Assaf Gavron - The Hilltop

Roni’s gaze wandered on, aiming higher and farther afield, and then stopped suddenly in its tracks in surprise: Herodium! And he became aware of the perfect roundness of the hilltop in the distance, how it surged forth sensually from the body of the flat desert, light in color and so inviting — a breast! A breast in the middle of the desert! I’ve come to the right place, Roni thought, and looked around at the hilltops, at their soft curves, their gentle contours, and their feathery, after-the-rain covering. A few days from now, Nir would tell him that Yosef Ben Matityahu or Titus Flavius Josephus himself had written of the Herodium that it looked just like the breast of a woman.

The leader of the demonstration, a thin, spectacled young man with a prominent, square jaw, bellowed slogans into a megaphone: “Cease construction of the fence! End the theft of Palestinian land! Stop the government-supported expansion of the outposts! No more settlers!” He was standing at the forefront of a small group of youths wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the logo of the left-wing Meretz party, a handful of anarchists, a number of silver-haired individuals from the old generation of the Peace Now movement, and the attractive protestor. Across from them were a number of folks Roni recognized, among them Gabi. Roni approached him and rested a hand on his shoulder. “Great action, brother!”

“I’m pleased you’re enjoying yourself,” Gabi said, and smiled, and then went on to explain why so few of the outpost’s residents had bothered to show up. It’s Friday, the women are baking cakes for the Sabbath and are cooking meals for the coming twenty-four hours; the boys and girls are helping in the kitchen or looking after their younger siblings; and the men are returning from errands in Jerusalem.

“Who’s that orange one?” Roni asked, gesturing with his eyebrows in the direction of one of the woman settlers, who was wearing an orange head scarf.

“Ah, yes, that’s Neta Hirschson, she wouldn’t miss this for the world,” Gabi responded.

The woman marched purposefully toward the demonstrators, fixed them with a stare, and began shouting: “You should be ashamed of yourselves! Enemies of Israel! It’s all over; your rule has ended! You had your chance and you failed! You had Peres, you had Rabin, you had Oslo. And you’re still shooting your mouths off ? What chutzpah! After the things you did to this country, you should be ashamed to show your faces here!”

Someone answered her, “Land thieves! Criminals! You’re stealing the budgets of the development towns and the poor! You’re wasting the soldiers’ time! You’re shaming us around the world, the country is sick of you!”

And Neta responded, “Lunatics! No one gives a shit about you! So much self-hatred! Look at you, groveling at the feet of the Arab enemy! You have no God, you have no future! Get out of here, you won’t achieve a damn thing!”

And the other one, “You’re contemptible. Here you are, living at our expense, on our taxes and our blood, with our children in the army to protect you, and yet you’re still complaining? Take a look at yourself, teaching your kids to be bullies and to hate! What happened to ‘All Jews bear responsibility for one another’? What happened to ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’? Enough with the hatred! Down with the fence!”

And it was on that precise point that Neta refrained from differing with the protestor. She had already heard from Othniel and Hilik that the planned fence would encroach on the settlement’s land. Besides, the entire idea of the fence, which created a border and, for all intents and purposes, created a Palestinian state in the Land of Israel, was contemptible to the core.

“Yes, down with the fence,” Neta yelled.

“Stop the barrier from running through here,” the left-wing demonstrator shouted back.

“Stop the barrier from running through here,” the settler cried out. And for one brief moment, the two united, like two ends meeting to form a circle, but the harmony was soon shattered when a soldier approached the demonstrator and was greeted loudly with “What’s your name, you piece of shit? Don’t you dare touch me!”

Neta watched the protestor walk away, still mumbling “You’ll stop at nothing” and “Go back to where you came from” in a lowered voice, perhaps to herself. She then glanced at her watch and quickly headed toward home; she had a booking with a client from Ma’aleh Hermesh A. who needed an urgent pre-Sabbath manicure and pedicure.

Aside from the incident involving Neta and her rival, the demonstration passed quietly. The soldiers who had been deployed from the outpost remained idle. And when it was over, Roni kept track of the attractive demonstrator. He saw her approach the Palestinian who had been eyeing her earlier. Son of a bitch. The two exchanged words. Roni moved closer. The woman handed over some money to the Palestinian and received a large metal container in return. Someone else, also in an End the Occupation shirt, produced some cash in exchange for another container. Roni edged nearer. The braless woman looked at him and he responded in kind.

“You should be ashamed of yourselves,” she blurted out, and walked off. The Palestinian’s eyes followed her for a few seconds, and then he turned to Roni and winked.

“What’s all this?” Roni asked, gesturing toward the Arab’s wares.

“Olive oil, dirt cheap,” the Palestinian said.

“How much is dirt cheap?”

“Eighteen liters, three hundreds of shekels.”

Roni did the math in his head — a little over fifteen shekels a liter, less than four dollars. Cheap indeed. “Two-fifty and it’s a deal?”

The Palestinian smiled. “No, three hundreds of shekels. Dirt cheap,” he said.

The two men looked at each other. Roni fixed his stare, hoping the Arab would break. He recalled a business school lecture from his time in New York. The professor had said that all commercial negotiations — whether they be haggling in a marketplace or merger talks between two giant conglomerates — were a duel in which body language played a decisive role. The Arab stared back at him, refusing to back down.

“What’s your name?” Roni asked, wrinkling an eyebrow in the direction of the olive farmer.

“Musa Ibrahim,” replied Musa Ibrahim, a well-built man with a white mustache and white hair that started far back on his scalp, in stark contrast to his tanned skin.

“Pleased to meet you. Roni Kupper,” said Roni Kupper, extending a hand. Musa shook it. “So, you say there’s a chance I can get you down to two-fifty?” Roni inquired.

“Did I say there was?” Musa smiled.

Roni took out his wallet, which he had found one day in the snow in New York, and opened it. “Well, look at that, bro, I’m spending my very last shekel on your oil,” he said, counting out a total of exactly 292 shekels in notes and coins, shrugging apologetically. Musa snatched angrily at the handful, and Roni hoisted the tin container onto his shoulder and turned around.

The Sabbath settled on the hilltop like a shawl on hair, pleasing and soft.

The soldiers went off to rest. The left-wingers were gone. And the distributor Moran’s pickup truck was already on its way westward carrying crates of asparagus, mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, and arugula, as well as cartons of yogurt and goat-milk cheese — all bearing the label Gitit Farms, named after the Assis family’s firstborn daughter, and Moran’s address in the Sharon region of the country.

Gabi, with the help of the slightly built Yakir Assis, gathered up a large piece of canvas that read STOP THE EXPANSION OF OUTPOSTS UNDER GOVERNMENT PROTECTION — they’d use it to help fence off Othniel’s fields, which were already demarcated by stretches of canvas bearing the slogans END THE OCCUPATION AND TWO STATES FOR TWO NATIONS, in response to a long length of canvas glorifying Rabbi Nachman of Breslov that the Arabs of Kharmish used during olive-harvesting time.