The baby’s bottle is ready. I leave it on the counter and have another cigarette by the window. It’s still early in the morning, and people are in no hurry to leave their homes. You can hear the crying of babies in the homes nearby. My parents must be awake by now, but I’ll wait till my wife and daughter wake up and then we’ll join them. The baby is the first to wake up. I lift her off the sofa, hug her, say good morning in the tone that she’s grown used to. I wonder if she’s aware of what’s going on around her. I put the bottle to her lips and she clasps it tightly and starts drinking. Ever since she was born, I’ve been worrying. In the early months I worried about crib death, about unexpected reactions to inoculations, about road accidents, about childhood illnesses. Sometimes I’d wake up in a panic and go check if she was still breathing. It never occurred to me that I’d actually have to worry about her having enough to eat. I never imagined a moment when I’d picture my little girl starving to death or lying on her bed bleeding after a bullet hit her. Scenes of children killed in the Intifada run through my mind. I think of the funerals and the posters of Palestinian babies who’d had half their skulls shot off, or photographs taken at hospitals, of babies with blood-soaked diapers, babies who had died and looked as if they were just asleep. Israeli TV doesn’t actually show pictures of dead Jewish babies. They make do with pictures of the child when he or she was still alive. I hold my daughter tight, clutching her. The sound of her sucking on her bottle intensifies my fears. It’s the first time I feel hopeless. Because until now, despite all we’ve been through, I knew I’d manage somehow and one way or another I’d figure out a way for my loved ones and myself to survive.

My wife wakes up and turns her head nervously till she sees me and the baby. “What happened?” she asks, concerned. “Everything’s okay,” I quickly reassure her. I move closer and finger her hair, hoping she still wants my support. She bows her head, trying to sort out what has happened to her during the night and to figure out how much of it was reality and how much a dream. She takes the baby from me, with the bottle still in her mouth, places her in her lap and asks, “Was there any more shooting after I fell asleep? Have they left?” I shrug. “No, they didn’t shoot any more after that. I don’t know if they’ve left,” I lie. “I haven’t gone outdoors yet. We’ll go over to my parents’ soon and find out what’s going on. But I don’t think there’s going to be any school today.”

2

There is nobody in the streets except the Palestinian workers. The mayor and villagers have ordered them to collect the garbage and dispose of it in the soccer field at the outskirts of the village. People are in no hurry to leave their homes this morning. They’re suspicious, still unable to figure out what exactly was happening during the night and what the shooting was all about. The Palestinians are the only ones still working. Some of them see us making our way to our parents’ home and make a sign for food by putting their hands to their mouths. I ignore their gestures, not because I don’t care but because I don’t want to give the impression that we have any food left. I shrug as if to indicate I wished I had some. My parents’ house looks dirtier than usual. There are spots on the floor despite my mother’s attempts to get rid of them with a dry rag. The fact that their tank would run dry before ours was to be expected. Their home has always been the place where everyone congregated and where everything happened, a kind of extended-family living room. We ate most of our meals there even before all this began, and Mother was never one to skimp on food or water. But my calculations were off and in fact somehow the faucets in my parents’ home remain the last ones from which we can still squeeze a few glasses of water.

“Do you believe it? They’ve stolen our water,” my brother greets me. “They climbed up on my roof and yours and stole the water.” He tells me this as if it were new to me. For him it is yet another thing to tell, and he is very agitated as he says it — more agitated to be standing there and telling me such things than he is at the implications of his report. I nod and look at my wife, who is becoming even more anxious. “It isn’t so terrible,” I reply at once, but I’m actually thinking of my wife as I say it. “I bought a few bottles of drinks that should last us quite a while. I promise you that even though they’ve stolen our water, we’ll be the last ones in the village to run out. By then everything will be okay.”

My response has a mildly calming effect on them all, though I’ve allowed myself a deliberate overstatement. I explain that from now on, water will be used for nothing but drinking, and it should be for the children only. We’ll manage on fruit juice or carbonated drinks. “No more cooking with water,” I tell my mother. “And let’s not even think of tea or coffee. One thing’s for sure: we’ve got to guard whatever food and water we have left against thieves. I suggest we bring everything we have and put it here, at Mother and Father’s house, the only place that always has people in it. The safest place for the important things is right here.”

My two brothers join me. We begin at my house. I get a few large plastic garbage bags to use for moving the food. “We don’t want anyone to see what we’re moving,” I say. At first they laugh at the quantities of food I’ve bought, the bags of rice and flour and the canned goods. There isn’t much we can do with the rice and flour without water anyway, so we only take the drinks, the baby food and the cans. There was less than I’d expected in my older brother’s house. He had no drinks left at all. Mostly he had potatoes, wafers and candy bars.

3

There’s the sound of heavy shooting again, but not the same as last night, and there’s lots of noise in the next street. As we all duck and the women start screaming, Father goes outside, unperturbed, to see what’s going on. “It’s just shooting,” he says. “Some local guys shooting in the air. Come see for yourselves.” My brother and I go out, and the women and children stay indoors. A large group, several dozen men, their faces covered in blue-and-red checkered kaffiyehs, are making their way down the road with their weapons held high. Every once in a while one of the men presses the trigger, letting loose a round of shots. A group of children are following them along, some dragging their bikes, trying to get close enough to inspect the weapons. Every time one of the guys shoots, the children cheer.

The next-door neighbors come out too and stand in their doorways to watch the show, a first for us. They gather around, and we join them. Some of them already know that the young men from the village have shot at the soldiers. A few of the neighbors are saying the guys actually managed to kill some soldiers at the roadblock and that this accounted for all the shooting during the previous night. They hit a few houses, but nobody in the village was killed. The younger children say they’ve already seen the houses that were hit, that the bullets were enormous and made holes through the walls of the buildings they hurt, and that it’s a miracle nobody was hit.

A few of the older women shout with joy at the sight of the armed men, as if they were warriors about to liberate the village from a siege. The young men’s face coverings are not enough to conceal their identities. On the contrary — they are all well known and are recognized in no time. All of them have a criminal record, they are members of a gang that steals cars and pushes drugs, the kind of gang that have become an inseparable part of the local scene. Now the women are shouting and treating them like war heroes. Their attempt at imitating well-known Palestinian scenes is pathetic. What can they be thinking? And just what organization do they belong to? The pitiful scene of drug dealers and thieves roaming the village streets like some kind of new heroes can only mean bad news. They are being joined by more and more people ostensibly wanting to be part of the victory march, following them, showing support and cheering. The villagers seem to have decided on a new form of leadership, headed by criminals who acquired their weapons for illegal purposes, definitely not nationalistic ones. What exactly does the nationalist consciousness of those people consist of? Not that this matters anymore. They’ve got their weapons, they’ve got a hold on the village and now everyone is supposed to cheer and salute them.