Here is the unlikely battlefield. You have a mountain slope, baked dry, thousands of sun-bleached rocks, millions of thorns. It issues into an even drier wadi, on the other side of which another slope of rocks and thorns rises up only to descend into the next wadi, and so it goes from ridge to ridge and wadi to wadi until pure desert takes over and rolls on as far as the horizon. On the slope in question, there is a functional well, its mouth encased in stone. The well belongs to the Palestinian shepherds of south Hebron, specifically to the Al-Murgh family, which has been chased off its lands here, in the tiny point called Al-Tawamin, by Israeli settlers and soldiers. Settlers from nearby Havat Yair or Sussya covet these lands and this well, as settlers covet every arid centimeter in south Hebron. We’re here, among other reasons, to see that this slope, this well, don’t fall victim to their greed.

Actually, we have a larger ambition, though it will take time to achieve it. We want the Al-Murgh family to come back, as some families have come back to Bi’r al-’Id, with our help. It’s not the only spot we want to save. It’s a slow process, full of danger, and the forces arrayed against its happening are powerful.

But there were some good signs this week, as Amiel informs us on the minibus on the way down. Apparently as a result of continuous pressure by Ta’ayush activists on the ground, backed up by our lawyers, the army and the occupation bureaucrats have moved toward recognizing that Palestinian farmers and shepherds in south Hebron do have some rights—an almost unimaginable thought under the standard conditions of the occupation. The new Brigade Commander in the area is said to be reevaluating army policy in the area to ensure Palestinian access to fields and wells.

There was a flurry of phone calls and faxes between our people and the officer in charge of land rights and the custodian of what are called “state lands” (miri), that is, lands not registered in the name of private individuals or families (much of the land in south Hebron, including large areas traditionally owned and used by the villagers, falls in this category). The Brigade Commander is said to have acknowledged that the wells were dug long before there were Israeli settlers here and must therefore belong to Palestinians, who should, in that case, believe it or not, be allowed to use them. If this idea seems to you axiomatic and unproblematic, you don’t know the reality of south Hebron.

Everyday, normative violence by settlers is the heart of that reality, and it hasn’t changed in recent weeks. We hear the usual stories. Shepherds were out grazing their sheep when armed settlers arrived and stole a sheep, loading it onto their vehicle as soldiers stood by and watched. Other settlers attacked a herd and shot several of the sheep and beat the shepherds. Yaakov Talya, the notorious settler-rancher near Bi’r al-’Id, tried to take possession of the well we cleaned of endless mud and stones just a few weeks ago. All this is standard, tedious, odious, and probably permanent.

But we’ve had some recent successes, and at 7:30 this morning, before the sun has warmed to its true strength, we watch with satisfaction as a tractor-driven water tanker fills up from an ancient well on the hilltop at Al-Tawamin. We expected soldiers to turn up to stop this, but it didn’t happen—at first. We had time to clamber down the hill to inspect the caves, once homes to whole families, which were deserted overnight under conditions of settler-driven terror in 2001. Large metal cooking pots, riddled with bullet holes, litter the floor of the caves; settlers come here for target practice and other relaxing social events. Can we clean the caves and entice the families back? Maybe. The Zionist dream, updated version 2010.

Mid-morning. A herd of sheep washes over the hilltop and heads for the well. These are settlers’ sheep, and they will have to be stopped. It seems incredible, I am always amazed, but the struggle, our struggle, takes place on the most micro of micro-levels, the level of the individual goat or sheep or well or footpath or thorny bush or olive tree. If we allow them to graze here, to water the sheep at this well, these lands, too, will be lost, absorbed into settler territory. So, though the sheep are thirsty, we send them back up the hill together with the shepherd—a somewhat befuddled employee of Dalia in Chavat Yair. He keeps asking us, in a peculiar blend of half-baked languages (Hebrew, English, traces of Slavic) who we are. Shortly a more authoritative figure arrives: Avidan, in Shabbat white, with beard and skullcap, of course, and an irresistible urge to show us the error of our ways.

“Why,” he asks rhetorically, self-possessed, cynical, arrogant, voluble, “don’t you look at the real truth?” In the space of half an hour or so of bitter haranguing, he invokes the “real truth” many dozens of times; it’s his favorite phrase. Some truths are more real than others, for example the ones he believes in.

