What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife? A Memoir

A trip does not begin at the moment of departure, when grooved wheels start spinning upon asphalt or crunch over gravel. It does not begin when landscapes scroll peripherally, when geographies shift and political borders are crossed, revealing themselves to be nothing more than lines drawn with invisible ink.

A trip begins at the moment of conception. It begins when a desire for movement vibrates firmly in the mind, when anticipation becomes an itinerary.

I sat prostrate in a booth at JFK, waiting to board my flight to Tel Aviv. I knew my trip had already commenced, but wanted to pinpoint its beginning, to hear a gun go off; I needed language to tell me that, yes, it has started, the marathon has begun. And so I paid the airport’s internet access fee and looked up the word “trip” online. Definitions. Parameters. These were what I needed.

The first entry I found said, “journey or voyage,” a definition I could accept, a definition that emerged some time in the 1600s out of the Middle English word trippen, to step lightly.

I was stepping lightly.

Scanning the etymology and history of the word, I wondered if someone, stepping lightly hundreds of years ago, had caught a toe on an exposed root and fallen face-first – an action which allowed for the definition of trip to include “a stumble, a misstep.”¹ And I thought, Am I stumbling? Is this trip a misstep? Am I a fucking idiot? Here I was, moving toward an Israel I wasn’t sure I actually wanted to enter, moving closer to a Palestine that scared me, moving toward the source of things.

Finally, the airline staff called for passengers to board Delta flight 148. As I passed through the gate and neared the plane’s open hatch, New York’s December chill seeped through the gang way’s molding, marking my fear. A fear that propelled me forward, quickened my pace. The gun had gone off. It was time to start running.

In some ways, my trip had begun when I first received word from the Israel Prison Service that Mohammad had denied my request for a meeting. I was immediately suspicious. Mohammad’s refusal was so tidy, automatically invalidating any need for a decision from government bureaucrats. And when Mariam con firmed such suspicions by writing, “The family and Mohammad want to meet you,” I was unable to let things rest. These discordant answers seemed to be a tumorous outgrowth of the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, a conflict so pervasive it was able to invade and occupy the truth. Someone was lying, and I was intent on finding out who – not for the sake of some ethical principle, but to remove the cancer.

Weeks before leaving for Israel, I tried contacting prominent figures in Israeli intelligence circles, people with connections, people capable of checking the status of my request to meet Mohammad from within. I was determined to find if I’d been given a convenient answer by the Ministry of Public Security, an answer which needed no explication or justification from prison officials. In the weeks before my flight, I stayed up many nights sending email after email to Israeli politicians, strategic fellows, journalists, and professors, searching for someone on the inside willing to do some digging for me.

When the responses arrived, they came from Knesset members, former ambassadors, renowned scholars, and foreign correspondents stationed in Jerusalem. I was awed by the outpouring of interest from these people of consequence, whom I had basically spammed. But for all the well-wishes and notes of encouragement, nobody seemed willing or able to help. The journalists didn’t want to risk alienating their governmental connections. The professors claimed impotency. The politicians suggested I turn to the Ministry of Public Security, the very people I did not trust. Then I received a note from Mordechai Kedar. The message was brief:

Dear David,

I highly appreciate your efforts. I’ll try my best to enable your visit.

I’d written to dozens of people within the Israeli security apparatus, but had no memory of sending an email to this man, a research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies claiming the capacity to “enable” a meeting with Mohammad. I poked around online and found his biography:

Dr. Mordechai Kedar (PhD Bar-Ilan University) served for twenty-five years in IDF Military Intelligence, specializing in Arab political discourse, Arab mass media, Islamic groups and the Syrian domestic arena. A lecturer in Arabic at Bar-Ilan, he is also an expert on Israeli Arabs.²

This guy’s the real deal, I thought, emailing back a formal note of gratitude and wishes for continued correspondence.

But nothing else came. The line went silent.

Well before dawn on the day of my departure, I awoke to my cell phone vibrating beneath the pillow. Someone had left a message. Groggy and worried, I thumbed in the phone’s password and listened. A deep, coarse voice speaking English with a Hebrew accent crackled through, the cadence slow and cautious:

David. This is Mordechai. Now it is 4:30 in your place. Can you call me? The Prison Authority want your passport number and if you are coming alone. If not, who wants to visit the prisoner and everyone’s passport number. If you don’t call, I’ll call again. The bagel and lox are waiting for you.

