Death as a Way of Life

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Noise. That’s the first word that comes into my mind when I think of the last ten years. So much noise. Gunshots and shouts, incendiary words and mournful laments, and explosions and demonstrations, and heaps of clichés and special broadcasts from the scenes of terrorist attacks, and calls for revenge and the throb of helicopters above and the screeching sirens of ambulances and the frantic rings of the telephone after each incident.

And within that whirlwind, in the eye of the storm, there is silence. It can’t be heard; it is felt, in every cell of the body. A silence such as one feels in the brief moment between receiving bad news and comprehending it, between the blow and the pain.

This is the empty space in which every person, Israeli or Palestinian, knows with piercing certainty all that he does not want or does not dare know. There, within himself, he understands — even if he denies it at the top of his lungs, with shouts and gunshots — that his life is being dissipated, squandered in a pointless struggle, and that his identity and self-respect and the one life he has to live are being endlessly expropriated from him in a conflict that could have been resolved long ago.

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