“These people [the Palestinians] don’t own a single millimeter of this land. They have absolutely no right to it. God gave it to us. If they want a state of their own where they can live and develop their own culture, they can have it where they belong, on the other side of the Jordan River. Look at this well. Our grandmothers and grandfathers dug this well. Your grandmother and grandfather. You’re handing over your grandmother’s well to the enemies of the Jews.”

This is a rather unsettling thought, though, to be honest, my grandmother, a very gentle and gracious woman from Nikolayev in the Ukraine, never, to the best of my knowledge, ever dug a well; nor would she have approved of what Avidan and his settler friends are doing. But the point of the metaphor rapidly becomes clear; it is a vision of the end of days.

“If we give them this well,” says Avidan, “everything else will go, too—Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, everything. We’ll be back where we were under the Nazis. They will take your houses in Jerusalem, then they will kill us all, and it will be your fault. Besides, look at the old synagogue they found in Susya. It proves that Jews were here before.”

“I think I’d like to resign from Judaism,” says Amiel, who has been listening without reacting, bemused, detached. We’ve all heard it many times before. Amiel is cooler than I. Though long experience has taught us there’s no point whatsoever in engaging in such debates, I can’t help saying to Avidan,

“In my eyes, you’re no better than a common thief. You’ve stolen the lands that belong to these people, and you keep trying to steal more.”

Avidan is unruffled. He has a lot more to say. He’s not, incidentally, a bad man; there’s something straight, almost innocent, about him, unlike the more violent settlers we sometimes meet. He lives in a stark and simple world governed by a seamless mythology that, whatever else it might mean or do, has been conscripted to the single overriding goal of dispossessing the Palestinians who live here. He doesn’t seem to me to regard them as fully human, and anyway he thinks God, a rather literal-minded figure unskilled in hermeneutics and dealing largely in real estate, is on his side. He has no doubts, unlike me. Most striking of all is the ultimate threat implicit in every word and thought: the world is structured (by God? perhaps not) to kill Jews, that is its operative inner logic, and if you give way at any point—say this well, for example—the apocalypse will begin at once, right here, from the tiny, dry, prickly, inelegant piece of ground we are standing on. A piece of ground which we, too, by the way, are committed to defending from the likes of Avidan.

I have a moment of sheer surrealism. What are we doing here at the well, under the fiery sun and the watchful, uncomprehending eyes of some forty thirsty sheep? And why am I listening to this lunatic? Am I feeling sorry for him? There is a kind of sick romanticism about the man, you can see he loves to tell himself the whole crazy story of Jewish exile and return, with its sweet pathos; and he is infected, of course, with the self-righteousness that comes with the story. He loves the Jews, a twisted, tragic love. He invites us to Shabbat lunch. I feel bad that we didn’t let the sheep drink at the well.

Now the soldiers arrive, as always. There is the usual to-and-fro; the details don’t much matter. Negotiations transpire on the crest of the hill in a mirror-like space of infinite depth, with the soldiers filming all of us with their digital video cameras, no doubt for the state security archives, while we film them filming us filming them filming us….
In the end, we tell them we’re prepared to leave on condition that the settlers leave, too. That’s what happens. The pumping of water is anyway over by now. We walk over the rocks, down to Bi’r al-’Id, and there we see what looks to me like a miracle: sweet, clear water from the tanker is gushing at full blast, under the fiery sun, into the well that we cleaned. It will keep them going for a while. Our friend Nasir from Susya is sitting there on a rock; he has come to say hello. Speaking of the Jews, Nasir is wearing a black tee-shirt with a long inscription in Arabic and English. “Likay la nansa, al-Quds. Jerusalem: We will never forget you.”

By David Shulman

I’ve been thinking about truth. About what the word means, and how we know what it means. This comes in the wake of yesterday’s demonstration, with its by now habitual rituals unfolding in their remorseless, bitter order—the hopeful beginning, the drumming and slogans, the dispossessed Palestinians standing beside us as we chant, the rapid, volatile crescendo, the eventual police attack, and the arrests. Sarah, a young woman of astonishing courage and clarity, was among the first to be arrested.

