Free Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War by Megan K. Stack

then. Well. My family is fine, thank you. It was like a prison visit. Less than an hour later, I was headed back to Jerusalem. I got on a settler highway back, and the ride was smooth and fast.
    It was dark, late, and cold when I got back to my little stone apartment in the old Israeli artist colony. Lying in bed, I felt the heaviness of melancholy inside my chest like a small spot of deadness, a Palestinian cancer. The entire West Bank was withering away, choked off by occupation. It was nothing but roads you couldn’t take, checkpoints you couldn’t pass, the spots of troubled Arab turf laced into the network of settler roads and settler towns like flies tangled in a spider’s web. Who was everybody kidding—where was a Palestinian state going to come from? There was no solid piece of land.
    The maps around here didn’t mean a thing.
    I loved living in Israel. That was the hardest part. I loved it every time I climbed the dry heights of Masada and felt the desert wind and saw the Dead Sea gleam below like spilled ink. I remember restaurants inTel Aviv; the cliffs of Jaffa; a few sticky summer mornings when I woke up with the sun and drove to the shore to swim, watching the old white men splash their flabby forearms, opening themselves to the Mediterranean like wary bears come out from winter hiding. I loved the music that dripped from the clubs on gritty summer nights in Tel Aviv, the darkened streets and young bodies and the sexiness of it all, the intensity of youth and desire against a backdrop of war.
    But you went to the West Bank or Gaza and saw the way the Palestinians lived, and it ruined everything. You realized it was rotten underneath; it was impossible. I could be in Herzliya, eating buttery sea bream and drinking mojitos on a terrace over the beach, watching the sun set the Mediterranean skies on fire and the children kick at the edge of blackening waters, hearing the voices of mothers, the shush of waves, the pulse of music playing somewhere. But inside of me was the corruption of memory, knowing the underbelly of the state, thinking about what all of the people around me were determined to ignore. It made everything filthy.
    The bombings were huge and awful, but the suffering of the Palestinians was chronic, dripping through the days like acid. All the small horrors that get washed away from a distance, that never make the news but are the grains of earth in that place—the Palestinian cancer patients who are not allowed to leave the Gaza Strip for treatment; the Palestinian mothers who gave birth at checkpoints; the people who hadn’t seen their families for years; the shepherds who led their flocks accidentally into the wrong spot and got blown away; the Palestinian-American woman who came to visit her family one summer and got stuck because the Israelis wouldn’t give her a permit to drive back to the airport, because even Palestinians with American passports are treated like plain old Palestinians once they set foot inside Israel; the settlers who ransacked the olive groves; the market stalls and greenhouses torn down. The occupation was a cloud of punishment that raged in times of suicide bombings and in times of quiet, a few miles away, invisible.
    At the time the Palestinians drew my attention most of all, because their culture was the most foreign; because they were killed far more often and yet their slaughter was treated more casually, packing lower news value; because they were trapped both by Israel and by their own leaders, their own killers.
    But I am haunted now by Israelis. By the overlay of realities, the way they knew, and didn’t know. Like the people in Kfar Saba, they lived right next door, there and not there. They ignored it, or they told themselves stories that made it all right, horrible stories, and worst of all the stories were true—the injustice and blood of Jewish history.
    And yes, Israel has a reason for everything, and there is a national myth that theirs is the most