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A review by weaselweader
The Attack by Yasmina Khadra
4.0
“There’s no worse cataclysm than humiliation. It’s an evil beyond measure … ”
Dr Amin Jaafari is a surgeon at a hospital in Tel Aviv. He’s an Arab and he’s an Israeli citizen. He’s respected and admired by his community (that is to say, he thinks so) and he’s wildly in love with his wife. It is difficult to conceive of the shock, the fear, the dismay, and the confusion that he must have felt when a deadly bombing in a local café proves to have been instigated by his wife, ostensibly a radicalized Palestinian suicide bomber. In Jaafari’s mind, that was simply impossible and he sets out on a crusade to infiltrate the local Palestinian resistance to prove it.
The marketing blurb claims that Yasmina Khadra, the pen name of former Algerian army officer Mohammed Moulessehoul, has written an intense, emotional modern history
“devoid of political bias, hatred, and polemics” that “probes deep inside the Muslim world and gives readers a profound understanding of what seems impossible to understand.”
Well, reading through the filter of my admitted pro-Palestinian bias, I saw nothing that convinced me he succeeded in crafting a balanced novel. At an even deeper level, I read nothing that persuaded me that balance or sympathy for Israel and the Jews in this never-ending war was reasonable or warranted. Consider, for example, the question asked during Jaafari’s interrogation by a Jewish Israeli police detective. How could such a woman
“get up one day and load herself with explosives and go to a public place and do something that calls into question all the trust the state of Israel has placed in the Arabs it has welcome as citizens”?
Say whaaaat? How dare he? Arabs welcomed as citizens in a country created out of thin air after World War II by simply appropriating land that had been inhabited by the Arabs for thousands of years? Gosh, how generous of them! The hubris embodied in that attitude is overwhelming. The self-entitlement of Israel offered by the Torah and belonging to the Jews by right as the “Promised Land” is stifling. It is clear that the Holocaust taught the Jews nothing by way of generosity or compassion, both in Israel and in the diaspora scattered around the world.
All of that said and my personal political opinions notwithstanding, THE ATTACK is an exciting, compelling, gripping, and utterly heartbreaking page turner. Whether a reader whose personal feelings lean more favourably in the direction of Israel’s 21st century conduct with respect to the Gaza Strip would feel the same way is an open question. You’ll have to judge for yourself. THE ATTACK is a book that you NEED to read.
Paul Weiss
Dr Amin Jaafari is a surgeon at a hospital in Tel Aviv. He’s an Arab and he’s an Israeli citizen. He’s respected and admired by his community (that is to say, he thinks so) and he’s wildly in love with his wife. It is difficult to conceive of the shock, the fear, the dismay, and the confusion that he must have felt when a deadly bombing in a local café proves to have been instigated by his wife, ostensibly a radicalized Palestinian suicide bomber. In Jaafari’s mind, that was simply impossible and he sets out on a crusade to infiltrate the local Palestinian resistance to prove it.
The marketing blurb claims that Yasmina Khadra, the pen name of former Algerian army officer Mohammed Moulessehoul, has written an intense, emotional modern history
“devoid of political bias, hatred, and polemics” that “probes deep inside the Muslim world and gives readers a profound understanding of what seems impossible to understand.”
Well, reading through the filter of my admitted pro-Palestinian bias, I saw nothing that convinced me he succeeded in crafting a balanced novel. At an even deeper level, I read nothing that persuaded me that balance or sympathy for Israel and the Jews in this never-ending war was reasonable or warranted. Consider, for example, the question asked during Jaafari’s interrogation by a Jewish Israeli police detective. How could such a woman
“get up one day and load herself with explosives and go to a public place and do something that calls into question all the trust the state of Israel has placed in the Arabs it has welcome as citizens”?
Say whaaaat? How dare he? Arabs welcomed as citizens in a country created out of thin air after World War II by simply appropriating land that had been inhabited by the Arabs for thousands of years? Gosh, how generous of them! The hubris embodied in that attitude is overwhelming. The self-entitlement of Israel offered by the Torah and belonging to the Jews by right as the “Promised Land” is stifling. It is clear that the Holocaust taught the Jews nothing by way of generosity or compassion, both in Israel and in the diaspora scattered around the world.
All of that said and my personal political opinions notwithstanding, THE ATTACK is an exciting, compelling, gripping, and utterly heartbreaking page turner. Whether a reader whose personal feelings lean more favourably in the direction of Israel’s 21st century conduct with respect to the Gaza Strip would feel the same way is an open question. You’ll have to judge for yourself. THE ATTACK is a book that you NEED to read.
Paul Weiss