On the one hand, Sheikh Jarrah is a touchstone. As Misha said to me on the way back: Some things are amazingly simple. In Sheikh Jarrah you can see pure theft in all its starkness. The Bible says “Thou shalt not steal,” and it—God, that is– was referring to Sheikh Jarrah. Any one can see it. The shocking thing, of course, is that the whole apparatus of the modern state—the municipality, its committees and master plans and grey bureaucrats, the mayor, the government, the Prime Minister, the cabinet, the courts, the police, the secret services—all these have colluded in actively perpetrating the theft. There’s really not much room for argument. Either you stand by and let them throw innocent people out of their homes, or you come each week to demonstrate and resist. It’s particularly terrible because the wave of expulsions is continuing, in fact intensifying. Two weeks ago we shifted the demonstration to the new set of houses that have been targeted. As so many times before, we heard an aged, wrinkled Palestinian grandmother say: “Why are they doing this to us? I prefer to die than to leave my home.”

It’s clear that the government wants to destroy the whole of Palestinian Sheikh Jarrah, to rid the neighborhood of its many dozens of extended families, and to replace them with Jewish settlers. It’s quite possible that in a few years’ time, if the process continues to accelerate, there will be nothing left of Sheikh Jarrah. The mosque will be replaced by a yeshiva—plans for its location already exist– the homes of the Palestinian refugees from 1948 will be occupied by fanatical settlers, new (ugly) apartment buildings will go up, the Arabic street signs will disappear; in short, a whole piece of reality, with its language, its memories, its dreams, its human dramas, large and small, will be liquidated. That’s the plan. That’s what they want. Why should they want it? Hate exists. Truth can be simple.

On the other hand, I think this simple truth is itself enveloped by another, deeper one, more inchoate and lonely, perhaps resistant to formulation. I’ll try to say something about it and about the way it becomes manifest.

The early part of the demonstration is somehow satisfying. No sooner do we arrive than Ezra Nawi spots me and recruits me to his infiltration squads: “Come with me.” I should describe the situation. The stolen houses, now inhabited by Israeli settlers, are about 100 meters down one of the main streets leading into the neighborhood. In recent months, the protestors have been strictly barred from approaching the houses, or even from setting foot in the upper part of the road. Settlers and right-wing activists have free run of the entire neighborhood, as do ultra-orthodox Jews who come to pray at the nearby tomb of Simeon the Just. Our quarrel is not with the latter. The houses themselves are now draped in Israeli flags, and on the roof of the al-Ghawi house there is also a large, crude candelabra, probably there since Chanukah.

Something changed slightly in the course of this last week. Some of our people prepared an appeal to the Legal Adviser to the government, Yehuda Weinstein; the letter sets out, in precise, understated language, the tortuous story of police violence and illegal actions in Sheikh Jarrah over the last few months, and also offers the fairly obvious explanation that senior officers in the Jerusalem police are driven by a blatant right-wing bias. The letter was signed by many well-known public figures in Israel and received much media attention. So today, riding on the crest of a wave, however small, we are no longer playing by their rules. The police barricades are up, and both the blue-grey Jerusalem police and the sinister, black-clothed riot police are there, but a good 200 to 300 activists, maybe more, are already milling around in the upper part of the street. I follow Ezra and a few others by a roundabout route, over walls and fences and through an olive grove, to end up in front of the stolen houses themselves. The drummers are drumming, and there are shouts: “Free Sheikh Jarrah!” “One Two Three Four, Fascism Will March No More!” And so on. I hug Nasir, one of the evictees. About fifty of us have gotten through, and there is a steady stream of new faces, including, to my delight, my son Misha and his bride-to-be Erika (they announced their engagement to us just half an hour before).

It is good to be here, close to the families (a really good place to celebrate an engagement). On the outer wall of the al-Kurd house, someone has etched a Palestinian flag with the caption: “History is With Us.” A small contingent of police is there to hold us back, and at first they are relaxed, almost nonchalant. Occasionally, we hear shouts and cries from the upper street; later we discover that the police had already moved to suppress the protest there with violence, and the first arrests were under way. Eventually they get to us, too. Reinforcements arrive, and soon they attack, pushing and poking us, lashing out, bending arms, kicking a little, roughing us up, and occasionally picking someone out and carrying him or her off to the detention vans. I’ve seen much worse, but it isn’t pleasant, and it is, needless to say, both illegal and gratuitous. A non-violent demonstration of this sort has repeatedly been pronounced legal by the judges who, week after week, released the arrested activists (after a weekend in jail) and reprimanded the police for making the arrests in the first place.

