Sabra Zoo, Mischa Hiller’s fast-paced, enthralling novel, narrates events leading up to the 1982 massacre in Lebanon of more than 7,000 Palestinian civilians in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps

Beirut today is a city with a magical skyline at night. Tall apartment blocks, broad avenues lined with luxury stores for the Prada and Gucci patronising wealthy, cafes and open bars packed with Lebanese expats and foreign visitors in the summer, it has it all. The city regained a semblance of political stability after a civil war that ended in 1990 and then the 2006 conflict with Israel which left half of Beirut in shambles.

But Sabra Zoo explores another Beirut, the one during the summer of 1982, when the city was under siege and there were stories of cadres of Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) quietly leaving the city and the Israelis entering for a cleansing operation. This serves as backdrop for Mischa Hiller’s award-winning debut, daringly exploring memories of the city at the height of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps massacre of civilians by the Lebanese Phalangist militia.

Following the assassination of the Lebanese president-elect Bacher Gemayal in September of 1982, Christian Phalangist militia went on a killing spree through the camps with the support of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF).

This is the world inhabited by Ivan, the 18-year-old Palestinian-Dutch narrator of the novel whose parents have fled the city with other cadres of the PLO. Working as a translator in a hospital at the Sabra refugee camp, treating victims of the siege and bombardment, he offers a Palestinian perspective. He also doubles as an underground agent, delivering fake identification documents. Numbed with alcohol and longing, his nights are spent with his Arab friends and foreign volunteers, wise for his years and straddling two worlds.

Almost unable to make a choice through the racy earlier part of the novel, Ivan carries his Dutch passport as the ticket that allows him easy access to PLO cadres in hiding, rooted to the violence he observes in haunting, often confused narrations. His youth and his energetic hormones and conversations about love and lust (or the lack of) with his male friends make for diversions in an otherwise dark and dismal storyline.

Ivan is part of an adult world, and while his contemporaries are at university, he flows along with the chaos of conflict, witnessing the city uprooted, unless it is Asha’s apartment within the vicinity of the picturesque and secure American University of Beirut (his own apartment becomes unsafe when his cover is blown). Asha, a petite Indian doctor and activist later leaves Beirut for Europe to tell the west about what she has witnessed in the camps.

Meanwhile, kebab shop owner and taxi driver Samir is Ivan’s trusted friend and the perfect Casanova. He also explains the political context of the civil war to Ivan and their foreign friends: “In 1976, at the height of the Civil War, the Phalangists had surrounded Tel al-Zaatar (translated as ‘hill of thyme’), a large Palestinian refugee shanty town that happened to lie in east Beirut…the camp was inevitably overrun and 3,000 people were killed. The camp was razed to the ground. They carved crosses on the bodies.”

Ivan’s romance with Eli, an attractive and older Norwegian physiotherapist, is without permanence yet shows how the partnership — and his other associations — are about socialising, eating, drinking and huddling together for comfort amid the terror of war, Israeli air attacks and escaping double agents in car chases.

There is also Youssef, a young patient whose foot has been damaged by an Israeli cluster bomb. Ivan helps Youssef recover and the boy’s sleazy humour, typical of any teenager in the novel, is partly his way of surviving against the odds.

The nerve-racking plot finally erupts with the Israelis entering the city and the assassination of the president-elect followed by the Phalangists’ sudden, brutal vengeance on a camp crammed with women, children and the elderly depicts inhumane and mindless horrors. Hiller’s descriptions are terrifying as he writes about the helplessness of foreign journalists, doctors and aid-workers surveying and documenting the massacre, the state of victims and blood-curdling tales told by survivors.

Later when the IDF invade West Beirut the narrative gains urgency, quickly adapting a compelling tone with the young friends looking for their missing associates through road blocks and bombardment. Refugee camps are strewn with mutilated bodies, the smell so strong that Ivan and his companions react as if shell-shocked. This violence — an old man with his eyes gorged out, the corpse of a woman with the foetus cut out of her — is one of the most ghastly episodes in the history of the Middle-East on the IDF’s watch.

Hiller’s language is powerful and angry. “Outside lay a toddler on the ground by the wall. His head was caved in,” he writes. The Kahan Inquiry in 1983 concluded that although the Phalangists were directly responsible for the massacre, the IDF standing by was indirectly complicit. The report resulted in the resignation of Ariel Sharon as defense minister.

Evoking strong reaction like Ari Folman’s award-winning, animated documentary, Waltz with Bashir, Hiller’s memories, devoid of sentimentality, are about the aftermath of conflict, unavoidable grief and forced choices. His prose has emotional honesty, capturing the restrictive and appalling conditions of war, of people managing with everyday violence to live, eat, love, and share jokes surrounded by circumstances they cannot escape. There is simplicity in these passages with a darkness almost impossible to grapple with, contributing to a sharp contrast of mood and tone as the novel moves from Ivan’s romantic trysts with Eli to the violence perpetuated on defenseless people.

The reviewer is Senior Assistant Editor at the monthly, Herald

Sabra Zoo(NOVEL)By Mischa HillerTelegram, London isbn 9781846590771231pp. £10.99