The soldiers took the girl prisoner and frightened the men off with gunshots. On August 12 a patrol led by the platoon’s commanding officer, Second Lieutenant Moshe, encountered three unarmed Arabs-two men and a girl, apparently in her teens, though possibly younger. The platoon was one of several IDF units tasked with preventing infiltration by Bedouin across the newly established armistice lines with Egypt. A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment.In the summer of 1949, a platoon in the Sodom District Battalion of the Israel Defense Forces ( IDF) established an outpost at Nirim in the western Negev desert. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this ‘minor detail’ of history. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba – the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people – and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Rather than a discovery of hidden truths, or a search for justice, it is a meditation on the repetitions of history, the past as a recurring trauma … For Shibli, the emblematic experience of occupation is the longue duree of ennui and isolation rather than a dramatic moment of crisis.’

‘Though Minor Detail initially promises to be a kind of counterhistory or whodunit-a rescue of the victim’s story from military courts and Israeli newspapers–it turns out to be something stranger and bleaker.

The Quintuple Whammy (DIGITAL ED.): Eleven Stories 2018 – 2022įor our June selection, we have picked Minor Detail, and will be donating €2 from each sale to the Go Fund Me page helping to rebuild the Samir Mansour Book Store in Gaza, destroyed in recent airstrikes.

Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize 2023 – 2023 PRIZE NOW CLOSED.The End of the World: Desperate Literature’s Guide to Dystopia.The 2019 Unamuno Author Series Festival Anthology.Juana y La Cibernética (edición bilingüe).‘The Quintuple Whammy: Eleven Stories 2018 – 2022’ (the.

Minor detail book review