Book Review: Limassol

When you are an Israeli writer - former information officer for the IDF - and you address in your book various issues involving secret agents and Palestinians, you should expect to be read with the attention dedicated to daily newspapers. It's what happened with Yishai Sarid's book in Germany - but probably in other countries as well - when after 2010 Dubai killing newspapers as Suddeutsche Zeitung and Spiegel did their possible journalistic best to find some hints in the narrative of the story.

"Israel is not Switzerland" said Sarid in one of his interviews with the German media and this could be a message line strong enough for trying to evaluate the book according to literary standards.

Written in the first person, the book is the story about the action of a Shabak agent - Israel's home agency whose motto is "Defender that shall not be seen" - in mission to help the assassination of a terrorist Palestinian activist. In order to tempt him to go to Limassol - Cyprus' second city and a good summer destination for many Israelis - he's befriending Daphna, a beautiful lady with a drug-addicted son, whose best friend, the dying Palestinian Hani is the father of the terrorist. He addressed Daphna as a beginner writer, trying to get professional advice for advancing a story about a Jewish trader of etrog and step-by-step he's helping her to bring the son back from a drug resort in Caesarea and is helping Hani to be treated at a good hospital outside Gaza. In parallel, his personal life is succombing - his wife's decision to move to Boston with her job is the beginning of their separation - and his professional life is going under a high improbability, after failing to the mission of interrogating Palestinians suspects of terrorist connections, confessing that: "I'm also turning into a butcher. I don't have time any more to be sophisticated swith them. You've got to work with force from the first moment".

From time to time, we are introduced to the moral and personal dilemma of our hero: between family and profession, between profession and friendship, between duty and human sensibilities. Such questions are normal and understandable and most likely to be encoutered in the real life. When we are talking intelligence it prevails the survival of the fittest.