In This Place Together by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

The numbers of dead kept growing. Sulaiman heard about a roadside bombing in Gaza that tore into an armored Israeli school bus of settler children. Something in his stomach fell. Two adults were killed in the attack, several children wounded. At first, this felt new. It didn’t stay that way for long.

The day after the school bus attack, Sulaiman watched as Israel bombed Gaza, as Hamas and Islamic Jihad began organizing more suicide bombings inside Israel. A bomb would go off near a bus, in a mall, in a gas station, each instance taking several lives. On Israeli TV, the cameras sped past a hysterical woman with blood on her face, zoomed in on a child’s toy. Sulaiman wanted to be as far from these acts as possible. He watched, though he wanted so much to look away.

Israel continued using live ammunition to disperse protests, and the number of Palestinian dead rose dizzyingly, thousands of people marching in the streets behind the bodies of martyrs. After attending one of the first marches, Sulaiman didn’t join again. He understood the collective mourning, but couldn’t stop thinking that some people, the ones competing for positions and power, were benefiting from all this. It was a game for them, the martyrs only numbers. But it was also impossible to avoid the numbers. By December 2, 2000, more than twenty Israelis and two hundred Palestinians were dead.

One afternoon, Sulaiman found himself rushing his youngest brother, Nabil, to the hospital. A rubber bullet had struck his head. When the doctor said Nabil would be fine, Sulaiman let out a breath, thinking how easily it could have been different, a miracle of centimeters. But it seemed impossible to let a full breath out, to escape what was happening. In Hizma, the sounds of helicopters became so familiar that Sulaiman only noticed their absence. During his village’s demonstrations—filled with shouting, tears, stones, and, occasionally, Molotov cocktails—the soldiers often used live bullets. Sometimes, villagers would die. Often they were not the people at the front throwing stones but the ones in the back or, once, someone sitting on his balcony, reading a book. Every day people were taken to jail, sometimes for planning the violence, but often for throwing stones or nothing at all.

The first time that his brother Karim’s oldest son, Khalid, went to jail during the second intifada, it was for throwing stones. After his second arrest, this time accused of inciting other children to throw stones, Sulaiman’s sister-in-law asked him to speak to the boy, urge him to be careful. The rest of the family had already tried to keep Khalid away from the demonstrations, to focus on studying, but he wasn’t listening. Sulaiman agreed to try.

When Sulaiman came face-to-face with his nephew, he raised his voice, told him he was throwing his life away.

“You want to die?” he scoffed. “It’s easy to die. It’s much harder to live.”

Afterward, the boy’s mother pulled him aside. “Shwayya, slow down. You were too harsh on him. You did the same thing when you were young.

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