I saw them hug each other in the snow. It was the first snow I’d ever seen. Quiet, lighting up the night, not banging on the windowpane like rain. I stood at the window, looking out at the lawn, which was covered in whiteness. After that, I spent most of my time just lying on my bed with my mouth open and my head aching, until they broke up.

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, Naomi wore a white blouse and read out of a black looseleaf about a little girl who sees her father on fire in the forest. At the end of the ceremony I told her I loved her, and she smiled. On Memorial Day for the Fallen Soldiers, she was furious because I hadn’t stood at attention during the memorial siren. We were sitting together in biology class. Everyone else got up, and I stayed seated. I had lost a grandfather and an uncle in the war, after all. After the siren she didn’t sit down. She took her bag and left.

She didn’t show up for lunch. She wasn’t in her room or in the library. What an idiot I was. What was the matter with me? Couldn’t I have stood? Her father was killed in active duty after all. He died when she was still very little. There’s a picture of him over her bed, with her on his shoulders. She must have been about three; she hardly remembers him. He was an officer in the IDF, and he’d been in charge of the evacuation of Yamit. He didn’t die in the war. He’d had an accident on his way home from his base. The IDF took her on a trip to Canada once. They pay her tuition.

I sat at the school gate listening to sad music on my Walkman — the Cranes, maybe, or the Swans — and I waited for her.

Naomi got out of her mother’s Mitsubishi. She had tears in her eyes. It was the first time I saw her mother. She looked at me and drove off. They’d been to the ceremony at the military cemetery on Mount Herzl. But that wasn’t why she was sad.

“Why didn’t you stand for the siren?”

I’m not Jewish.

“I love you. I’ve loved you for a long time. I told my mother that I love you. I cried, and I told her I couldn’t take it anymore. Every time you told me I love you I thought, in my heart, So do I, so do I.” She smiled.

Now I understood what true joy was. I carried her bag to her room. I was ecstatic. It was the happiest Independence Day eve of my life.

A National Home

Sometimes I think about when I was young, and I thank God I’m not there anymore. What a mess I was: the way I looked, the way I felt. I’m so happy to be an adult. In the middle of twelfth grade I went to a café for the first time. It was one of those Tuesday evenings when they gave us time off. That’s when I learned that you could order a salad as a separate course, served in a big bowl, and that there were different kinds. Salad on its own, without a pitta. We were sitting in Atara Café, where Amos Oz sat in My Michael. Naomi ordered a Greek salad, and I ordered a hot chocolate. Something familiar, something I could afford.

In twelfth grade, Naomi took me to the movies for the first time. I couldn’t believe that girls could go into a movie theater. There used to be a movie theater in Tira, but not anymore. There’s a small room, with walls of unpainted bricks and a television set. When we were little, Aunt Ibtissam’s son, who was really big then, took us to see Tarzan. There were wooden chairs, like in elementary school. It was nothing more than a dark hovel. My little brother threw up right at the beginning, and all of us got out of there pretty fast. Everyone kept shouting and smoking, and when Tarzan’s guys appeared in the forest there were catcalls and whistling. I was petrified.

I was frightened in twelfth grade too. The movie theater was bound to be full of people like the Polanski students. They’d recognize me and I’d have nowhere to run. Sometimes the Polanski kids would come to the school gate and scream, “Death to the Arabs!” I never went out into the yard beyond the fence. It seemed too risky, too far from the guard.

Naomi said I had nothing to be afraid of at the movies. We were going to see Life According to Agfa, and she said it was a movie the thugs would never go to, a movie for left-wingers like her. We could sit through the whole movie holding hands. I didn’t have to be afraid of anyone.

The new life was exciting. I realized it wasn’t only bad kids who went to the movies. Grown-ups went too. Men and women sat together. Everything was clean and neat. The chairs were padded, and everyone dressed nicely. Boy, was I glad to see the two Arab kitchen workers in the film. They were cool, actually, and funny. The thugs were the bad guys. I couldn’t get over the pianist in the restaurant. Naomi said it was Danny Litani, a well-known singer. She didn’t have a tape of his in her room, but she had one of some guy who sang “Things Have Got to Change,” and “Just Get Out of the Territories.” I couldn’t believe a Jew would sing stuff like that.

Naomi was in a party called Ratz. She had a green shirt with the party logo, and she talked a lot about human beings as human beings. About how there was no difference between national groups, how individuals should be judged on their own merits, and how you shouldn’t look at a whole group as if everyone were the same. She said that in every nation there are good people and bad people. I never really understood what she was talking about, but I took the whole thing seriously.

In twelfth grade I understood for the first time what ’48 was. That it’s called the War of Independence. In twelfth grade I understood that a Zionist was what we called a Sahyuni, and it wasn’t a swearword. I knew the word. That’s how we used to curse one another. I’d been sure that a Sahyuni was a kind of fat guy, like a bear. Suddenly I understood that Zionism is an ideology. In civics lessons and Jewish history classes, I started to understand that my aunt from Tulkarm is called a refugee, that the Arabs in Israel are called a minority. In twelfth grade I understood that the problem was serious. I understood what a national homeland was, what anti-Semitism was. I heard for the first time about “two thousand years of exile” and how the Jews had fought against the Arabs and the British. I didn’t believe it. No way. The English had wanted the Jews here, after all. In Bible class, I discovered that Abraham was Isaac’s father. In twelfth grade I discovered that it was Isaac, not Ismael, who’d been replaced with a sheep.

In twelfth grade, the kids in my class started running in the parking lot, getting into shape for the army. They were taken to all sorts of installations and training camps, and I received a bus pass and a ticket to the Israel Museum. Sometimes soldiers in uniform came to our school to talk with the students, and I wasn’t allowed to take part. Our teacher always apologized. He was embarrassed to have to tell me it wasn’t for me. In twelfth grade I understood I wouldn’t be a pilot even if I wanted to be, not only because I wasn’t fit and my grades weren’t good enough. There was no way they would even call me up for the screening tests. I sure had a good laugh at my father.

An Educational Approach

That day, Mother and Father stayed home from work. They dressed up, and an hour and a half before the appointment they got in the car. They knew they mustn’t be late. They had to look like parents. The night before, they’d come to pick me up at the hospital. The school guidance counselor had taken me to the Emergency Room at Shaarei Tsedek hospital. How I screamed at her when I heard she’d asked my parents to come! I’d shamed them in the worst way. And I’d shamed myself too. Now I’d hate myself even more.

I just kept praying: Don’t let my parents find out. Don’t let my father find out. But now they knew. They came to the hospital and saw me having my stomach pumped. They talked with the guidance counselor and took me back home to the village. My father’s friend Bassem was with us. He and my father had been playing chess when the counselor called, and he offered to go along to see how I was doing.