“Sabra Zoo” is a gripping novel – one of the first from the Arab perspective – to retrace the days leading to the Sabra massacre in Beirut, following the Israeli inva- sion and the assassination of Bashir Gemayel. The novel is told through the eyes of Ivan, an 18 year old boy whose Palestinian father and Danish mother have fled the country with the other PLO cadres. Alone in Beirut, he helps the cause by delivering fake passports to Palestinian officials in hiding. He also spends a lot of time at the Sabra hospital, acting as translator to the handful of foreign doctors, while fantasizing on the Scandinavian female staff. A gripping story, with touching side characters, Sabra Zoo is also about a boy coming of age in the horror of war. While Israel has just begun to revisit the Lebanon invasion and the black mark left by Sabra and Shatila, Palestinians and Lebanese are often portrayed as one dimensional background figures. Heller, a Palestinian-British author, partly corrects this view, though a lot more introspection needs to be done from the Lebanese side.

When did you decide to write a book on the Sabra-Shatila massacres? 

It had been in my head for many years after leaving Beirut in 1982 but I wasn't ready to write it until over twenty years later. 

Did it require a lot of research? 

I researched the chronology of events leading up to the massacre and various accounts of the massacre itself.

At the end of the novel, one of your characters says that being balanced is a sham, that if you could see both sides equally, then you were missing some vital fact. Do you agree?

I think objectivity is possible, but trying to be balanced, by which I mean trying to remain neutral when there is obvious injustice, benefits only those who are per-petrating it.

In your opinion, how do you explain the current interest in Israel for the 1982 invasion and the Sabra Shatila massacre? Could it spearhead a similar reaction in Lebanon?

I think some distance is needed from events to be able to tackle them dispassionately. As we've seen recently with Waltz With Bashir some Israelis have started to explore what Israel was doing in Lebanon through book and film - that is one of the roles of fiction and should be welcomed even if people disagree with the results. From a Lebanese perspective the novelist Elias Khoury has already tackled some of this history in his Gate Of The Sun.