There is a lot of documented testimonies about incidents of sexual violence against Palestinian women, both during the 1948 war and even today. (Getty Images)
On the twelfth of August 1949, at the Israeli military site of Nirim, located in the Negev desert, a battalion of Israeli occupation soldiers detained a young Palestinian girl after killing her family, raped her several times, before eventually killing her, and burying her in the desert at a depth of less than an arm, turning her burial site into one of the main places on which the "State of Israel" was built.
The incident was kept under wraps, and investigations were concealed for more than half a century, until the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz was able to obtain secret documents containing the testimonies of the soldiers involved in the crime, publishing in 2003 a story that finally revealed the painful details of the girl's rape and murder (1).
The girl's identity remained unknown, her name was not known or mentioned in the investigations, and her age was not specified, although it was likely that she was in her early teens. We will never hear her screams, we will never know what she said or felt, was all her family killed? Or are there still those who weep for her?
Palestinian writer Adania Shibli decided to give voice to this young girl through her novel "A Minor Detail".
Sexual violence against women as a weapon
There are no clear and specific statistics in numbers, but there are many documented testimonies about incidents of sexual violence against Palestinian women, both during the 1948 war and even today. In an article (2) published in the Israeli newspaper "Haaretz" in 2016, the writer "Amir Orin" referred to what he described as "a history of corruption and rot behind the legacy of Israeli battles," based on the files of the Israeli military prosecution itself, in which many incidents of rape against Palestinian women and teenagers were documented, which were closed without punishment extending the hand of punishment to the perpetrators.
Nadira Shalhoub Kevorkian, a law professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an activist in the field of gender-related military violence in conflict zones, said in a media interview that rape of Palestinian women has been used as a military tactic throughout the history of the conflict. In 2014, Mordechai Kedar, a Middle East researcher at Israel's Bar-Ilan University, suggested raping the mothers and sisters of Palestinian resistance fighters in a solution to deter resistance during an interview with Israeli Radio Beat.[3]
Cancellation of the Palestinian Voice
Palestinian writer Adania Shibli's novel Minor Detail was published in Arabic in 2017 and translated into English by Elizabeth Jacket, nominated for the National Book Award in the United States in 2020 and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021.
Recently, the novel won the 2023 Liberato Press Prize, after being translated into German by Günther Ort, and the author was supposed to receive the award at a ceremony on October 20 at the Frankfurt Book Fair, one of the largest and most important gatherings of the publishing industry in the world. But with the reverberations of the "Al-Aqsa Flood", cultural circles, whether in the Arab world or in Germany, were surprised by the decision to cancel and postpone the concert, a decision that was widely objectiond, as it was considered a cancellation of the Palestinian voice, as indicated in the protest letter signed by more than 1300,<> writers from all over the world.
Jürgen Bos, director of the Frankfurt Book Fair, issued a statement condemning Hamas, noting plans to give Israeli and Jewish voices extra time to become more visible at the book fair, and declaring the Frankfurt Complete Book Fair's solidarity with Israel.
Secondary details as an alternative to misleading history
The title of "A Minor Detail" seems like a bitter irony about how a tragic crime like gang rape and murder becomes a minor detail that history does not pay attention to (social media)
The victim suffered from being muzzled and cancelled simply because she was Palestinian, something that seems to continue to this day. From the outset, the title of the novel, "A Minor Detail", seems like a bitter satire about how a tragic crime such as gang rape and murder becomes a minor detail that history does not pay attention to.
The first part traces the details of the crime of rape and murder referred to in the introduction to the report, which occurred in 1949, where a platoon of the Israeli occupation army was tasked with securing the new southern border line between Egypt and Israel, through what was called "clearing the land" of "Arab infiltrators", about a year after the 1948 Nakba, during which more than 700,<> Palestinians were displaced from their lands.
This part relies on intense language, closer to dryness and declarativeness, that does not reveal the feelings of the characters or their inner thoughts as much as it focuses on small sensory details, and focuses especially on the platoon leader who seems very obsessed with cleanliness, and repeatedly tells several times the details associated with cleaning his body, or killing small spiders infiltrating his tent, in an obsession similar to his obsession with what he called the "cleansing" of the region of Arabs. However, the cleanliness-obsessed commander has a stinking wound on his thigh, but ignores the pus and mold in it, and tries to get rid of the smell of the girl in the tent after raping her. The girl left in his tent the smell of fuel, which he himself ordered to use to sterilize her hair after cutting it. The smell haunts him, and the girl's words in an incomprehensible language are mixed with the barking of her dog, so he orders to kill her, and she is buried near the camp.
In the second part, the author moves to the beginning of the current century, which is narrated by a woman living in Ramallah, and unlike the first part, the second part explains the narrator's feelings and thoughts very accurately, revealing her psychological fragility, and her anxiety closest to pathological anxiety. The details of the tragic crime do not catch her eye because, she says: "There is nothing extraordinary in its main details, if compared with daily events in a place dominated by the hustle and bustle of occupation and permanent killing," but what really catches her eye is a "minor detail", which is the coincidence of the date of the incident with the date of her birthday a quarter of a century apart.
At first, the idea of chasing the story and searching for what is behind it hesitates between forgetting it because "sometimes it is inevitable to overlook the events of the past, if what is happening in the present is no less terrible than them", but forgetting does not work, the narrator is dominated by the idea of moving to the original crime scene in order to trace this story, and give a voice to the victim to narrate the events from her perspective. But this simple desire to move from one place to another within the borders of the same country reveals to readers the daily tragedy that the Palestinian lives on his land because of the occupation, as the mere movement from one point to another requires many maneuvers, risks and strict permits, as the country has become divided into areas, the residents of each area require special permits to visit the other area, and some of them are not authorized to visit some areas.
