An Intifadeh Of the Soul

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He continues. "Then they start the interrogation. They make you very, very tired, physically and mentally. You forget everything outside after a time. You are utterly alone. There are two of them, and they play good guy and bad guy, the bad guy slapping you and spitting on you. You wonder, 'Where does he get so much spit from?' They dig at your genitals with a boot or a stick. Sometimes they tie you to a pipe so that you cannot stand or sit or kneel and leave you that way for days.

"The sacks they put on your head are never cleaned, and they smell of vomit. They can add more sacks, and you begin to suffocate -- that works very fast on some guys.

"You cannot imagine your joy at the words 'Take him to the cell.' After many days of isolation," says Qassem, "I sometimes missed seeing the interrogator if he did not show up. To see a human face -- even his!"

THE GLOBAL VILLAGE

In the village of Deir Dibwan, northeast of Ramallah, the newer houses are made of rich blond limestone, with lemon trees in the front yards and, on the roofs, miniature Eiffel Towers to brace television antennas. The village has simultaneously the smell of goats and an air of affluence. It is a theme park of Palestinian authenticity, a once-was village sustained by money from America. Deir Dibwan has a population of 8,000. At any given time, some 4,000 are in the U.S. making money.

Once immigration was irrevocable. The refugee boarded a ship and departed for the New World. He might return to the ancestral village years later and try to remember his childhood. But now immigrants can go time-traveling in their own histories, back and forth. One family, the Dalias, have been commuting thus between their pasts and their futures since 1926, when a forebear, Abdul-Hameed Dalia, began shuttling between the Middle East and the New World. The resulting state of mind may be painfully torn, but is often miraculously freed and creative. A sense of being treacherous to the tribe and its values coincides with a heady liberation.

THE STONES

The diamond cutter stares at the stone until it discloses its inner structure, its secret. If the moralist stares long enough at Palestine/Israel, he thinks it will disclose a miracle of resolution.

But the place is not one stone. Here are two monoliths that by an intolerable trick of metaphysics stand upon the same spot. The Muslim's Dome of the Rock looms above the Jew's Western Wall. The promised land is also hell in a very small place.

Sunlight shafts down upon Jerusalem through gunpowder clouds, the city immobile, the sky above in tumbling motion like time-lapse photography. Pure light and Jerusalem stone give the city its astonishing beauty. The dolomite limestone changes miraculously with the light: blind white at noon gone to pink and rose and peach at sunset.

The stones have a strange abstract fertility, like dreams breeding. They come teeming up in geometries to make temples, cities. They also have their power in smaller sizes. They come up in the hands of children and fly through , the air, to make a nation, or at least to trouble the dream of Zion.