Цитаты из книги The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine

The settlers’ takeover of the Hebron vegetable market was, in a way, an opportunity. Hanegbi held the deed to the land on which the market was built and leases on two other parcels in Hebron, one of them in Tel Rumeida. The settlers’ presence there had put the Israeli government in an uncomfortable position. They had…

Overall, Jews enjoyed greater security and freedom in the Muslim Levant than they did among Christians elsewhere, particularly in Eastern Europe, but also in the West. In his official report to the British Parliament on the 1929 “disturbances,” Sir Walter Shaw acknowledged that “there had been no recorded attacks of Jews…

He graduated. The Intifada ended. Not much else changed. The gates to the entire West Bank have been sealed and, with the PA’s complicity, all the Palestinians therein sit at tiny desks, studying their own humiliation. Everything Issa had experienced convinced him that unarmed resistance, if sufficiently organized,…

When Ezra finally decamped from the city in 1947, Jawad said, he left the business—and the building—to Jawad’s grandfather, who one year later turned it over to the UN so that it could be used as a shelter for refugees fleeing villages in what had overnight become the state of Israel. Jawad told me that he had gone to the…

It wasn’t just a family story—the 1929 massacre, in which nearly 10 percent of Hebron’s small Jewish community was slaughtered, formed a fundamental prehistory for the entire community of Hebron’s settlers, an “absent-present, not a past event of almost eighty years ago,” wrote Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, “a motive that…

Hebron is different from other earthly cities, but the painful truth is that Planet Hebron is not far off at all. I don’t just mean from Beersheba or Nablus, but also from Washington, London, Los Angeles, or New York. It’s our planet. We made it what it is. And by we I mean all of us—those of us who acted, and those who…

And so history is made—not by strategies or decisions carefully arrived at, but by chaos and improvisation. Something ugly was spilling everywhere.

This world was closing fast, and suffocating him. And it wasn’t just the heartbreak of watching his birthplace shrink and die that he found stultifying. It was the whole region and all of its endless, stupid violence, the impossibility of existing as anything other than a member of a specific tribe, be it Jew or Arab or…

On the crust of the planet people fight and die and are broken for their beliefs or their land or their dignity. Their leaders stoop to praise them and promise that their sacrifices will not be forgotten. Whole nations are made of such promises. But above and around it all moves money, which has no loyalties and no…

I once asked him if he didn’t sometimes lose hope. Even as I asked it, I knew it was a foolish question, but I needed to know how he kept going. The darkness in Hebron was so complete and overwhelming. (“How can one emerge unharmed from this daily schizophrenia?” asked the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo after a visit to…