The bagel and lox are waiting? Trying to clear my head, I rose and rooted around for my international calling card. It was well worn from dozens of calls to various Israeli government offices.

The phone buzzed again.

“Hello?”

“David. This is Mordechai. You got my message, yes?”

I rubbed sleep from my eyes and nodded. Then I remembered to speak: “Yes.”

“David, my contact at the Prison Service is ready to help you. Can you give me passport number of anyone who want to visit?”

I pulled the passport from my external-frame Kelty backpack and read the number aloud, vaguely recalling Kedar’s email, but still not exactly sure with whom I was speaking.

“I give this number to him and we see what happens. When do you come?”

“Tomorrow. I arrive tomorrow.”

“Okay. This is soon. Do you have phone in Israel?”

“I’ll be renting one, yes.”

“Then you will call me when you are here?”

“Of course.”

“Okay, David. Have a safe trip. We will speak soon.”

[Click.]

I returned to bed and fell into the sheets. But later that morning I awoke in a panic. “Shit, shit, shit. Jamie, I think – I’m not sure, but maybe I might have done something bad last night.”

Jamie raised an eyebrow as our girls crawled into bed. “What on earth are you talking about?” she asked while our oldest pecked her cheek with kisses.

“Last night I gave someone from Israel my passport number. A man called and asked for my passport number. So I gave it to him. If it’s the person I think it is, it’s someone trying to help. But now I don’t know who I gave it to.”

“Who are you worried you might have given it to?”

“I don’t know. What if it was somebody from the government? What if they don’t like what I’m doing? Fuck, I hope there’s no one waiting for me at customs. What if they don’t let me in? Can they do that?”

“Why’d you give someone your passport number?”

“He asked. I don’t know. It was four in the morning.”

I pulled out the phone and listened to Kedar’s message again, then pressed it to Jamie’s ear. “Listen to this.”

“Bagel and lox?”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Sounds like he’s trying to help. Do you know who this is?”

“I think it might be the big intelligence guy who emailed me. Remember him?”

“So go email him and ask if it was him.”

I emailed Kedar and waited, hoping something would pop up in my inbox before leaving the country. But no message had arrived by the time I closed out of dictionary.com’s window and was herded onto my flight by Israelis wearing Delta’s red, white, and blue uniform.

As I navigated my way through the jet’s cramped aisles, brushing past burly Chasidim and teenage tourists, I wondered if I would be denied entry into a country I feared to enter, a country I needed to enter.

Once we were airborne, I distracted myself with an in-flight magazine article on Roman cuisine. While reading, I began to sing. “It’s the hard-knock life, for us. It’s the hard-knock life, for us. Instead of treated, we get tricked. Instead of kisses, we get kicked. It’s the hard-knock life.”

My girls were addicted to musicals, at least those classics to which they had been exposed by Jamie and a host of well-meaning gift-givers. At the ages of four years and eighteen months, their addiction had grown acute. First it was The Sound of Music. Then Mary Poppins. Just days before I left Wilmington, the girls had been given the soundtrack to Annie by a friend and poet who doubled as a sometime-babysitter. When we put it on for the first time and pressed play, they immediately began chanting, “Annie! Annie!” Grasping our hands, they danced around the living room and tugged us toward some ethereal joy.

I caught myself singing audibly – feeling a sudden loss, an absence at the memory these lyrics elicited – and looked over to find a woman seated on the plane glancing my way. She smiled. I shifted my eyes down and lowered the hymn to a whisper, moving my lips to the song’s rhythm, a song that felt essential. I had never left my children for more than a day, and was holding them within the lyrics, holding my place amongst them with each syllable.

I sang hoping to survive this journey to Israel about which I had deeply embedded fears – fears I knew to be irrational, despite the fact that the last time Jamie and I were there, she had almost been taken away.

So my lips kept moving, reciting the lyrics as we banked toward the Atlantic, toward the Mediterranean, toward the known past and the unknown future.

I’ve never been able to sleep on airplanes – something about the ridiculous height, the opportunity for free-fall without warning, keeps me alert during even the most dreadful stretches of sleep deprivation. On international flights, when the lights are lowered and most passengers turn onto their sides, pull miniature blankets up to their chins, and sleep with open mouths, when the brain sends out tentacles of dopamine, instructing the limbs to fan out and relax – even then, my mind refuses to relinquish control over its surroundings, refuses to make such allowances. Sleeping pills have no effect. Melatonin-inducers have no effect.

