfriend, who was a rapper. He sampled the sounds for a protest song, but she worried about getting in trouble, so she destroyed the recording. The rap artist had a duplicate though. After they broke up, he sent it to a Palestinian DJ. McCann includes part of the transcript in Section 249.

Rami recounts his time in the Yom Kippur War (Oct 6, 1973 – Oct 25, 1973), which began when he was 23. He was sent to war in civilian clothes because the army didn’t have enough uniforms, and they barely had enough weaponry. He was placed in a tank unit aimed at fixing broken down tanks. Ironically, the tank he was in broke down. Every part of Rami’s body trembled with fear. That day there was a surprise attack, many Israeli soldiers died. Rami would’ve likely been one of them had their tank not broken down.

They reached the battle. His job was to go in and provide ammunition for the tanks, fix any mechanical problems, and usher out the injured and dead bodies. He eventually got caught in gunfire. His tank crashed on a guardrail. Rami got out. Amidst bodies of deceased soldiers, he searches for a new gun to replace his, which is malfunctioning. He picks up a Kalashnikov, which was the gun of the opposing side. “Rami fought the rest of the war with the enemy’s gun” (347). With that gun he killed another soldier, which is something he never told Smadar.

On his deathbed, Mikhail Kalashnikov asked the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox church if he was responsible for the death of those killed with the gun he designed.

The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was an old classmate of hers, called Nurit after the bombing that killed Smadar. She told him he was not allowed to come and pay his respects. She felt blood was on his hands and on Israel’s hands for its treatment of the Palestinian people. She spoke out, which resulted in backlash and harassment. As a result, she took a sabbatical and went to England for 11 months to get far away from Israel. McCann includes newspaper headlines published about Nurit’s reaction to the bombing (Section 225).

Salwa, Bassam’s wife, continued to return some sense of routine to her children after Abir’s death. She would dress Abir’s younger sister Hiba in Abir’s clothes as she got older. She also took Hiba to see horses prancing in the field.

Netanyahu continued to send the Elhanan family gifts on Memorial Day to commemorate their daughter’s death. One year a florid message accompanying a bowl. Nurit was infuriated by how the state co-opted her daughter’s death as a political rallying point. Her and Rami smashed the bowl and mailed it back to Netanyahu with a note: “Dearest Bibi, something is broken” (362).

The siblings of the deceased girls also give a speech alongside their fathers. Yigal Elhanan was five when he lost his sister in 1997. Araab Aramin was 14 when his sister was killed by the rubber bullet. Their fathers embraced them on the stage after they finished the speeches.

Rami learned to embrace the chaos of living in Israel: the people amassed together, bumping into one another, a large population condensed into a small area. Rami underlined a line by the Palestinian philosopher and critic Edward Said that read, “Survival, in fact, is about the connection between things” (381).