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“Crouching like a sunbird ready to fly, Nabila Yasmeen peered through the window of the village school. The children had taken their places, in rows four deep, eager for their learning to begin.
. . .
He was the school’s only teacher and he taught the children everything they needed to know.��

I think this is for readers who are unfamiliar with the ancient and ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. I saw a review by someone who said they had no idea what the situation has been, so I guess this novel has served that purpose. In her author’s note, she writes,

“It is necessarily brief, to counter the narrative that the question of Palestine is complicated...��

It is brief, but nothing is simple.

Palestine, December 1947. Nabila is a bright five-and-a-half-year-old girl who is desperate to join the other children at school, and the young teacher kindly pretends to ignore her, with an occasional almost-smile, until he has to shoo her away.

Today, while she’s still watching, he seem serious and nervous and hasn’t shooed her away yet, so she listens.

“He was good-humoured and easy in his manner, but today Nabila noticed something different in him. He seemed distracted, unsure. There was a lightness missing.

He cleared his throat, adjusted the collar around his neck and began to relay the news that had come to him via the radio. But Nabila found it hard to follow what he was saying. He told his class that, on Monday, the United Nations (whatever that was) had passed something called Resolution 181. He talked of partition and special committees. Of welfare and friendly relations among nations. Of mandates and immigration and freedom of worship. But it soon became apparent that the children in the classroom, most of whom were much older than Nabila, had no idea what he was talking about either.

So, he began again and in the simplest of terms he distilled the information for them. He told them that their country would be divided and a new country formed within it. Nabila was still confused. How could a new country be put inside a country that was already there? Where would the new country go? Where did it come from? What would happen to the people who were already there? Would they be squashed into the ground like ants under a boot? Would Nabila’s village be in the new country? Why was this happening? Nabila didn’t understand at all.��

This is Nabila’s and the reader’s introduction to the partition of Palestine into two states: Arab and Jewish.

The book goes on to follow the displacement of Palestinians from then until now. Then it shifts timelines to December 2023 in Australia, where Nabila is now an old lady.

I believe the author is presenting this moving story to show Palestine’s plight since WW2, when the UN moved to split one country into two. For readers who have not followed the continuing conflict in the Middle East, the UN resolution may be as much of a surprise as it is to Nabila. Jewish people supported it, but Arabs didn’t, and it has been ever thus.

People today, certainly those of Nabila’s generation, know about the Holocaust and perhaps about the promise to establish a safe, free Jewish State.

I humbly suggest the United Nations was between a rock and a hard place, as the saying goes, and agreed to select part of the ancestral Jewish homeland for the new country.

Contrary to the author’s statement that this is simple, I think it’s a conflict that goes back more than two thousand years and is still complicated.

There’s a saying I like: “It’s a reason, but it’s no excuse.�� For me, it applies to most forms of revenge and the brutality that’s been used over the years. The behaviour on both sides has been to provoke the other until someone makes a move and then stomp on them.

Any conversation about this becomes, “Yes, but…�� vs “Yes, but…��, noting past atrocities, past take-overs, past political upheaval, going back probably to pre-Biblical times. And then it becomes bomb vs bomb.

But one genocide doesn’t justify another.

The book does not mention the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, and there is no mention of hostages. The only indirect reference is in December 2023 when Nabila is attending protest marches where she lives in Australia. Readers are obviously expected to know what the protests are.

The author includes many pages of links to articles and research, and I have no doubt at all that she knows what she has written about.

Not long ago, I read Apeirogon, the award-winning biographical novel by the incomparable Colum McCann, where two fathers �� Israeli and Palestinian, each of whom had lost young daughters to the ongoing hostilities �� hoped to work together to create some kind of peaceful co-existence.

It wasn’t simple then, and it isn’t simple now. I sure wish it were.

Read this and see what you think - and then get curious.

For some reasonably basic background, I suggest you check the articles by Britannica (now based in the US) and the BBC.




My review of Apeirogon

P.S. I read this because it is one of the five books sent to all Australian parliamentarians for summer reading about the Israel-Gaza war. (Remember the Aussie summer is Dec-Jan-Feb.)



The other four books sent to Aussie MPs are:
Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir - Israel, Palestine and Beyond by John Lyons

Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappé

The Hundred Years�� War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917��2017 by Rashid Khalidi

Palestine A - Z by Kate Thompson