This is the story of two people who live in New York, and fall in love. Banal enough, except that Liat, a translator, is Israeli, and Chilmi, an artist, is Palestinian... You know, from the very beginning, that things can't end well. You're just waiting to see what form the bad ending takes.

It was another Five Books recommendation, from a list drawn up by novelist Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. First published in 2014, it's by Dorit Rabinyan, an Israeli author whose family migrated to Israel from Iran in the early 1950s. I read the German version, which was translated by Helene Seidler, and published in 2016. The story is set in the period from autumn to summer of 2002-03. The events of 9/11 are still fresh in everyone's mind, making anyone of vaguely "Middle Eastern" origin into a subject of suspicion; the US is about to unleash its tragically misguided attack on Iraq.

Everything -- timeframe, publication, recommendation -- came many years before the current round of horrible violence. Contemporary events (headlines today: "Palestinians cling to Eid despite destruction"; "Relentless attacks, hunger grip Gaza"...) only make the story more poignant, the chances of a good resolution were the scenario to play out again even more remote.

A note on the title, before I go on to a (spoiler-laden) discussion of the plot. In Hebrew, it's Gader Chaya. This means "hedge", but a literal translation would be "live border": "Only Hebrew and Arabic," says Rabinyan, "have a poetic expression to describe a hedge as a fence that is alive. It’s also a border or barrier that is alive and portable. It travels within your consciousness. That was the echo I wanted to have in the original title." In terms of foregrounding the contrasting identities the book evokes, that's a good title, but perhaps a little obscure. Most of the many languages into which the book has been translated go with "All the Rivers", reflecting the idea that all the rivers in that part of the world run towards the same body of water: "I like this title too," Rabinyan continues, "because it calls up the Mediterranean Sea without mentioning it. The Mediterranean is the living fence of a horizon that is in both the Israeli and Palestinian subconscious."

The German title, however, is See You at the Seaside (Wir sehen uns am Meer). This is also a clever title: "Misleadingly sweet", it becomes, by the book's end, "a bitter, almost cynical metaphor for a love that is impossible under the given circumstances".


The sea around Cyprus, 2017. The closest I've ever been to Israel and Palestine

So Liat and Chilmi meet, via a mutual acquaintance. They fall instantly in love. They know this will be a temporary arrangement. It's a love affair that comes ready-stamped with an expiry date, and it will end when Liat goes back to Israel after her six-month stay.

It's Liat's point of view that we gain entry to. She's the more practical one; she's the one who is most upfront about the fleeting nature of their relationship; and she's the more nervous one. She pushes Chilmi away when she's on the phone to her family in Israel; she lives in terror of being spotted on the street by some stray person who could report back to her parents.

He, on the other hand, is the dreamy one. He lives for the moment, and doesn't think too hard about the future. He allows Liat to meet some of his visiting family (it doesn't go well); and he invites her to view the footage his little brother, Marwan, has shot of daily life for this Palestinian family. Chilmi is actually the more attractive character. You can see he would be annoying at times, and Liat duly gets annoyed, but he exudes a beautiful, almost child-like playfulness. He works passionately at his art, but he's fun-loving, a little scatty, other-worldly. And self-sacrificing. When Liat falls ill, he nurses her. When she pushes him away, he forgives her.

On the whole, the progression of the relationship is portrayed very realistically. Of course, they are initially suspicious of each other, despite their immediate attraction. Liat cannot instantly forget all the prejudice about Palestinians that has been part of her environment; Chilmi is spooked to find she, like all Israelis, has been in the army (his experience of Israeli soldiers comes from the time he spent in prison -- for drawing a Palestinian flag on a wall in Hebron when he was 15...). As we meet more Israelis and more Palestinians, it's very clear that there are jerks on both sides. And yet, always, the power disparity is evident. The misconceptions are not equal, because power only ever runs in one direction.

And of course, our protagonists quarrel. All lovers quarrel, and in this case they've got this ticking clock and this impossible situation to contend with. Nerves are bound to fray.



Liat's political education comes bit by bit. She never gives up her patriotism. Why should she? Jews need to feel safe on their bit of land. But she also gradually understands more of what Israel's need for security feels like for Palestinians.

When she says she lives in Tel Aviv, for example, Chilmi is entranced. He's fascinated by the sea. She talks about how she misses sunsets over the water, enthuses about how wonderful it is to swim in the Red Sea. The subject keeps coming up. Then he tells her that he was born in Hebron, but his family moved to Ramallah. There's no sea in either place. But the sea in Gaza, she wonders... "He shook his head wearily, and began to count off the long list of obstacles that the Israeli army put in the way of Arabs when they wanted to travel from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip. The checkpoints, the permits, the months of waiting." Chilmi has been to the seaside just three times in his whole life. She's embarrassed by her earlier exuberance. But he's good-natured about it: "One day... the sea will belong to all of us, and we'll swim there together."

We're half-way through the account before Liat learns that when Chilmi's parents arrived in Hebron, in 1967, it was because they'd had to flee their refugee camp in Jericho during the war. Their original village is south of Lid, "where you built your airport". But even if he could, he says, he wouldn't want to return there. He wants to live by the seaside.

Marwan's home-movie closes with a sunset: "The grey, unfinished-looking houses of the Palestinians blend in with the surroundings in shape and colour. The houses of the Jews, on the other hand, are foreign bodies, two-storey cubes with sloping red roofs... From the balcony in Ramallah, Marwan's camera captures with incredible clarity the coastal plain 60 or 70 kilometres away, and Gush Dan, the centre of our country, plus the Tel Aviv skyscrapers. You can even see the glitter of the blue stripe of the Mediterranean, and everything seems to be within reach... Seen through Marwan's camera from the ninth floor in Ramallah, Israel looks like a huge island, like a concrete castle that has risen from the sea. All the buildings, high-rises, and residential towers have grown into a single lump. Like an illusion, a megalopolis of unfathomable proportions from a science fiction film, Tel Aviv looms on the horizon."