So I remained awake during the sixteen-hour trip from New York to Rome to Tel Aviv, singing the soundtrack to Annie.

As the flight attendants extinguished the cabin’s main lights and passed through the aisles, distributing tea, I thought, Why must things be so hard? The question sounded bombastic, overly dramatic. It made me cringe. And yet, despite the ironic impulse to dismiss it, the question reflected my true state, providing cover both for the personal obstacles that had surrounded my attempts to confront Mohammad as well as the larger political struggle squeezing both Israelis and Palestinians. I felt sandwiched between a conflict with no perceptible solution and a psychic conflict wholly subservient to the blood being shed in the land to which I was flying. Seeking my own form of reconciliation had forced me to consider the failed attempts at a greater reconciliation in Israel and Palestine. It forced me to consider how this journey fit within a much larger struggle.

I had delusions, to be sure, for I thought that my decision to meet with the Odehs might somehow shift the balance, such that Palestinians and Israelis, hearing of my brave efforts, would decide to stop shouting for a moment and talk. I knew it was foolish to think in these terms, to believe that my own attempt to heal by confronting “the other” might inspire others to follow the same path. But I also refused to believe differently. This has turned into a mission, I thought, understanding I had chosen to merge the personal and the political, that I had fashioned a selfish quest for sanity into something larger, something unrealistic. As the survivor, I was now trying to take everything that had happened – Marla’s death, Ben’s death, Jamie’s suffering, my hyperventilating – and transform it, place it all in a chrysalis and let it grow wings, grow something that could emerge and fly, pollinate, pulsate in the air, make the desert bloom. The cliché was so tired it kept me awake.

I knew I was being guided by hope, by a hope that a resolution could be brought on all fronts, a hope which expanded from the knowledge that the two peoples, Israelis and Palestinians, or more specifically, Jews and Muslims, share the same mythical forefather: Abraham. And they – I should say we – share more than just a father. We share a common experience: abandonment.

Abraham’s son, Isaac – the one who was bound and almost murdered by his father – wasn’t the only child Abraham failed at God’s behest in the Book of Genesis. There was also Ishmael, whom Abraham fathered with his maidservant Hagar after Sarah was unable to produce a child. Ishmael, Abraham’s first child, was eventually rejected – cast into the desert with his mother and a water bottle when rivalry erupted in the household, Abraham showing them the door after God instructed him to do so.

Neither son saw their father again until Abraham was dead of old age, wrapped in a shroud. Neither son returned home until their father was unable to harm them any longer.

If anything, Jews and Muslims should have rallied against our common enemy. We should have protected each other throughout history from a devious deity and a father who abandoned us both. We should have followed the example set by Isaac and Ishmael, rival siblings who re-united to bury Abraham upon his passing, to bid him good riddance.

Instead, we’ve suffered through a bloody sibling rivalry, one played out on a grand, tragic scale, with both sides paralyzed by the psychological traumas induced after years of conflict, years of victimization, years of extremist ideologies overshadowing those who just want to watch a good soccer match in peace. Instead of kisses, we get kicked.

Flying to Rome, I considered the history of Palestinian and Israeli suffering, the mutual perpetration, the victimization. Both sides have been scarred and hobbled by the weight of it all. Israel devastated by the specter of giant, Arab nations clutching at its borders, by Palestinian bombs and threats of martyrdom, by the inescapable shadow of the Holocaust. Palestine in turn ravaged by the paralysis of colonialism, by an overwhelming, brutal military force, and by the suffocating shame a lifetime of occupation brings.

