From Tragedy to Truth: 'Minor Detail' Explores the Haunting Legacy of War

• TW - Gangr#pe, Brutality

"A short while later, the sound of six g#nshots rang out in space, then silence fell once again. - Morning, August 13, 1949."

The story is utterly straightforward. After the Palestine-Israel war in 1948 and the displacement of Palestinians from their land, Israeli soldiers captured a minor Palestinian (Bedouin) girl, gang-ra#ed her, and buried her in the sand after putting 6 bullets in her body. The day was August 13, 1949. Fast forward to 1974, a woman (from some details it may seem autistic) from Ramallah obsessed with this incident after coming across a column in a newspaper and started digging into the past. Eventually, it leads to her death by Israeli soldiers without discovering the minor details linked with the incident. That's all about the story.

"And suddenly, something like a sharp flame pierces my hand, then my chest, followed by the distant sound of gunshots."

Now what's not simple - is the details.

The story is divided into 2 segments; the first one is based on a commander and his platoon's 5 days' day-to-day activities (from August 9 to August 13, 1949), in a third-person POV, and the second one of that obsessed woman in a first-person narrative. A gap of 25 years, still the detail has portrayed the symmetry from that horrific days to the present day of the story, be it the dog's barking, tangled hose, cleaning, wind, room detail, or the Palestine-Israel relation. Don't dare to put down the book after reading the first segment, though it has repetitive detail and sentences. Why these repetitions shouldn't be there? - nothing is exciting and unique in the life of a soldier in a war-ravaged place except for patrolling and looking out for trespassers. The detail started getting intense in the first segment when an infection from an unknown pest started spreading in that commander's body. That day he ra#ed the girl being a commander, the next day probably the whole platoon ra#ed her and killed her brutally.

"The rumble and clamor continued to reign in the tent, as soldiers began enthusiastically planning how they would divide their time with the girl, allocating the first day to soldiers in the first squad, the second day to the second squad, the third day to the third squad, and assigning the driver, the medic, the maintenance team, and the cooks to a separate group with the sergeants and squad commanders, corporals, and the officer."

The detail in the second segment follows with the real minor details that haven't been portrayed in the story, in the column or in her discoveries.

• Boundaries - be it geographical Palestine-Isreal or the psychological Infiltrators, Bedouins, Trespassers, and Arabs must be killed. They became infiltrators in their own land, including people from Jerusalem, whose very existence constitutes a security threat if they utter a word of Arabic outside their areas.

• Mindset - Their women will be our war booty, basic rights, and needs. Tanks should prevail over the land, not humans.

• Meaning of life - The existence of life here had already become a paradoxical joke. Hiding one's own religion and name just for the sake of not getting killed.

Finally, the philosophical aspect where power overthrew basic human rights and barriers of fear and hate towards race, overtakes human sentiment, moral values, and emotion.

"Well, no going back now, not after crossing so many borders, military ones, geographical ones, physical ones, psychological ones, mental ones."

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'Minor Detail' is not a research paper on how the crime took place or how the woman obsessed with the findings, it's more than that. It unfolds every layer of geopolitical and cultural relations between Israel and Palestine and focused in-depth on the racist mindset of animals towards war-ravaged people. In my next newsletter, I will talk about 'At Night All Blood is Black'. Until then let me know in the comments what you felt about 'Minor Detail' if you have read that book already.

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