Thus, the narrator resorts to borrowing the identity of her colleague and renting a car using the identity of another colleague, to begin the journey with a map of Palestine before 1948 and a current map, finally reaching her destination where she explores the Museum of Israeli Military History, the archive and the crime site in Nerim, and discovers how the history written by the victor misleads, as these documents give her nothing, while she can find evidence with an old woman, whom she meets by chance, the woman may be the age of the victim if she has lived, perhaps knew her, or heard about her in Small.
Does the margin reveal the truth about the position?
Moving from the center to the margins, to the secondary details, "Minor Detail" raises questions about identity, language, and the heavy legacy of defeat, which writes a misleading history from which to erase the voices of victims. (French)
In 1980, Carlo Ginzburg published a paper entitled "Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and the Scientific Method" (4) in which he examines the role of small details in revealing historical truth, starting from the style of art historian "Giovanni Morelli" in verifying fake paintings, instead of looking at the basic parts of the painting, which is what imitators of works of art used to make the greatest effort, Morelli advises relying on looking at small details that they usually do not pay enough attention to, and so it can be through Her contemplation is to discover falsehood. In his article, Ginzburg links this method to the Freudian method of psychology with the methods of the fictional investigator Sherlock Holmes, each of which relies on exploring the margins to uncover the secrets of the center, proposing a dialectical relationship between the margin and the center as a cognitive method (5).
The narrator says of herself that she often sees fly droppings on the painting rather than the painting itself, focusing on less important details, and referring to the aforementioned method used by art specialists to judge the authenticity of the paintings by paying attention to secondary details.
The author hovers over secondary details through clever glimpses, forming a heavy picture of how everyday violence turns into marginal details that do not concern the mind. When the Israeli occupying forces bomb the building next to their work, claiming that three resistance men were sheltering there, the narrator wonders not about the fate of the three youths, as much as she is disturbed by the broken window and the dust particles caused by the explosion.
This normalization with violence occurs as a result of living a daily life based on bombing, murder and rape, these tragic details move to the margins, becoming a daily and ordinary thing, while moving from one place to another becomes an exceptional and frightening thing. Moving from the center to the periphery, to the secondary details, the novel raises questions about identity, language, and the heavy legacy of defeats that writes a misguided history from which to erase the voices of the victims.
The burden of history is borne by maps
Maps are a necessary means of reading history, restoring the policies of erasure, deletion and substitution of "maps", and the corresponding processes of genocide, displacement and settlement on "earth". (French)
During the narrator's journey in the second part to restore the voice of the victim, she uses two maps; one Arab of pre-1948 Palestine, and the other current, and through a comparison between the two maps, she explores how the names of Arab villages and streets were erased and replaced by Israeli ones, and the maps here become a necessary means of reading history, and restoring the policies of erasure, deletion and replacement on "maps", and the corresponding processes of "land" of genocide, displacement and settlement.
The author describes the feelings of panic that become a daily reality for the Palestinian citizen, in his journey from one area to another, as if he lives as an observer between the sides of a large prison, fraught with borders that are difficult to understand and whose crossing threatens his life at every moment. Moving from one city to another, from one street to another, and visiting a museum that is open to the public is something you can simply do in any other country, but it only turns into a nightmare if you are a Palestinian (6).
The writer relied on intensive language, which seemed motorized in some places, just like the language of the gagged girl whose mouth is gagged during her rape, so she cannot scream, and if she screams, she screams in Arabic, the platoon leader does not differentiate between her screams and the barking of her dog, which follows her and becomes like the sound of her screams that do not shut up.
This barking, which extends in the second part of the text, confirms its circular structure, awakening his wails at night the narrator, and chasing her in her car, as if he were a wail that still reverberates after more than half a century. We will see the details of the soldiers' clothes and cars in the museum that the narrator visits, and smell the fuel that drowned the victim's hair, when the narrator accidentally pours fuel on her hands and clothes, and the smell creeps into her nose as it trapped the nose of the Israeli platoon leader. The circular structure of the text is crowned in the closing scene, so that violence combines the victim with the narrator, as murder and violence is a recurring structure in the Israeli occupation that is repeated every day (7).
The voice of the voiceless
The journey of the anxious narrator, who seemed ambitious to give her victim a voice, did not lead her to anything, what she hoped to find in the archives of the Israeli state or its museum did not exceed what she knows, what she found is the narrative of misleading and written history from the point of view of the victor, as for the victims and the defeated, their voices have disappeared and erased, and in Nerim when she meets an old Palestinian woman who may remember what happened, and carry an oral history more honest and important than written history, she is silent and does not ask her, and the possibility of the truth is lost with everything that He is lost under the burden of anxiety and fear that muzzles tongues. It was as if the narrator was also misled for a moment, so she was preoccupied with the center, which excluded from her sight the secondary detail formed in the old woman, the oral narrative that no one hears and no one asks while she alone may have the healing answers.
Adania Shibli was born in Palestine in 1974, and her work has been translated into a number of languages, including English, French, German, Italian and Hebrew, she received the Young Writer Award from the A.M. Qattan Foundation twice: the first in 2001 for her novel "Masas", and the second in 2003 for her novel "We are all equally far from love", the author lives between Jerusalem and Berlin, and holds a PhD from the University of East London, and worked as a visiting professor in the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies in Birzeit University, Palestine.
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Source : Al Jazeera