Herded uphill, amidst the yelling and the scuffles, we are singing the famous Hasidic song of Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav: “The whole world is but a very narrow bridge, and the main thing is not to afraid.” Speaking of truth, it rings true on this sorrowful street, like a memory of what it once meant to be Jewish. I wonder what Rabbi Nachman, one of the deepest minds in Jewish history, would have said about what is happening in Sheikh Jarrah. Actually, I think I know. A policeman strikes Erika, and Misha instinctively moves to protect her, pushes him back. A friend asks me why we are refusing to obey the police commands, why we are moving so slowly, holding our ground, so that they have to push and drag us physically up the hill, and some people get hurt and get arrested. I explain. It is important to resist. It is basic to who we are and what we stand for. Even if no one is watching, even if no one knows, if we are to remain human, we must continue to bear witness and to resist.

Even as I say the words, I realize they’re not much of an argument. So what if we resist? Look at the forces arrayed against us, look at our failure to make change happen. Where are the hundreds of thousands who should be standing here with us? What good is truth, anyway, when the liars and the thieves and the demented politicians have the guns, and when the ordinary Israeli person, whoever he is, just living his life, won’t break through the shell of his lethal indifference? But I’m not groping toward a philosopher’s truth, and the moral equation is not, after all, in question. We’ve already defined the situation. “Thou shalt not steal.” What does this have to do with being poked and prodded up the hill?

I think the point is that there is no ordinary person. For every one there’s the same precarious balance, and the same struggle. The easy way is always to go along with the cruelty; most do. Some don’t. You can see it here on the street. Something has galvanized the people around me to do the decent thing. I don’t think they had to think about it. It is something one knows the way we know that someday we will die, though we mostly deny this in our hearts; or the way we know how to fall in love, and how to stay in love, and how to hold a baby and how to rest when we are tired and other things like that. Such knowledge isn’t simple in the way the other kind of truth might be. It is something we carry in our bodies, and it’s often a rather delicate and complicated business, where it’s easy to make the wrong choice out of fear or laziness or confusion. Hence the struggle. When you make the right choice, there’s truly no mistaking it. No syllogisms or proof-texts are needed. Your skin tells you, or your muscles and bones, even before your mind looks for words. You feel whole—a whole human being, capable of action. I look around me at the stalwarts of the Sheikh Jarrah protests. The moral calculus of action, easily put into words, is not the only reason they are here. Actually, nothing instrumental can fully explain it, any more than the instrumental or the reasonable can explain why we are alive. Let them poke me and push me and arrest me and curse me, I don’t care. I care that they have driven Nasir and his family from their home. In that sense, I’m here for truth, a Greek truth, perhaps, the peeling away of a veil. I will stand my ground.

There was another good example of it last week. Yonatan Shapira, a captain in the Air Force who has refused to serve, who helped organize the letter of the pilots refusing to perform missions in the Palestinian territories, sprayed two graffiti on the last remnant of the wall surrounding the Warsaw ghetto: “Liberate all ghettos” (in Hebrew) and “Free Gaza and Palestine” (in English). He did it openly, in the full light of day, and he also explained it:

“The Holocaust has been appropriated for years now by the Israeli government and the Israeli education system. The Israeli establishment would rather have Jews and Israelis in a state of frightened victims who worship militarism…..In our act we tried to separate between the actions of the Israeli Government and Jews. The lesson that should be learned from the Holocaust is resistance to any form of racism. Resistance to ethnic cleansing and forced expulsion of people. Resistance to the starvation of human beings and their confinement into ghettos. These are issues that the Israeli policy makers would like us to ignore and forget.”

At the top of the hill I find my colleague Tamar. “How’s the revolution going up here?” I ask her, a little sadly. “Just look at these people,” she says. “They’ve planted some strong seeds. Some day they will bear fruit.”

Ezra Nawi, after a day in the mud

June 26, 2010   Bi’r el-’Id

There’s a strange beauty in the viscous black mud that comes up from the depths of the earth, from the bottom, or somewhere near the bottom, of the well we are cleaning in Bi’r al-’Id. Bucket after bucket of it, lifted by pulley from down below, straggles to the surface, where we unload it and pour it out on the rocky escarpment. Its texture changes remarkably over the long morning hours from a watery top layer to heavy, shiny dark loam to a granular, sticky brown. It has a strong smell, like the sulphurous mud from the Dead Sea (not very far away) that people smear over their bodies for healing. Yehuda says the Palestinians of Bi’r al-’Id should bottle it and sell it at the airport: “Sacred Mud from the Sacred Desert.” There’s no end to it. The buckets go down and up, down and up, heavier each time; the rope attached to the pulley is now caked solid with mud, and the escarpment has turned into a mire. Amiel, Dolev, and Danny are down in the dark recesses, filling the buckets alongside Haj Isma’il. Suddenly Ezra arrives—he was released from jail only a few days ago—and immediately lowers himself, like Spider Man, down the shaft. You can’t stop him. When they emerge hours later, they are black troglodytes, covered with mud from head to toe; and we, too, working the buckets above ground, are splattered, encrusted, soaked.

