Apeirogon

by Colum McCann

Apeirogon: a shape with a countably infinite number of sides.

—This, he said, is the world’s most expensive candy.

Imprison him with his imprisonment.

He considered himself a follower of the tariqa, or the mystic path, which was to lead to heaven.

During the twelfth-century Crusades, Christian warriors tied naked prisoners—Jewish, Muslim, Turk—to mountaintop rocks and then released trained eagles with sharpened talons upon them. The eagles worked around the liver, the kidneys and the heart until they pecked the prisoners to death.

The reason a falcon is hooded is exactly the reason a falconer is not: the birds can see so well that they would most likely be distracted by other prey much further away. The falconer hoods the bird and waits. He wants the falcon to only see what he sees.

He was aware that these were not new ideas, just new to him. Still, it felt as if he were in the territory of the explorer.

For him everything still came back around to the Occupation. It was a common enemy. It was destroying both sides.

How he left prison, not so much a man of peace—even the word peace itself was awkward at times—but a man who wanted to pit himself against the ignorance of violence, including his own.

Rumi: Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I have begun to change myself.

One of the things that Steven Spielberg knew—even as a young filmmaker in Hollywood—is that history is in constant acceleration, but sooner or later a force, any force, must hit a curve: that curve, then, is a story that must be told.

The Kabbalists, in their attempt to examine the nature of the divine, are known to envision two aspects of God. The first, known as Ein Sof, finds God to be transcendent, unknowable, impersonal, endless and infinite. The second aspect is accessible to human perception, revealing the divine in the material world, available in our finite lives. Far from contradicting each other, the two aspects of the divine— one locatable, one infinite—are said to be perfectly complementary to one another, a form of deep truth to be found in apparent opposites.

I am sorry to tell you this, Senator, but you murdered my daughter.

Bombing operations in Gaza and raids into the West Bank are often referred to by Israeli officials as mowing the lawn.

Molotov cocktail

Rami knew full well that they might watch him from time to time. His phone was probably tapped. He didn’t care anymore. He had lost so much more than they could monitor.

the Palestinian colors. White our deeds, black our battles, green our fields, red our swords.

In the 1980s the greatest sale of Israeli flags—outside of Israel itself—was in Northern Ireland, where the Loyalists flew them in defiance of Irish Republicans who had adopted the Palestinian flag: whole housing estates shrouded in either blue and white, or black red white and green.

The Nakba.

Freedom, he said, begins between the ears.

The Conference of the Birds,

Frankenthal sold everything he could to support himself so he could devote his time to the search. He finally found forty-four families who were willing to come together to talk. He gathered them in small groups, in libraries, cafés, sometimes his own home.

In a letter to Rami, Bassam wrote that one of the principal qualities of pain is that it demands to be defeated first, then understood.

Like every Israeli, I knew they were there, and I pretended I knew them, even pretended I liked some of them, the safe ones—we talked about them like that, the safe ones, the dangerous ones—and I never would have admitted it, not even to myself, but they might as well have been lawn mowers, dishwashing machines, taxis, trucks. They were there to fix our fridges on a Saturday. That was the old joke: every town needed at least one good Arab, how else could you get the fridge fixed on Saturday? And if they were ever anything other than objects, they were objects to be feared, because, if you didn’t fear them then they would become real people. And we didn’t want them to be real people, we couldn’t handle that.

My grief and her grief, the same grief.

And like Bassam says, we are running from our pain to our pain.

Some people have an interest in keeping the silence. Others have an interest in sowing hatred based on fear. Fear makes money, and it makes laws, and it takes land, and it builds settlements, and fear likes to keep everyone silent. And, let’s face it, in Israel we’re very good at fear, it occupies us.

I’m not necessarily asking for everyone to get along, or anything corny or airy-fairy, but I am asking for them to be allowed to get along.

We are not doomed, but we have to try to smash the forces that have an interest in keeping us silent.

And being against the Occupation is, in no way, a form of anti-Semitism.

I pay the price, sometimes I despair, but what else is there to be, in the end, but hopeful?

We cannot imagine the harm we’re doing by not listening to one another and I mean this on every level. It is immeasurable.

for a long time they were the same thing to me, justice and revenge.

We had a mission in jail and the Israelis had a mission too. Our mission was to survive as humans. Theirs was to rob us of our humanity.

My enemy was that: my enemy. He could have no pain, he could have no feelings. Not after what he had done to me and my family.

Rumi, the poet, the Sufi, said something that I will never forget: Beyond right and wrong there is a field, I’ll meet you there.

As I have always said, it’s a disaster to discover the humanity of your enemy, his nobility, because then he is not your enemy anymore, he just can’t be.

the most expensive candy on earth.

There was no criminal investigation. There never is when one of us is shot. They never say “killed” with a rubber bullet. They say “caused the death of.” That is their language, but it is not everyone’s. Most of the time nothing is ever said or done when a Palestinian child is killed, but many hundreds of my Israeli brothers and Jewish brothers around the world supported me in bringing the soldier to trial. Amazing. But the Supreme Court decided there was no evidence, so they closed the file for the fourth time. We had fourteen eyewitnesses but they still said there was no evidence, how is it that twenty-eight eyes can see nothing? My child was not a fighter. She was not a member of Fatah or Hamas. She was sunshine. She was good weather. She told me once that she wanted to be an engineer. Can you imagine what sort of bridges she could have built?

I don’t have time for hate anymore. We need to learn how to use our pain. Invest in our peace, not in our blood, that’s what we say.

In Palestine we say ignorance is a terrible acquaintance.

We need to learn how to share this land, otherwise we will be sharing it in our graves.

Muhammad said that one of the things he regretted now, as an old man, was that he had never found the body of his lost goat.

Satyagraha: the revelation of truth and the confrontation of injustice through nonviolent means.

The civility of the disobedience was part of its power.

Bassam told Rami that Abir had played the exact same game.

Bassam clicks his tongue and half-smiles. A familiar and hopeless gesture: they can travel together anywhere in the world, but not these few miles.

There was fresh falafel and sea salt and virgin olive oil and hummus and romaine lettuce and tomato and cucumber and garlic and yogurt and pomegranate and parsley and mint and maftoul and there were beans and sprigs of rosemary and several cheeses and jars of water with slices of lemon, all laid out on the wooden table.

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