As the plane leveled and began cruising, I bent over to extract my backpack from under the seat in front of me, where it had been stuffed in a space far too small for something so bulky. Before takeoff, I had hidden it from an edgy Israeli flight attendant, worried she would force me to stow it overhead. But when I tugged at the bag, my body pinned between the window and an overweight, grey-haired woman sleeping next to me, it wouldn’t move. It was stuck. I angled my head between my knees and peered down to see what was wrong; the crown of my head butted sharply into the seat before me. A man peered between the seats as I mouthed, Sorry, then felt around and discovered that one of the bag’s buckles had locked onto the seat’s metal casing. I tugged, holding my breath, grimacing from the strain. When the strap finally came free, my elbow snapped backwards, the funny bone angled directly at the sleeping woman’s head. In the fraction of a second before impact, my mind slowed and recognized the potential damage. I imagined the woman’s nose crunching under the force of my elbow, the brittle cartilage popping easily, naturally, as the bone fractured, the blow’s force dispersing across her face, now shattered and bleeding, her breath labored, the crew rushing to our row, the call for a doctor, the emergency medical landing. Then, in that fraction of a second, while I imagined all this, I was somehow able to adjust the trajectory, to tuck my arm in slightly, my elbow hitting her headrest instead.

I was astonished by how hard it hit, how traumatic the force. The woman’s head bounced, lost contact with the seatback, and returned to a resting position. Her eyes fluttered and her arms rose in self-protection, instinctively, and then – she fell back asleep. No one had noticed. Everyone was oblivious to the violence I had almost committed. I couldn’t believe it.

It was such a small moment, an infinitesimal alteration of a swinging elbow, just tenths of a second on an airplane traveling five hundred miles per hour, thirty thousand feet high above Greenland’s coastline where, down below, narwhals cut through frigid Arctic currents and fishing boats were anchored, the day’s work not yet started. The world was immense. The moment was small. But it was a moment that had changed the course of history, at least for the woman sleeping soundly next to me. And I thought: You are powerful.

Shaken, I reached into the backpack and pulled out a folder stuffed with loose pages – academic articles from psychology journals, its pages intending to rationalize the irrational conflict to which I was returning in Israel and Palestine. These scholars proposed to explain why the conflict hadn’t ended, and why it might never end, by exploring not history, but neurons and synapses.

I opened the folder and began reading.

