Naturally, official Israel refuses to admit this. Nor should it be news that this project has led to the rise of an Israeli people who now live and share Palestine unequally and oppressively with the Palestinian nation. It is not news that Israel is a settler colonial state that was built on the ruins of another people, the Palestinians. But even a 500 page novel such as “Apeirogon” cannot address each and every catastrophe that has been visited upon the land and people of historic Palestine. It proved to be a major ecological disaster and human tragedy for the Palestinians expelled from these marches and losing their homes and lands there. Contrary to Israeli propaganda this project had nothing to do with getting rid of the malaria-carrying mosquitoes as this problem had already been resolved before Israel was established through the use of DDT.

But Abulhawa faults him for mentioning birds while failing to mention the draining of the Hula wetlands in the Galilee in the early fifties. McCann has enchanting descriptions of migratory birds weaving in and out of his narrative and functioning as symbols of freedom that humans in Palestine do not have. We can and do take offence at reducing the conflict to a misunderstanding or at calls for dialogue as the solution of the conflict. We cannot as Palestinians take umbrage at anyone trying to portray Israelis and Palestinians as human. While “Exodus” arose out of a desire to present a false and misleading picture of pre 1948 Palestine, “Apeirogon” is a sensitive exploration of the lives of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. To compare this novel with Leon Uris’s propagandist 1958 book, “Exodus”, which presents Zionism as liberation movement, is patently unfair.

McCann has described his work as “a hybrid novel with invention at its core, a work of story-telling which…weaves together elements of speculation, memory, fact and imagination.” His book arose from two stories he heard in 2015 about the killing of 10-year-old Abir, daughter of Bassam Aramin, in 2007 by an Israeli soldier and the killing of 13-year-old Smadar, daughter of Rami Elhanan, in 1997 by a Palestinian suicide bomber. In this novel he writes about the shared experiences of two individuals, an Israeli and a Palestinian. He doesn’t write about what he knows but what he wants to learn about through his writing. McCann is a writer who has written about gypsies and other oppressed people and is talented at entering worlds that are new to him. While she makes valid general points about prevailing narratives in Western representations of Palestinians, McCann’s novel does not fall into that disreputable tradition. It ascribes to the novel motives that are simply absent from the text. Susan Abulhawa, one of the most celebrated contemporary Palestinian novelists, has written a devastating review of Colum McCann’s new novel “Apeirogon.” As an appreciative reader of McCann’s new novel, I find her review unfair.

Apeirogon review