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it was one Israeli soldier who shot my daughter, but one hundred former Israeli soldiers came to Anata to build a playground for her.
I still sit in that ambulance every day. I keep waiting for it to move.
Rami was in the hospital, waiting for us. He
But I refuse to be a victim.
There is one living victim and that is the man who killed my daughter. He was a teenager
The thing is, we Palestinians don’t exist as humans for many people. I am officially stateless.
We keep on going. We have to. Rami and me, our sons, Araab and Yigal, are together on
But here’s the key—we are not voiceless, no matter how much silence there is.
We need to learn how to share this land, otherwise we will be sharing it in our graves.
high summer of 1835, a Maltese sailor—a
happened upon a young English-speaking traveler in the market of Akka,
traveler was seeking to make a journey by boat from the Sea of Galilee to the Sea of Salt,
Christopher Costigin was twenty-five years old.
grown up on Thomas Street in Dublin.
He wanted to see for himself the river that Moses had seen from the heights of Mount Nebo, where Jesus had been baptized by John,
The source of God was, he was sure, to be found at the Dead Sea.
The Sea—the lowest point of land on earth—is
Costigin became known as Costigan in the history books.
a headland on the Dead Sea was named after him.
name of the Maltese sailor went forever unknown.
The suicide bombers camped out for weeks in caves near Nablus. They
After the death of Matti Peled, Smadar got in the habit of winding his watch at bedtime.
Why, she asked, were all the clocks in the back rooms of the house exactly one hour off?
maybe—he thought later—the clockmaker didn’t want to dwell in that time at all, and she was, in the back of her house, always an hour ahead, so that the things that had happened there might not, yet, have happened here.
Peled had worn the Timex all through the ’48 war, his days in the Knesset, the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War, the agreement with Sadat,
talisman of sorts.
only time he wanted not to wear it or consult it at all was at the conclusion o...
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agreement, he wrote, was like a piece of chamber music disguised
temporary salve for the Palestinian ear but designed, in the end, only for the Israeli violin.
After he left the morgue, Rami had to go to his father’s house to tell him what had happened to Smadar.
His father, almost eighty years old—a
Yitzak put his hand to the bridge of his nose, then rose slowly and said: I’m awfully tired, son, I have to go to bed now.
As if things that had happened there might not, yet, have happened here.
Water dissolves more substances than any other liquid, even acid.
At the end of the Second World War a young Bedouin shepherd of the Ta’amirah tribe
Muhammad al-Dhib came upon a cistern-shaped cave with an opening.
Several jars of ancient pottery
All empty.
tenth was sealed with red clay. Inside he found several strips of rolled leather.
hung it in a goatskin bag in the corner of his hut.
1947, Muhammad’s uncle noticed the leather scrolls hanging in the
took them to a market in Bethlehem.
they bought three of the scrolls for seven Jordanian pounds.
spring of 1948 John C. Trever, a Biblical scholar and archaeologist,
colleague of his, William F. Albright,
greatest manuscript discovery of ...
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Seven Jordanian pounds: at the time, twenty-eight dollars.
Jewish tradition it is forbidden to throw away writings invoking the name of God.
texts are interred in a genizah, a burial place for the written word.
custom of substituting the word G-d for God is based on the traditional practice in Jewish law of revering God’s Hebrew name.