It's such a small piece of land, says Chilmi. How are you going to create two states there?

They get heated when they talk politics, and eventually learn not to. Chilmi is for a binational state. She is for the two-state solution: "He was the enlightened do-gooder with the vision of paradise. And I donned the asexual, Zionist-patriotic-conservative-bourgeois dunce's cap. He was the universal man who was chasing after peace, and had already left trivialities such as national flags and national anthems far behind." The land is one and the same, says Chilmi, reminding her that she's the one who said that all rivers ultimately flow into the same sea.

Wassim, Chilmi's brother, is much more outspoken about the plight of the Palestinians, and he and Liat have a conversation that is very antagonistic, and -- for her -- very distressing. She expresses a very logical worry that extreme nationalists are becoming more powerful on both sides. The pressure of the Israeli occupation is allowing fundamentalist extremists to come to power in Palestine, she says, while every Intifada contributes to the rise of the right in Israel. When Palestinians demand the return of refugees, she goes on, and envision a binational state, they push Israelis -- afraid of another Shoah -- to the right. Her voice wobbles: "In my arguments with Chilmi something similar has often happened to me: I fall into an almost panicked pathos, and feel a kind of fateful responsibility, as though I were carrying the future of the State of Israel on my shoulders." Israelis are all indoctrinated, says Wassim, contemptuously. The fundamental dilemma remains: The State of Israel was set up so that the Jewish people could take their future into their own hands, but in doing this they have destroyed the future of several million Palestinians.

Liat is hurt that Chilmi doesn't defend her against his brother. But she realizes that they're both acting in the same way -- rallying to their own tribe.



They part, as we knew they would have to. Liat goes back to Israel. Chilmi, while keeping a foothold in New York, decides he needs a break at home as well. He finds Ramallah very much changed, and there are traces of the Intifada everywhere. He talks about the wall. It's not a fence, he says, it's a monster. He rents a little place, and starts to tend the garden, even though he's not planning to be there long. This activity shows him how little he can live with. Maybe he will stay a bit longer, after all...

Then he suddenly gets the opportunity to go with some rellies to Jaffa. To the seaside... And at the beach there's a big sign, saying in several languages: No swimming.

Marwan films their journey, and all the time you're thinking: Something political is going to happen here. They've avoided the official entry points. They're openly using a camera. We've seen all the police cars. And when Liat hears that Chilmi is dead, she immediately thinks he must have been shot by some border guards.

But no, he has drowned off the beach in Jaffa...

It's a really beautiful description of a drowning... All those blues. All the infinite varieties of that colour that Chilmi loved so much.

So he doesn't die an ostensibly political death. But it's a death that carries layers of symbolism. The Palestinians are being pushed into the sea... He longs for the sea because it is so very inaccessible... What he longs for becomes deadly... He and Liat can only be together if he is swallowed by the sea which she sees every day...

***



At first, I wasn't sure... The Liat-Chilmi relationship seems to move incredibly quickly. And the symbolism of the section that recounts their initial meeting is a bit heavy. Everything in the city turns into a warning sign, flashing red... They tramp all over New York because Chilmi has lost the key to his home...

But the reader is quickly caught up in the relationship. Invested in the characters. Wondering if there's any way this can turn out well that wouldn't be really kitschy. Knowing there isn't, because this heavy sense of foreboding has surrounded them from the beginning.

It's a very clever book.

And the Israeli Education Ministry banned it from high-school curriculums... The idea of intimate relations between Jews and non-Jews, they said, threatens the idea of separate identity that is at the core of the Jewish state. Of course, sales soared. But Rabinyan suffered extensive harassment by "right-wing bullies".

She interpreted the ban as a reaction to the way she depicted Palestinians as human beings: "[Chilmi] is not ignorant or a demon or a religious fanatic. He is relatable. What frightened the Ministry of Education most was that he was loveable. Banning my book had nothing to do with depicting a romantic involvement between Jews and non-Jews. It had to do with challenging the blindness the government wants us to have in acknowledging that there is a partner on the other side." (The character of Chilmi is based on a real Palestinian artist Rabinyan knew in Brooklyn, who also, in fact, died by drowning.)

During the controversy, she was supported by readers and by many famous Israeli authors: "Amos Oz ... wrote about my situation in newspaper articles, and David Grossman gave speeches supporting me. As A.B. Yehoshua told me: 'Today it’s your book; tomorrow it is my book. If you’re afraid, I’m afraid too.'"

The ban was later reversed.

***



The novel's attempt to make people see differently reminded me of a very good Israeli television series we watched last year. It was called The Lesson, and there's a helpful outline here: "When a class gets into a debate over whether Arabs should be banned from the local swimming pool after incidents of sexual harassment, it’s not long before the students break out into chants of 'Death to Arabs!'... The series was inspired by a rash of conflicts between Israeli civics teachers and students in recent years that extended beyond the classroom. In 2020, an Israeli school in Rishon LeZion made headlines after students complained of their civics teacher’s pushback following classroom discussions in which students said all Arabs should be killed and that assassinated Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin 'deserved to die.'"

Of course, recent events have tragically exacerbated this polarization: "After October 7, Dorit Rabinyan, a board member of several left-wing organisations opposing Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, told the New York Times: 'I know it’s not noble of me, I know there is suffering on the other side, but the other side took hostages and slaughtered so violently, with so much passion, that my compassion is somehow paralysed.'"

Israel's retaliation, on the other hand, has been monumentally counter-productive, losing it huge tranches of global support.

At the moment, everyone's drowning. And a lifebuoy seems as far away as ever.