Pages:	Hey.
Me:	Hi.
Pages:	Ready?
Me:	Sure.
Pages:	Then let’s get on with it. We’ve been in this folder too long.
Me:	Okay, okay. Let’s see, which article are you?
Pages:	I’m “Why Does Fear Override Hope in Societies Engulfed by Intractable Conflict, as It Does in the Israeli Society?” by Daniel Bar-Tal.³
Me:	Oh yeah. Nice title. And a good question. I don’t know the answer. Why does fear override hope?
Pages:	It’s because fear is an automatic emotion, grounded in the perceived present and often based on the memorized past. Hope, in contrast, involves mostly cognitive activity, and thus is based on creativity and flexibility.⁴
Me:	So fear is an automatic, unconscious emotion that surfaces without warning. This seems intuitive – the adrenaline pumping automatically at the sound of a scream or sight of a masked gunman. But what does it mean that hope is cognitive? That it’s not an emotion, but a thought? I’ve felt hopeful. I feel hopeful right now.
Pages:	Oh, sorry. Hope is an emotion, but it more resembles a state of mind in that it’s only brought about by cognitive thoughts, by perceived goals or outcomes that could be achieved in the theoretical future.⁵
Me:	So hope is goal-oriented, and thus cognitive. I have to think to be hopeful. I have to want something, to envision something, envision the possibility of something to feel hopeful, to experience such a state of mind. Sounds like an exhausting emotion. So much preparation. So much work.
Pages:	It is.
Me:	So it’s not even a fair contest, then. Fear sounds automatic, involuntary. Like blinking or breathing. Fear just rises in the throat without warning. But hope? You have to prepare for it? You have to think it? You have to desire it?
Pages:	More or less. And because hope is based on thinking, it can be seriously impeded by the spontaneous and unconscious interference of fear.⁶
Me:	And there’s so much to be afraid of. So much has happened. Palestinians have been dominated by foreign nations for nearly a century. They have been dispersed repeatedly, and have been under the thumb of a powerful military occupation for as long as I can remember: checkpoints, trigger-happy soldiers firing tear gas and live ammunition, drones dropping bombs on apartment buildings, cars, schools. And Israelis, despite having the most advanced military in the Middle East, have seen images on the news of suicide bombers blowing themselves up, rockets falling from Gaza, and Arab leaders screaming for the destruction of the Zionist regime. And all this against the backdrop of the Holocaust and a two-thousand-year history of persecution and exile. It’s no wonder both people feel victimized. Both are afraid of being wiped off the map. Both fear extinction.
Pages:	Yes. And this fear, based on both the distant and immediate pasts of both peoples, is recalled reflexively, the brain short-circuiting with fear, a fear which bypasses the thinking process. It’s a mechanism of adaptation meant to protect life and homeostasis, but often operates irrationally and even destructively at the moment it is invoked.⁷
Me:	It sounds like a failure of evolution, this primal fear triggering violence as a protection even when it’s not necessary, which leads to a violent, defensive response: more violence, more harm, more destruction. Which is why it’s so cyclical. One side attacks, making the other side afraid, which in turn attacks, perceiving a need to protect itself. All of it just leading to maladaptive responses.
Pages:	You’ve got it. When in fear, human beings tend to cope by initiating a fight, even when there is little or nothing to be achieved by doing so. It’s an evolutionary appendix, a lingering flaw.⁸
Me:	But what about hatred? Terrorists don’t just kill innocent civilians out of fear; soldiers don’t shoot at unarmed, nonviolent protesters out of fear.
Pages:	Hatred is often generated by fear, being an emotional response closely related. We often hate that which is threatening to life or the reflected world presumed to be valuable, ethical or necessary – the world as it should be. Hatred is simply fear with the helmet strapped on, the pads laced, the body juiced with some performance-enhancing injection. Hatred is fear ready to explode after an expletive-filled speech from the coach, imploring everyone to hit the other side in the mouth. Hard.
Me:	So how do Israelis and Palestinians overcome the fear and hatred, the cycles of violence that are both generated by fear and the cause of more fear? How do they overcome this automatic emotional response rooted in real, traumatic histories?
Pages:	May I introduce you to my colleague for that?
Me:	Sure.
Pages:	This is “Psychological Correlates of Support for Compromise: A Polling Study of Jewish-Israeli Attitudes Toward Solutions to the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict” by Ifat Maoz and Clark McCauley.⁹
Me:	Nice to meet you, “Psychological Correlates.”
Pages:	Pleasure’s mine.
Me:	You sound complicated.
Pages:	Not really. I’m simply a study on different attitudes Israelis and Palestinians have toward one another, and how those attitudes affect the potential for them to, as you put it, “overcome the fear and hatred” in order to achieve a solution to the conflict and reconcile.
Me:	Isn’t it obvious? The better the attitude toward one another, the better the chance for resolution?
Pages:	It’s not that simple. And it’s totally fascinating. You’ll see.
Me:	Okay.
Pages:	By the way, this study was actually done in July 2002, just before the Hebrew University bombing. So the results were gleaned at exactly the moment Mohammad Odeh struck. Not that this affects what I’m about to tell you, but it is interesting nevertheless.
Me:	[Sigh.]
Pages:	Ready?
Me:	Sure.
Pages:	Okay. Have you heard of something called zero-sum threat perception?
Me:	Not exactly, though I could guess.
Pages:	No need. I’ll explain. Conflict and violence between groups often arise from the perceived threats presented by the other, and these threats to a group’s safety produce fear.
Me:	And this fear – or any perceived threat that causes this fear – prohibits dialogue and reconciliation?
Pages:	Hold on. Only in the specific circumstance we’re getting to. Don’t interrupt.
Me:	Sorry.
