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Rami
Sixty-seven years old, he
Eight days before he died,
François Mitterrand, the French president, ordered a final course of ortolan,
tiny yellow-throated...
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He fasted for the next eight and a half days until he died.
In the fall of the First Intifada,
pair of birds migrating
were found by a
fourteen-year-old boy, Tarek Khalil, who
It was his job to put a tiny metal ring around their legs,
so their migration could be documented
The metal bands might, he thought, unbalance them in flight.
Tarek took the songbirds back out to the hillside to let them go, unbanded, amid the apricot trees.
A rubber bullet, when shot from a metal tube on the end of an M-16, leaves the barrel of the gun at more than one hundred miles per hour.
they were designed to be fired at the ground, then bounce up
The bullet that killed Abir traveled fifteen meters through the air before it smashed into the back of her head,
She had gone to the grocery store to buy candy.
Every day since Abir was killed, Bassam has walked to the mosque in the hour before sunrise
Forty-eight years old,
A town of neither here nor there, Anata appears
a Palestinian town, in the West Bank, under Israeli occupation, within the Jerusalem governate.
surrounded almost totally by the Sep...
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The town shoulders up against the Shu’fat refugee camp. Shu’fat
It is easy to get into the camp—just
but it is tougher to get out.
Think of it like this: you are in Anata,
rear of a taxi, cradling a young girl in your arms.
Biblical Jeremiah—known
said to have been born in ancient Anata.
Bassam is haunted by his daughter’s candy bracelet.
It was decided to transfer her to Hadassah in Jerusalem.
shot came from the back of a moving jeep.
Commander of the Border Police wrote in his report
His men were, he said, in mortal danger.
Abir was ten years old.
border guard who fired the shot was eighteen years old.
Some Israeli soldiers in Lebanon were killed by French-made Milan anti-tank missiles,
sold by François Mitterrand’s government first to Syria, then on the black market to Hizbollah fighters.
Six soldiers were killed by fighters who—in an operation known as the Night of the Gliders—floated
M-16 used to shoot Abir was manufactured near the town of Samaria, North Carolina.
Bassam
teenager, many years before, in prison in Hebron, locked away for seven years.
Bassam spent weeks upon weeks in the infirmary.
doctors and nurses were worse than the prison guards.
Druze orderlies were fiercest of all:
After a year in lockup Bassam established a schedule for classes.
Know your enemy, know yourself.
He brought the poems to one of the prison guards, Hertzl Shaul, a part-time guard and a student of mathematics.
the hospital where Abir lay dying, Hertzl—who
