Assaf Gavron - The Hilltop

Yoni, paging through an issue of the men’s magazine Blazer , smiled. “I’m home this Sabbath at last.”

“Where’s home?”

“Netanya.”

Roni had nothing to say about Netanya. Two minutes later, he stood up, smiled, and bade Yoni a good night. Outside again, he gritted his teeth against the wind and thought, Poor guy, he got the worst of both worlds. An Israeli and an African. God! At least he’s still able to smile.

He stopped on the way home at Gabi’s cabin-in-the-making and turned on the pale light. He saw that Gabi was almost done assembling a wooden bed frame and remembered his brother telling him that once the bed was in place, he would begin sleeping in the cabin. And though he had yet to hook up a water pipe, and there was no furniture, and the roof wasn’t finished (Gabi was waiting for tiles promised him by a friend from a hilltop near Itamar, beautiful green tiles; the friend simply needed to complete construction of a roof on his hilltop and would then give Gabi his leftovers), he wasn’t concerned at all. On the contrary, he loved roughing it, he sought that pioneering spirit. Ma’aleh Hermesh C. sometimes felt to him too staid and bourgeois, he used to say, with the stone cladding on the homes and all. Roni asked him what would happen with his trailer after he moved. “I don’t know,” Gabi said. “You’ll have to ask the Absorption Committee.” Roni’s face dropped. He and the Absorption Committee weren’t on the best terms.

* * *

Nir rocked baby Zvuli while Shaulit finished bathing Tchelet and dressed her in a diaper and pajamas. A disaster: Shoshana, the doll without which Tchelet refused to go to bed, had disappeared. The entire house was turned upside down, mattresses were lifted, furniture was moved, dark corners were inspected, a flashlight was employed to illuminate the yard — even the search for unleavened food products before Passover wasn’t as thorough. Shaulit finally called Nehama, and after around ten minutes of idle gossip, the fateful question was posed. Nehama thought for a moment and then said, “Shoshana may be at the kindergarten.”

Nir put on his shoes and exited into the night. He went over to the synagogue, ran into Jehu and Josh in the throes of evening prayer inside, located Shoshana in the day-care area, and returned her to the loving arms of Tchelet, who closed her eyes and dropped off to sleep seconds later. Shaulit raised her red eyes to look at Nir and whispered “Thanks,” and he embraced her and caressed her shoulders. She had been feeling down since the birth. Zvuli, she’d say, reminded her of her father, who was murdered by terrorists on the road to Beit El eight years earlier.

“Nehama baked a cake for the Gotliebs,” she said, wiping away her tears. “We haven’t even been over to welcome them.”

Nir made a face. “Get the mixer back from Neta and I’ll make something,” he said.

* * *

Yakir logged on to Second Life again. Because he handled the farm’s Internet orders, no one, including Othniel, who knew nothing about computers, dared depose him from his seat at the computer desk. He returned to his virtual character and gazed at the figure on the screen. The avatar pleased him. In addition to a thick black beard, he wore a white skullcap and had a horse called Killer, which King Meir had crowned “supercool.” King Meir was — or so he thought, because you can never be sure in Second Life who’s behind the virtual characters you encounter — a thirty-six-year-old lawyer from Dallas, Texas, which explained how he was able to lease the virtual island, Revival, for two hundred real dollars a month. The remaining members of the group were, they said, young Jews just like him, mostly Americans, and they all prayed at the Flame of the Revival synagogue that King Meir erected on the island, and they spoke among themselves primarily about Arabs. After all, that’s what people do in Second Life, for the most part, talk. You type and your character delivers the words in a cartoon-style speech bubble, and your friends release their words in their speech bubbles. King Meir was the undisputed leader of the group, and Yakir, in all likelihood the only true settler among them, was his favorite.

King Meir, in a yellow shirt bearing the Kach Movement’s fist logo and the slogan KAHANE LIVES, wanted to stir things up in the overly tranquil world of Second Life. He wanted to show the Arabs who was boss, cause a commotion in their virtual mosques and their other toxic spaces. He wanted a show of Jewish power! That evening the group spoke about their visit to Islam-Online, where they came across a Palestinian museum that documented “the injustices of the occupation” and “the Palestinian holocaust.” King Meir wanted to take action. He wanted the group to plan something that would really hurt the cheeky bastards. Yakir and King Meir and the others — Klaus, the German, and Menachem from California, and several others — threw ideas back and forth in the group chat for quite some time, before Othniel placed a light hand on his son’s shoulder and returned him to the real world. “Enough, sweetie, it’s bedtime.”

The massive slabs of concrete — gray, nine meters tall, two meters wide, thirty centimeters thick — the intended building blocks of the border fence arrived on the back of trucks from the Eckerstein plant in Yeruham one day in June, a day of scorching desert winds, with the summer already settled in, past the point of retreat. They were off-loaded near the bulldozers, which for weeks had been dozing in the sun and waiting for their D-day.

Othniel hastily called his regular list of associates at the council, in the Knesset, and in the army. He was told they’d look into the matter, that the alert would be sounded, and that he should continue to report on any developments.

Several days later, the High Court of Justice convened to deliberate the petition — filed jointly by legal counsel for residents of the village of Kharmish, the owners of the olive groves, and the Yesh Din human rights organization — against construction of the fence along its designated route, which would entail the uprooting of the olive groves and the loss of livelihood for their owners. As an act of protest that same morning, many of the village’s residents went out and staged a silent sit-in amid the D-9s. Captain Omer Levkovich and his soldiers arrived on the scene to maintain order.

The court heard the arguments of the petitioner and summoned the first witness for the defense on behalf of the State of Israel, a brigadier general with a wealth of security experience who served in the Seam Zone Administration. The officer was questioned on the significance from a security perspective of the location of the fence on that particular ridge, on those private groves. The officer testified to the extreme importance of the fence’s location, unraveling a map and pointing at it with one of those foldout rods for pointing at maps. He explained the need to commandeer the land, station guard towers, and erect a high concrete wall to boost security for the settlements, deter enemies, and eradicate rampant and unhindered Palestinian terror.

Testifying for the petitioners was a reserve officer from the very same forces — a major general, with a long history of service in Israel’s wars and a wealth of security experience with the Arab enemy in general and the Palestinian foe in particular. And he was asked: The words spoken by the brigadier general who testified before you, were they the truth? And the reservist major general responded, Bullshit. He outlined the futility of erecting a concrete barrier in the location in question, and he illustrated on the map that the region under discussion was quiet and not dangerous, and what’s the point of ripping into the landscape like that, cutting off the local population from their source of livelihood and stirring anger and hate where there was none before?