Pages:	Now, negotiation research has identified a form of threat perception that appears to be particularly powerful in blocking mutually agreed upon solutions between individuals with conflicting interests. This is the zero-sum game perception – the perception that each side can profit only to the extent that the other side loses, that there is no possibility of an agreement that would leave both sides better off.¹⁰
Me:	Okay.
Pages:	In Israel, we have a situation where each side feels threatened, each side feels as though the other might be bent on its destruction. We measured this amongst Israeli Jews, who responded strongly when asked whether Palestinians hated Jews and would destroy Israel if possible. A significant proportion believed this, felt this to be true. And in a situation where such a threat perception exists, it’s not surprising that few Israelis who felt this way were interested in compromise or resolution. And how could they be? How could you compromise with somebody you think wants to destroy you? Compromising just gives the other side an upper hand, a better place from which to stab you in the back. Ultimately.
Me:	So this perception of threat creates a competitiveness. If one side gains, the other must lose. Israelis who see Palestinians as wanting to destroy them have only one response: hit Palestinians in the mouth long enough and hard enough until the threat goes away, until they lose. There’s little room for compromise.
Pages:	That’s one way to put it.
Me:	But what about fear? Is it created by a perceived threat, or does fear create the perception of being threatened?
Pages:	That’s a chicken-and-egg question that I’m not interested in. But we did look specifically at fear, and found something really interesting.
Me:	What’s that?
Pages:	We thought that fear – the fear one group has toward the other – would similarly engender resistance to any compromise or resolution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
Me:	It didn’t?
Pages:	It did. But what’s interesting is that fear only corresponded to a resistance for compromise when Israelis feared for the group, for their people, for the State of Israel. When there was a fear that Israel could be destroyed, when the threat-perception was near zero-sum regarding the group, there was little motivation for compromise with Palestinians. However, and this is the really interesting part, fear for personal safety had absolutely no relationship to such resistance in our study. Israeli Jews who expressed fear for personal safety were just as likely to support compromise solutions. These results suggest a specification of the role of fear. It is possible that fear for one’s group is a source of resistance to compromise, whereas fear for personal safety is not.
Me:	That makes so much sense. I’ve never understood how Israeli leaders could perpetually undermine avenues toward peace when public polling in Israel shows majority support for some type of resolution to the conflict. The Israeli government just seems to behave so pathologically, always unable to take its finger off the trigger, even as the populace grows restless. And maybe it’s because leaders, responsible for the country, for the fate of the country, can’t help but view things as a zero-sum game, can’t help but fear for the safety of the entire people. It’s their job. It’s their responsibility. It’s why Yitzhak Rabin said, “In every generation they rise up to destroy us, and we must remember that this could happen to us in the future. We must therefore, as a state, be prepared for this.”¹¹
Pages:	Which makes Oslo so remarkable – that Rabin could have overcome this threat perception as Prime Minister to seek a compromised peace with Arafat.
Me:	So if Rabin could do it, if Rabin could view Palestinians as the next people ready to rise up and destroy Israel, could have that fear and threat perception etched beneath his skin, and then turn all he knew on its head and envision a future of two states existing side-by-side – if he could do it, how might it similarly be done by others? How do we move past all the fear and perceptions of threat and all the automatic, unconscious responses and utilize a nascent hope? Not a naive hope, but a cognitively sophisticated, calculated hope?
Pages:	Our results indicate that willingness to com promise – to hope for and envision a situation in which both sides can reconcile for the good of everyone – depends both on sympathy for the other and on the perception that there is a possible future in which both groups are better off.¹²
Me:	So what then? How can this be done?
Pages:	How do you increase sympathy for someone?
Me:	Know them? Learn about them? Meet them?
Pages:	Exactly. Meet them.
Me:	So, is what I’m doing a part of that?
Pages:	Could be, though you’re not Israeli, and so don’t fit into our rubric.
Me:	But I’m Jewish.
Pages:	True.
Me:	If an Israeli heard or read about my efforts, that would perhaps increase sympathy for Palestinians, right?
Pages:	Sounds like a stretch. It could, perhaps. Depends how intimately you plan on getting to know Palestinians.
Me:	If an Israeli leader read about my efforts –
Pages:	Don’t hold your breath, kid. We’re scientists, and thus realists.
Me:	Fine. At least tell me that what I’m doing – on this plane, hurtling toward Israel at five hundred miles per hour – has the potential to shift things slightly, has the chance to not only be self-serving, but to possibly increase sympathy for all sides among those who hear about it.
Pages:	You need such a justification?
Me:	I’d like it.
Pages:	Why?
Me:	I’m afraid of being killed.
Pages:	By Palestinians?
Me:	Yes. Shouldn’t I have reason to fear given what’s happened? Even if the fear is irrational? Isn’t it automatic?
Pages:	Of course.
Me:	So then?
Pages:	And so you need justification that your efforts may have meaning, may have an impact outside yourself, because …?
Me:	Because it would give me hope.
Pages:	You already have it. Otherwise you wouldn’t be on this trip.
Me:	I know. But I’m afraid of the fear. I’m afraid of its capacity to kick in automatically, to take over the synapses. Just tell me what I’m doing could have meaning outside myself. Just give me that hope.
Pages:	Fine. What you’re doing fits into the spectrum of things, into the spectrum of what might be needed for reconciliation and compromise between Israelis and Palestinians to happen. It could help. It can’t hurt.
Me:	Thanks.
Pages:	You’re welcome.