A slim majority of Israeli teenagers don't know what the Oslo Accords were, according to a recent poll. They don't think a negotiated settlement with Palestinians is possible. They are the failure of the generations before them. And they all do compulsory military service, just like this book's main characters, three young female friends who grow up in a dull, peripheral town in today's Israel, then join the army, where they are really bored. To mitigate boredom one of the many features of army life for which they are hopelessly unprepared they imagine a lot of outlandish scenarios. Also, being late teenagers, they flirt with boys and fret about the future and sometimes they harass and humiliate Palestinians at checkpoints, just to pass the time. Effusively praised, this first novel was picked up for translation into 22 languages when it was a just-commissioned promise based on a string of short stories. Some of those stories ran in the New Yorker and Vice magazine, and made 25-year-old Shani Boianjiu the youngest recipient of the US National Book Foundation's 5 under 35 award. The novel has also been longlisted for the Women's fiction prize.
The book has that contradictory impulse of much army fiction, in which compulsory military service is depicted as brutalising a nation's young adults (what it does to those living under military occupation is not in the frame), as well as an elevating rites-of-passage. The girls come from a flimsy insult of a village on Israel's border with Lebanon, one of those into which non-European Jews were dumped and left to deal with it. Lea ends up serving at West Bank checkpoints, letting Palestinians into Israel the ones with permits "that assured they weren't the type likely to stay in Israel for ever or try to kill us".Bored, she invents life stories for one of these crumpled Palestinian men until the real version slices open the neck of one of her checkpoint colleagues. Avishag is stationed on the Egyptian Sinai border, where her job is to watch illegal people, porn and pirated films that try to enter Israel. Yael, meanwhile, is a weapons instructor, teaching boys barely younger than her to shoot better.