Apeirogon

Bassam Aramin is the novel’s other primary protagonist. He is a Palestinian Muslim man who was born in a cave. At age 17 he was arrested by Israeli authorities for an attack he planned on Israel. He was sentenced to prison, where he was treated horribly by the guards and engaged in a hunger strike to get his sentence reduced. He spent seven years in prison in total. Upon release, he got married to Salwa and began to raise a family. One of his children, Abir, was killed by a rubber bullet that hit her in the back of the head. Israeli soldiers fired the shot.

After her death, Bassam resigned himself to sadness for a long time, but he eventually realizes the enemy is not the Israeli people but Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Bassam goes to England to study the sociological aspects of why the Holocaust occurred at the age of 42, which gives him insight into the Jewish people.

Bassam founds the group Combatants for Peace, which works to promote unity and peace in the West Bank. One of Rami’s sons attended the meetings and invited Rami, which is where the two men meet. Their relationship is the central trajectory of the novel and the major way McCann suggests two people from different backgrounds can find common ground and come together to promote peace.

Smadar Elhanan is the daughter of Rami and Nurit. She was killed at the age of 13 in 1997 by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem. She was walking to get books for school when the bomb went off. The event changed the trajectory of the Elhanan family. Both parents grieved in different ways. It is ultimately her death that brought Rami and Bassam together to begin their tour of lecturing on the necessity of harmony across differences.

Smadar was a typical 13-year-old girl. She was joyful and vivacious; good at school; and a talented swimmer, dancer, and musician. She cut her hair close to the scalp and pierced her nose to look like her idol, Sinéad O’Connor. Her death became a political issue in Israel. The prime minister (Benjamin Netanyahu) sent his condolences along with other high-ranking Israeli state officials, which were not appreciated by the family since they resented their daughter’s death being appropriated as a political moment. Smadar was buried next to her grandfather, Matti Peled, a general turned peace advocate. Both her and Abir’s deaths are the book’s central tragedy and form the impetus for the two central characters, their fathers, to dedicate themselves to giving lectures on peace.

Abir Aramin is the daughter of Bassam and Salwa. She is killed by Israeli border police, who fired a rubber bullet in her vicinity. The bullet hit her in the back of the head. Bassam rushed to the hospital to be with her, who insists that she be sent to a hospital that is better equipped to save her despite roadblocks. The ambulance experiences numerous delays because of the political strife and protests in the area, and it takes over two hours to arrive at the other hospital. Abir eventually succumbs to her injury and dies.

Her death mirrors Smadar’s in that she was not doing anything threatening, yet she was still killed. She was a happy, lively 10-year-old girl at the time of her death. She was carrying a candy bracelet when she was shot, and Bassam finds this bracelet and carries it with him for many years. Abir had a gift for memorization—she could remember long passages from the Qur’an or poems—and she was also gifted in mathematics.

Hertzl Shaul is a prison guard who eventually bonds with Bassam during his imprisonment. He is studying mathematics and proves to be much more caring and less vicious than the other guards. Hertzl mentions that Bassam’s prison number is an “amicable number,” which are “two different numbers related in the sense that when you add all their proper divisors together—not including the original number itself—the sums of their divisors equal each other” (97).

In prison, the guards would strip Bassam naked to beat him. Hertzl was the only guard not to participate, in fact he even threw himself over Bassam to stop another baton blow. The other guards pressed Hertzl against the wall and headbutted him for this. Hertzl eventually attends one of the Bassam’s Combatants for Peace meetings. Their relationship suggests the potential for bonding even in extreme circumstances. Hertzl can also be seen as what the system of state sanctioned violence does to peaceful and caring people like him.

Nurit, who is strong-willed and intelligent, is married to Rami. She is Israeli and born to a well-to-do family. Her father, Matti Peled, was a prominent general and through Nurit’s well-heeled education she rubbed elbows with many of Israel’s elite, including the future prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Nurit is a successful professor. Her book, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, caused her to receive hate mail at the university. Her lectures were among the most popular at Hebrew University and the most reviled by those who disagreed with her positions.

While not a main character in the novel, Nurit nevertheless makes a large impact, both for her fiery spirit and her support of Rami and Bassam’s lecture project. One telling incident is Nurit’s anger at how the state co-opted her daughter’s death as a political rallying point. She leaves Israel for a brief stint after her daughter’s death while Rami stays. They grieved in different ways, but they always support each other.

Youssef Shouli is most likely the Palestinian suicide bomber responsible for Smadar’s death. Shouli studied at Bethlehem University where he worked on becoming an artist. An early project of his at the time was collecting discarded war items (rubber bullets, ammunition casings, empty gas cans) and using them to make bird cages and feeders. This practice eventually led to his arrest as the Israeli state charged him with inciting protests and throwing stones though he was actually only collecting items for his art. Unfortunately, he was sentenced to four years in prison. This event led to his radicalization, urging him down the path of violence and retaliation against Israel.

Perhaps in a traditional book Shouli would be something closer to a classical antagonist. He was responsible for killing a little girl (among other victims) who forms the main trauma for one of the two main characters of the book. Yet, McCann is careful not to treat him in an inhuman way or detach him from reality in a further effort to underscore the main character’s message of peace.

Matti Peled is Rami’s father-in-law and Nurit’s father. He was a distinguished general for the Israeli army and the architect of the Six-Day War—he organized lightning raids and bombing strikes. He was revered by his fellow Israelis for his success with this campaign. He was a socialist, a democrat, and a Zionist. However, after 1968, he changed his thinking and grew suspicious about the Occupation of Palestine. He began to speak out against it and to lobby for peace between the nations. He educated himself on things outside of Israel and on the cultures of other countries, including Palestine. He eventually taught Palestinian poetry at Tel Aviv University. This jeopardized his social standing in Israel, and he received death threats on his home phone. He was called an Arab lover, a false prophet, a pig-eater. But he continued to fight for education and peace for the rest of his life.

Though McCann keeps him at the peripheries for most of the novel since the focus is on either Rami’s or Bassam’s perspective, his influence on Rami, Nurit, and Smadar is felt, particularly in how he changes his intellectual and moral positions at the cost of his social standing in Israel. This has a great impact on Nurit and Rami, who both spend their life fighting against the Occupation and for the education and growth of the people affected by it.