Ripped from the Headlines

The opening scenes of Amy Wilentz's first novel, Martyrs' Crossing (Simon & Schuster; 311 pages; $24), seem transcribed from this morning's Middle East bulletins. In response to terrorist bombings in Jerusalem, Israel has barred West Bank Palestinians from entering the city. One rainy evening Marina Hajimi approaches the Shuhada checkpoint on the Ramallah road with her young son Ibrahim. He is suffering an asthma attack, and his Palestinian doctor has told her to get him quickly to Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. The Israeli army lieutenant in charge, Ari Doron, sees that the boy is in bad shape and frantically telephones higher-ups for permission to let him and his mother through. After agonizing delays, Doron's request is denied, but he decides to disobey the order. By then it is too late; Ibrahim dies in a waiting ambulance.

Innocent casualties have a brief news life; others are sure to follow. But Wilentz, a former TIME writer who served as Jerusalem correspondent for the New Yorker from 1995-97, uses the methods of fiction to examine an event that is both achingly personal and inescapably political through the minds of the people most affected by it. Good journalists don't claim to know what their subjects are thinking; good novelists do so for a living.

Ibrahim Hajimi is not, it turns out, just another Palestinian child. His father Hassan is a charismatic firebrand currently in detention in Jerusalem for suspected terrorist acts. And the boy's maternal grandfather is George Raad, a Boston cardiologist and internationally known Palestinian advocate. The death of a little boy so prominently connected offers a chance for some effective anti-Israel propaganda. To neutralize that very thing, Colonel Daniel Yizhar of West Bank security briefs Lieutenant Doron on what will be the official army version of the checkpoint episode. The story is mostly accurate but omits, Doron notes, the long period he spent on the phone waiting for an answer. He refuses to go along. "You believe nothing bad happened," he tells Yizhar. "I believe we killed a baby."

On the other side, Raad resents the attempt to turn Ibrahim into a political weapon. At a rally staged in Ramallah by the Palestinian Authority, he speaks harsh words to his hosts and the crowd: "If you want to find someone to blame for my grandson's death, look further than the soldier who was at the checkpoint that night, look in the mirror, as well. Look at yourself and the Authority, who've negotiated our birthright."

"Endings did not happen here," Colonel Yizhar muses at one point about Israel. But novels must end, and Wilentz resorts to a few melodramatic flourishes to tie up her story. The strength of Martyrs' Crossing, though, is not its plotting but its authentic and persuasive portraits of people trying to find their way through, and possibly past, the traps of history.