Stars over Jalazoun: A Memoir

One midnight back in the 20th century, Zohar and I and four others were taken to Jalazoun. Up and down the highway we patrolled, up and down the empty highway fronting the refugee camp. Virtually no ambient light—not with Beit El over the hill and Jalazoun both sleeping. Up and down, up and down, up and down for an hour or more as the crickets chorused, and then a break. I unslung my weapon, and the radio pack, and as the feeling returned to my arms joined him in leaning against an outsize boulder.

No moon that night but stars galore. The stars! How trifling happiness and unhappiness, geopolitics, defeat and victory seemed in comparison. Not a few of them had run out of gas a million years ago. They were dead. Yet their light would keep impacting earth when I was a million years gone, and a million years after the Arabs and Jews, the old and young Israelis and Palestinians in Jalazoun and Beit El were gone, too. I smiled in the darkness. How archaic, I thought, how laughable the unending fight between the Arabs and my people over the real estate between the Mediterranean and the Jordan when so many galaxies were cinders and the next world war was to be waged up there, in space.

“I was reading the newspaper,” Zohar said in that lovely Hebrew of his with the glottal ayin and the aspirated ḥet. “The astrologists predict a big war.”