We endlessly ask “what is to be done,” but we know that for any suggestion of a way forward, it is far easier to make the case for its probable failure than its possible success. Believers in two Israeli and Palestinian states believe that one state is impossible. Believers in one Israeli-Palestinian state believe that two states are impossible. I am sympathetic to Beinart’s arguments, but let me summarize the reactions. We have all been reading assorted takes on Peter Beinart’s essay “Yavne” in recent weeks. It is a place of constricted and narrowed geographies and of intellectual claustrophobia as well where the political options impinge and jostle one another, like cars vainly trying to pass one another on one of those tight roads in Palestinian communities only one car-width wide a world where familiarity has bred a contemptuous and sometimes murderous understanding of “the other.”įor outsiders, it is easy to reduce the situation to abstractions. A sense of claustrophobia pervades McCann’s novel. (BTW, an apeirogon is a polygon with an infinite number of countable sides.) The “here” is the Jerusalem and West Bank of the present and recent past, of the First and Second Intifadas, of Netanyahu’s unending reign of misrule, and of quagmires new and old.

The phrase recurs throughout McCann’s remarkable, compulsively readable new novel.

“Geography here is everything,” writes Colum McCann on the first page of Apeirogon.

Colum mccann apeirogon review