It was all that had survived in this place after the heavy shelling the area had experienced at the beginning of the war.

When they had arrived, they found two standing huts and the remains of a wall in a partially destroyed third. Then he began making his way through the thick, heavy afternoon air, back to the camp. Finally, he lowered his binoculars, wiped off the sweat and returned them to their case.

Against the sun’s harsh glare, he carefully followed the course of narrow paths across the sand, occasionally pausing to fix his gaze on a ridge for a moment longer. These reached his ears as he gazed through binoculars from his position atop a hill, examining the scene before him. The only signs of life in the area were distant barking and the noise of soldiers working to set up camp. Aside from these, nothing at all, just a great expanse of the arid Negev desert, over which crouched the intense August heat. The only details that could be discerned were a faint winding border which aimlessly meandered across these ridges, and the slender shadows of dry, thorny burnet and stones dotting the ground. Vast stretches of barren hills rose in layers up to the sky, trembling silently under the heft of the mirage, while the harsh afternoon sunlight blurred the outlines of the pale yellow ridges. Shibli’s compelling, intelligent prose is a form of resistance in itself.Nothing moved except the mirage. She embarks on a journey of discovery into the events surrounding that rape and murder-not only because of its gruesome nature but also because it happened to take place twenty-five years to the day before she was born. Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah reads about this ‘minor detail’ in a larger context, and becomes fascinated by it to the point of obsession. In the Naqab/Negev desert, Israeli soldiers capture and gang-rape a Palestinian girl in her teens. Minor Detail revolves around a brutal crime committed one year after the War of 1948, which Palestinians mourn as the Nakba, the catastrophe that led to the displacement, exile, and refugeedom of some 700,000 people, and which Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Adania Shibli, from her essay ‘Out of Time’. I could no longer accept the marginalised, minor life to which we had been exiled since 1948, when our existence turned into a ‘problem”.

Minor detail book review