A Bottle in the Gaza Sea

Naïm is the deuteragonist, or secondary protagonist, of the novel, whose emails and journal entries interweave with Tal’s to present the Palestinian perspective of the regional conflict. At first secretive and sarcastic, presenting himself anonymously as “Gazaman,” Naïm initially demonstrates many traits of a classical antagonist who serves to agitate and provoke Tal, at least until he reveals his own journal entries, which convey the fears and anxieties behind his angry facade. Suffocated and surveilled, Naïm tears up his writing as soon as he finishes and deletes all Tal’s emails, finally even ceasing his visits to the internet cafe for fear of punishment. Through Naïm’s descriptions of living in a state of omnipresent fear, boredom, and restriction, he embodies The Complexities of Identity and Belonging in a Divided Society. The descriptions of closed borders and curfews contribute to the understanding of what it feels like to live in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip; Naïm wants to be young, educated, and free, but chafes under the umbrella characterization of “the Palestinians” that he believes the world has imposed upon him.

Naïm’s emails to Tal also convey his discomfort in revealing too much of himself. Naïm acutely feels his role is that of a mouse in their relationship, even writing later, “I’m trapped. She caught me out” (72). His half-finished sentences ending in ellipses and coy responses to many of Tal’s questions build a sense of tension; he is earnest, but he is also hiding something. The news that he will attend medical school in Canada in his final email provides a sense of who he really is, as well as his hopes for the future, which shaped his interactions with Tal.

As he reveals more and more of himself throughout the novel, both in his messages to Tal and his breakdown with Willy and Paolo, it becomes clear that Naïm has also experienced a transformation because of their relationship; instead of just “agony,” he can conceive of hope that things might be different. His decision at the end of the novel to “wipe these last few years from my memory for a while” (148) demonstrates his own renewed sense of identity as an individual, while his promise to meet Tal at the Trevi Fountain conveys his attachment to her and to the belief in Hope Versus Despair.

The archetypal older brother, Eytan protects Tal and delivers her bottle to the sand where it is discovered by Naïm. As a soldier doing mandatory service, he serves as a reminder of the daily risk of violence and the emotional toll it takes on families, as when Tal reflects on “the dangers he was facing: not a month goes by without some of our soldiers dying in Gaza” (18). He humanizes the role of the Israeli soldier, and when Naïm describes bored young men throwing stones at a soldier just because he is perceived as the enemy, it could be Eytan they are attacking.

Eytan also symbolizes the physical proximity of Gaza and Jerusalem, serving as a physical and metaphorical bridge between Tal and Naïm. Tal writes that it is “funny,” or strange, to think that Eytan’s duty in Gaza brings him physically closer to Naïm than she is. It is her brother’s revelation that he saw Naïm find the bottle in the sand that solidifies the fact of his existence for her, giving her the feeling that it is “more and more unreal, more and more illogical that we can’t meet” (131); he knows nothing about Naïm, though he has seen him in person, while Tal knows many important things about Naïm and may never get to meet him. In this way, Eytan emphasizes not only the irony of the characters’ individual situations but also the broader irony of two cultures so closely united by culture and geography but so drastically divided by history and politics.

Both flat, static characters that serve to convey Tal’s status as an ordinary teenage girl, Efrat is “the best friend” and Ori is “the thoughtful boyfriend.” They give shape to Tal’s everyday life through what she writes about them, as well as what she keeps from them. When Tal first decides to write her letter, she keeps it a secret from Efrat by saying she is writing to Ori but that is “the problem with best friends: you tell them everything and share everything with them, and in the end you can’t have a square inch of secret garden [...]” (14). By emphasizing that she tells her best friend everything, Tal’s desire to keep the secret from Efrat, and later from Ori, reveals more about Tal than either of these characters, highlighting their roles as static characters. Ori and Efrat’s inability to understand why she will not sell her video of the bus bombing to a news station and her subsequent outburst suggest there are different levels of understanding about what it means to live in Jerusalem, even among those who live there themselves, furthering The Complexities of Identity and Belonging in a Divided Society.

Tal’s parents symbolize hope and safety, but also the generational exhaustion of hoping for a peace that may never come: Their tearful jubilation provides a sense of the significance of the Oslo Accords. Their sorrow over Rabin’s death conveys the pain of missed chances for peace, and their children’s comments illuminate what it is like for older generations to feel they are “held directly responsible for the Middle East situation” (18). Both worry for their children but take a pragmatic approach to parenting and to life.

After the bombing at the Hillel Cafe, Tal’s mother first hugs her and cries, but “then as usual she did four things at once: she turned on the TV and the radio, connected to the Internet, and grabbed her cell phone. That’s what I call a highly technological response” (1). From these few actions, readers see that Tal’s mother loves her and is emotionally moved, but she is also so accustomed to abrupt violence and has a routine in response to it. She cares and she is “sensible,” but she is also more distant from Tal than her father.

As a tour guide and de facto historian whom Naïm describes as “obviously pretty exceptional” (73), Tal’s father represents the history of Jerusalem and The Power of Storytelling and Communication. He often gives words to the larger contexts and emotions that Tal cannot voice herself, including the centuries of history shared by Palestinians and Israelis and the ways Tal finds to cope with her place in that history as an individual: “[Y]ou were defending yourself against despair [...] to speak in a language different from that of hate or indifference” (133). His view of history as long and ever-changing conveys a sense that no matter how bad things appear in the present, they can always get better, grounding the theme of Hope Versus Despair.