When I said goodbye to Amiel almost five months ago, he said, “We will meet in the spring, and when you get back, things will be the same here, just a little worse.” But actually in some ways they’re a lot worse. The continuing struggles against the occupation, on the ground in the territories, take their usual grim course, but inside Israel hardly a day passes without some new and sickening jolt. The country is in the grip of violent nationalist paranoia spiked with inventive forms of wickedness and active hatred for Palestinians, of an intensity I’ve never seen before. Here, for example, is what Yulia Shalamov Berkovitch, a member of the Knesset (from the Kadima “centrist” party), has to say: “”Israeli academia apparently suffers from ‘Palestinomania,’ a mild psychological illness whose symptoms include self-hatred, an affinity for Israel’s enemies, Jewish anti-Semitism and/or anti-Zionism. The spread of ‘Palestinomania’ demands the immediate and painful treatment for all of our sake, and the sooner the better” (Haaretz, June 21).  I wonder what treatment she has in mind:  Lobotomies? Re-education camps? Firing squads? In the same report, we learned that the Minister of Education, Gideon Sa’ar, thinks that it is “important to examine the issues” raised by a rabidly right-wing group called Im Tirtzu in a report on “anti-Zionist trends” in Israeli universities. According to Im Tirtzu, 80% of the reading materials assigned in the departments of Political Science in Israel are anti-Zionist and anti-nationalist and should, one must assume, be banned. They seem to have a black list, which no doubt includes the works of Rousseau, Plato, and John Rawls. The minister, whom some once saw as relatively enlightened, apparently goes along with this. The next step, I suppose, is censorship in the classroom, followed by book burnings in the public square.

Milder signs of the times are everywhere; the mayor of Ramat Hasharon in the coastal plain has decreed that in all schools that require a uniform, the pupils, from next year on, will have to tie Israeli flags to their wrists. He must feel, perversely, that  a lack of patriotism is eating away at the foundations of our national existence. Add to this the decision by Jerusalem’s mayor Barkat to demolish 22 Palestinian houses in Silwan—the same homes we saved by an international campaign in 2005—and the ongoing, indeed escalating evictions of Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah. Barkat seems intent on setting the city on fire.

But here we are in Bi’r el-’Id, where our Palestinian hosts are, miraculously, rebuilding the homes from which they were cruelly evicted over a decade ago. The sun is dancing, the wind fierce for a summer day, the sky endlessly open like the human heart at its best, like the desert stretching toward the horizon just below us. I ask my friend Muhammad how things have been during my absence. “Fine,” he says; “no problems.” Afterwards I hear that his father was recently assaulted by Yaakov Talya, the notorious settler-owner of the ranch aptly named Lucifer’s Farm, hardly half a mile away; when the soldiers turned up, they of course arrested Muhammad’s father. He is now awaiting trial. (Perhaps the military judges will send him to jail for the crime of having been attacked, as they have so many others we know.) And the road to Jinba, which we can see from our perch on the high ridge, has again been closed by the army after we punched it open with a water convoy last fall. Not long ago a boy from Jinba was seriously injured and had to be carried all the way up the mountain to the road near Bi’r el-’Id. Two weeks ago settlers from Chavat Maon entered Palestinian Twaneh, threw rocks at the villagers, and tried to set a Palestinian house on fire. In short:  Plus ça change….

