“Where is he?” I ask at once, shouting, even. “Where is he?” And my mother asks me to pipe down, because my younger brother is asleep. “Poor boy,” she says, “they kept them up all night.” I hurry into the room where my younger brother is sleeping, the room we once shared. I move the old door slowly, trying to keep it from squeaking in its frame. I look at him, his thin, long body stretched out on the bed. The bedspread he’d covered himself with has fallen off. I’m about to cover him, but then I realize it’s too hot for that. I notice I’m perspiring. I close the door again and hurry out. “I’m going out for a while. I’ll be back soon,” I tell my parents, checking their phone on my way out to see if it’s working. It isn’t. “It’s dead,” my father says. “Want something to eat?” I hear my mother ask from inside.

I pass by the housewives again, hear the nerve-wracking Egyptian music and the drums and the mechanical clapping. I hate that music, hate those housewives, I tell myself, and walk faster. I head up toward the mosque this time, which is more tiring. I’m not going to salam aleikum the SOBs sitting across from the mosque. I can’t stand them, them or their stories. How come everything’s so calm here, as if nothing’s happened? How I hate the people here. They live for their next meal and don’t think one step ahead. I hate them all, especially the older ones, who’ve neglected us and let the situation get as bad as it is. Obsequious nobodies. Look at us now. I’m mad at the lot of them. I don’t exactly know what’s happening, but it must be something much more serious than a terrorist cell or just some intelligence report or warning about a potential suicide bomber who’s entered Israel from Qalqilya or Tul-Karm and hidden out in the village. What the hell are they bringing the students home for? How could that tie in with a warning or a terrorist attack? What’s going on here damn it?

I check my mobile again, and the result only makes me feel worse. I’ll take the car and then see. First I’ve got to get the car back, though. The entrance to the village is less crowded by now, but there are still dozens of people milling around. The mayor isn’t there anymore. He stationed a few of his thugs in strategic spots to keep people from getting close to the barbed wire. There’s no more bottleneck and I can get my car out of there. Maybe I ought to go to the town hall first, to check whether they’ve had any news. The radio is still playing happy music, talking about the economy, rapes, robberies, Palestinian homes that have been demolished and a few terrorists who’ve been killed.

I check my wallet and decide I’d better go see my older brother at the bank on my way home, to withdraw a few hundred shekels. The bank is crowded now, because everyone who works outside of the village has decided to use this day off for errands. Luckily for me, I don’t have to stand in line. I head straight for the office where my brother works. “Say,” my brother greets me, “this is serious, isn’t it? People have been coming in and saying that the village is surrounded. What do they say in your paper?” only to discover that I have no way of being in touch with my paper. He goes on, “Must be some very red alerts, targeted alerts,” jargon that’s become second nature to Arabs living in Israel, thanks to the media, who tend to classify the warnings by their level of severity: general, hot, focused, targeted…

Everyone at the bank is discussing today’s events. Nobody’s in a hurry to use terms like closure or curfew. They prefer to wonder what it all means and why soldiers would be surrounding the village. Nothing like this has happened since the beginning of military rule. We’ve had the occasional roadblock and cars are often checked, but never — not even in the days of the Gulf War or the first Intifada — was there a decision not to let the inhabitants out. The customers at the bank don’t seem too rattled. Looks like when all is said and done they accept the decision. They’re upset to be losing a day of work, but they don’t see the events as a blatant breach of normal relations between citizens and their country.

I try to look calm too as I answer the questions they and the clerks fling at me. “What do you think, must be a serious terrorist roaming around here, huh?”

“I suppose,” I say. And one customer protests, “Shame on you, calling them terrorists. Say istish’hadi, say fida’i. What’s become of us? Are we going to start calling them terrorists too?”

A clerk with rectangular glasses and an official black suit, complete with white kerchief, says, “As far as I’m concerned, they can blow up wherever they want, but what right do they have to hide out here? Don’t we have enough problems already? They should just leave us alone. We don’t need to take part in this war.” Another woman standing in the line that’s cordoned off with colored chains says, “The problem is the children. What’ll happen if he hides his explosives in the bushes, God forbid, and the children play there and touch them by accident? Those Daffawiyya West Bank residents have no shame.” The customers burst out laughing. Somehow it was enough for them to hear that word, Daffawiyya, to start laughing. Of course people around here felt sorry for them when we saw them on TV, being shot at or trying to stage a protest. That wasn’t it at all. Most of the locals identified with the Palestinians on TV, but it’s as if the ones on TV were completely different people, not the same as the ones around here who loiter, looking for work. Those weren’t Palestinians but just workers who make trouble. No chance any of them would ever be on TV. People in our village identify with pictures from far away, forgetting that those pictures were taken a two minutes’ drive away from here.

I don’t have the patience for their arguments anymore, I’m really not interested. I know the situation is bad enough even without a Palestinian Intifada or the Israeli occupation or some suicide bomber hiding out in our village. Things are bad in any case. For us, for the Palestinians, it doesn’t make any difference. We’ll always have wars in this godforsaken place. Take any six feet in this place and you’ll find too much damage, too much turmoil, too much chaos in every part of our lives, which means the wars will never end. The real wars in this village are the wars over honor, over power, over inheritances and over parking places. Actually I sometimes think it would be a good idea if war did break out, to distract the inhabitants from their cruel and never-ending little fights. To me it doesn’t matter anymore so long as they stay away from me, so long as nobody comes to me when the next disagreement breaks out.

I go into my brother’s office and close the door behind me. “So, have things calmed down?” my brother asks. I nod. “Yes, I think things are going to work out. I just overreacted, sorry I scared you.”

“No, it really is serious. But what could actually happen?”

“I don’t know.”

I was debating whether to tell him they’d brought our younger brother home from the dorms in the middle of the night, and not just him, but all of the Arab students at the university. I decide not to because he’s liable to tell the others, and we shouldn’t create panic for now. I ask my brother for a little money. “A few hundred shekels,” I say, “maybe even a thousand if I may.”

“You may,” my brother says. “There are no ATMs, everything’s being done manually, so nobody will know you’re overdrawn. Strange, your salary hasn’t come in this month.”

“I know,” I mutter. “There was a problem with the accounting because of this new job they gave me. It should have been in my account by now.”

“Lucky for you that you came now,” my older brother says. “All hell will break loose here today. The money hasn’t come in from the main branch. They wouldn’t let the armored car into the village, despite the security escort. And it’s Sunday, so the safe is almost empty. Mark my words, unless the money arrives, pretty soon we won’t have enough to give people.” He’s laughing now. “They’ll kill us. I told the manager I didn’t care. I was getting out of here. I don’t have what it takes to fight with these people.”