We watched them as we secured the periphery, and when we reached the wall, Alon asked the old man: Who did this? The old man replied, La’aerif. I don’t know. From the way he spoke, it was clear that he really didn’t know.
This was repeated four or five times. Alon asked more loudly each time, and the old man replied more weakly each time, close to tears.
Meanwhile, someone else came out of the house with a pail and a rag. A younger man. And stood beside the old man. Leave my father alone, please, he said to Alon in solid Hebrew. I’ll clean it off. Alon ignored him and asked the old man again: Who did this? Don’t lie to me that you don’t know! And the old man said, more accurately sobbed, La’aerif. And then, to our great shock, Alon slapped him. Hard. Almost punched him.
The old man, who, until that moment, had been leaning on his cane, lost his balance and collapsed onto the sidewalk. The cane fell out of his hand and rolled away, and his body, which had folded into itself, looked suddenly very small, like a child’s. His son yelled in Hebrew, What are you doing? What do you want from him? And moved a step forward. But Alon promptly aimed his rifle at him and shouted that he’d better start cleaning, or he’d get a bullet in the head. The son gave him a defiant look, but bit his lips, picked up the pail, and dipped the rag in it. A minute or two later, the father stood up, with great effort, and joined his son. Moving swiftly, they washed off the slogan, and when the last letter had disappeared, Alon signaled with a movement of his rifle barrel that they could go back inside. The father obeyed the order immediately, but the son stayed a moment longer, put his hand on the wall where the slogan had been, and only then joined his father. Alon followed them with his loaded rifle until they disappeared into the house.
We watched them and secured the periphery.
—
At the end of every week of the officer training course, we had a summarizing discussion with the platoon commander. Before the discussion following the incident with the old man, we spoke among ourselves in the tent and decided that if Alon didn’t bring it up, we would.
Toward the end of the discussion, when we realized that he planned to ignore what had happened, we signaled each other with our eyes. Dror, the huge navy guy, spoke first, followed by Amit, from the medical corps, and then me. We all said more or less the same thing: that we didn’t understand why he had to slap the old man. We chose our words carefully. We said we really wanted to understand. To have it explained to us. We were all new at this business in the territories. And he, Alon, had a lot of experience.
In response, his face turned redder than his beret, and it seemed that, in another minute, he’d aim his rifle at us.
He said: You want an explanation?
He said: Should I tell you about Rudner from my platoon who had a refrigerator dropped on his head from a roof in Jenin and has been in rehabilitation for a year already? Or do you prefer to hear about Samama, whose face was burned by a Molotov cocktail they threw into his jeep?
He said: This is war here, in case you didn’t realize it. We’re at war.
He said all that—but didn’t dare to touch any other Palestinian during our patrols in the alleyways of the camps. As soon as he realized that he wasn’t getting any support from us—that we wouldn’t secure the periphery for incidents like that—he took a step back.
And began to abuse us.
Until the end of the course, he took every opportunity to make our lives a misery. There was no mistaking the look in his eyes when he sent us running all over the base for no good reason, confined us to quarters on Saturdays, and looked for excuses to throw us out of the course: He despised us.
My army service can be divided into two parts: before that night in Nablus, and after it.
Something inside me broke that night, but something began to grow as well.
I closed the book and gestured to the audience that that was it, I had finished reading and the meeting was over. I thanked them in English. Then in Hebrew.
There was a light sprinkling of applause.
People put on their coats and spoke together in hushed voices as they made their way out.
Of my dozens of books, only two copies were bought at the improvised table-stand.
One by Benjy.
He asked if I would write a dedication to him in Hebrew.
His mother approached, put a gentle hand on his shoulder, offered me a pen, and said quietly, and quite genuinely, “Thank you.” Her face remained frozen. Expressionless. But it seemed to me that I could see the thin trail of a tear running down her cheek. Or maybe it was just a wrinkle.
I took the pen—and it remained in the air for several long seconds. I couldn’t decide between a few seemingly personal but actually generic dedications I use in such cases, but then a Meir Ariel song began to play in my head, “It’s Been a Rough Night on Our Forces at the Suez.” Go figure how our minds work. In retrospect, I think it was because the first words are, “I’m reading Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway, in a beautiful translation by Aharon Amir”—and “Islands in the Stream” by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers was still stuck in my inner music player. In any case, at the end of Meir Ariel’s song, there are