Yet mud-stained, back aching, thirsty, I surprise myself today. I am borne along on a wave of irrational, happy hope. I have missed these weekends in South Hebron—missed the people, the Arabic, the desert landscapes, maybe even the danger. Each moment we spend here has its own irreducible value. Each act of defiant friendship is self-fulfilling, self-delighting. There it is again, that odd, unpredictable happiness, the heady wine of inner freedom. Yesterday we marched in protest in Silwan—some 500 ordinary Israelis doing the simple, the decent thing—and at first I was wondering where the Palestinians were (most were standing at their windows and doors and watching us), and my colleague Yossi Zeira said to me: “This is our task. No one will do it for us. Every good action counts and adds to the pressure. Slowly they will add up and bring change.” Alan, walking beside me, said he had felt tired after a day at work and almost didn’t come, and then he remembered a phrase from the end of Stephen Poliakoff’s film “1939″: “It is when the good people, or even those who are only half-good, remain silent that evil flourishes.”  And there are moments of still deeper insight. When Eileen heard the rhymed slogan we’ve been chanting—”Ein kedusha be’ir kvushah, There is No Sanctity in an Occupied City”—she said: “Maybe there is sanctity only in an occupied city.” I think she’s right. Nothing in my experience comes as close to the meaning of a word like “holy” as the act of protest against what the municipality and the police are doing in Palestinian East Jerusalem.

That’s also what Istvan tells me as we work the buckets by the well. He’s a religious man, and to him these Ta’ayush hours in South Hebron are what religion is all about:  truth, for example, and loving-kindness. “The settlers think that they represent the true Judaism,” I say to him, “and sometimes I’m afraid they may be right.” “No,” he says, “they are certainly wrong.” At moments a great simplicity emerges in the mind, like cleaning a muddy well, and you taste a giddy seriousness, a sudden lightening of the heart. Sitting beside us is Ziad Muhamra, shot point-blank in the face by a soldier some years ago when Ziad refused to take his goats off his ancestral grazing grounds. He told me his story last time I was here. Ziad survived, thanks to a devoted Israeli surgeon. He was in hospital for a year, fed by tubes. Today he remembers happily the moment he ate solid food again for the first time—a banana. It took him half an hour to eat it, and the whole ward, the nurses and the doctors and the other patients, all gathered round to watch this astonishing event. Now he has come back to Bi’r el-’Id. When he mentions his doctor, searching for the foreign Hebrew name, it seems to me, for a second, as if this tough shepherd from the desert, a true survivor, is close to tears.

But some things are simpler than others. ‘Id has joined us today; we embrace like brothers when I see him. But his life in the village is perhaps no longer viable. People envy him—he is educated, articulate, self-possessed—and some don’t like the fact that he has Israeli friends. A few days ago Palestinians came to Umm al-Khair and tried to kill him; he managed to get away. He has a wife and a baby daughter, and it’s not clear where he can go; he’d like to study somewhere in Europe. He’s good with his hands, artistic by nature. Maybe we’ll be able to help him. Then there is Haj Isma’il, with his 33 children from four wives. How will he manage to support this huge tribe from his tent in the tiny, precarious khirbeh of Bi’r el-’Id? He wanted to take a fifth wife, but the Qadi wouldn’t allow it, not even when Haj Isma’il tried to persuade him he’d already divorced the first wife. “I still have my strength,” he says, “and I don’t want to waste it or take it with me to the grave.”

“So how was jail?” I ask Ezra when he emerges from the well. “Akhla—great,” he says; “highly recommended.” He was imprisoned for a month after Judge Eilata Ziskind found him guilty of attacking a police officer during house demolitions at Umm al-Khair, where ‘Id lives.  I have no doubt that the charge was cooked up by the police in order to punish a central figure in the non-violent resistance to the occupation. The first week in jail, in Jerusalem, was hard; they refused to allow him to receive books, so he went on hunger strike—for four days he ate nothing, until the prison authorities relented. Afterwards he was transferred to Dekel Prison in Beer-Sheva, where things improved. The cell was filthy, he says, and infested with cockroaches who paid no heed to human attempts to drive them away; they slept with him in his bed, emerged from his towel when he showered. One day he asked the commanding officer: “Are these part of the menu or part of the punishment?” He found a 50-meter stretch of corridor where he was allowed to walk, and every day he would pace it up and down, for hours. He lost a lot of weight. But there’s no trace of bitterness in him—quite the contrary, today he seems to me at peace, and full of hope. At lunch I say to him, “I hear you’re feeling optimistic.” He laughs. “Yes. Just look around. Two years ago we didn’t even know the name of this place. These people had been driven off their land, the houses and terraces were destroyed, the wells stopped up. Now we’ve brought them back and stood by them, and we’ve helped them to stand up to the settlers and the soldiers and not to be afraid. They are here to stay. They are home. You can train people so they become able to resist. Even a few people like that make a huge difference. In the end we will win. So of course I’m optimistic. You must be optimistic, too, otherwise why would you be here?”