Fear can make a donkey attack a lion.
Over the next few days, things seemed to calm down enough that I began to think life in Safa might return to normal. Although I’d begun to seriously consider leaving early, there wasn’t anything I could do quickly because the village remained closed. In spite of this, I felt almost relaxed, somehow, as if the fear and relief I had felt the night of the raid had lulled me into a feeling that the worst was over—and honestly, I felt a little numb after the experience. Still, I was about to come around real quick.
It was a beautiful, sunny April day on the morning of the attack, and I awoke to loud pounding on the garage doors. Still in my pajamas, I ran to the garage, thinking it was Manar or my mother-in-law, but as soon as I saw the number of feet that appeared behind the rising door, I knew something was horribly wrong. Reflexively running for my prayer scarf to cover my pajamas, I heard the first group of people come in the house, talking in tones tinged with hysteria. When I came back from my room, I saw that more people, some of whom I’d never met, were coming in with their young children, asking to take shelter in our safety room, which was specially outfitted with thick concrete walls, steel window covers and a bulletproof door.
That was when the next-door mosque’s loudspeaker crackled to life, sending out a young boy’s voice through the village air, suddenly laced with whistles, the universal Palestinian warning that meant soldiers are coming…
Only this time it was going to be much worse.
“Settlers! We are under attack! Safa is under attack, come help us!” It was a distress message carried from the mosque next door to the next one down the valley, and from there to the neighboring villages in a kind of village-to-village Morse-code. It was faster than cell phones, and it was also infinitely more terrifying than the gunfire already echoing across the hills.
Waking the kids, I rushed them into the safety room to join the growing crowd, including Manar and Rawan, who ran in to talk to me in the kitchen. They told me that all of the village men and boys were heading to the edge of the village to try and head off the settlers before they could get in among the houses. At that, the three of us ran up to the roof and looked north toward the ridge between Safa and the Bat Ayin, where plumes of smoke rose against the blue sky.
It was then that I heard a noise similar to the private airplanes I was used to back home (something I never saw in the Holy Land). Looking up, I spotted it, but instead of a Cessna, it was a drone flying directly above me, circling over the house like a vulture.
Now I was really scared, and I ran as fast as I could downstairs to seal the door to the safety room, telling Amani not to open it from inside unless she was sure it was me or someone else she knew, scaring her so badly that she jerked the door closed before I could move my hand from the doorjamb, slamming it hard on my fingers.
There was obviously so much adrenaline pumping through my body that I could ignore the new, odd shape—and after a few moments—the pain in my pinky finger, obviously broken just above the middle joint.
Word spread that my house was the place to go, and more people—mostly women and children—continued to stream in, betting that it would be safer to be with the American (after all, most of them had seen how much power my passport had that night at the intersection), even if the safety room was full. Not wanting to keep anyone outside, some of them took up door watch in the garage, ready to shut the steel if they spotted settlers coming.
Not knowing what was going on outside was unbearable, so Manar and I ran upstairs once again, just in time to see a mass of people in white come up over the ridge armed with automatic rifles. Although we couldn’t see the “front line” over the ridge, the men and boys seemed to be holding them back for a few minutes with slingshots and stones. It wasn’t long before they were running in our direction, though, chased by the settlers. Now, the military had arrived, too—advancing down the road, using live fire, percussion grenades and tear gas.
Soon, what seemed to be the entire male population of Safa was running past the front of my house, followed by a gaggle of journalists wearing blue-helmets and bulletproof vests marked PRESS, furiously snapping photos of the men as they tried to dig in at the orchard across the street for a new volley of stones. Somehow, the settlers seemed to have paused—perhaps put off by the growing cloud of tear gas that was being shot at the villagers. It was drifting now, becoming an effective, if temporary, barrier between the two groups.
The soldiers, however, continued to advance, but were driven into Huda’s house by the stone throwers, which they quickly emptied of the remaining family members with a sound bomb and a cloud of tear gas.
Huda was the next person to make for my house, carrying her eight-year-old son, who was overcome by the gas. And now the action was front-row between my driveway and Huda’s home, the upper floor of which was quickly being destroyed by the soldiers smashing out windows and screens to shoot at the stone throwers. The stone throwers, oblivious in their fury, were smashing the home’s outer stone work, which was falling in huge chunks to the cement walkway below.
Unable to watch her home being destroyed, and traumatized to see it suddenly occupied, Huda ran for her house as the press turned to film her hitting her own face in despair, oblivious to the danger as she made for her back door. Luckily, Manar and I ran out to stop her before she could burst in on the soldiers, and we dragged her back to my house, missing a slipper—which she’d somehow lost as we pulled her back—screaming toward her home, “Shoot me! Shoot me!”
It was then that the soldiers decided to abandon Huda’s house for mine, presumably because it was the highest point around and directly above the orchard where the stone-throwers were hiding. In fact, I think it was one of them who sneaked through the field next to my house to come and warn us that the soldiers were at the front door, ready to break in the iron-clad frame.
By then, the press had moved into position in front of the house, snapping pictures of the Israeli unit hunkered down and ready to storm in while Safa’s women, children, sick and disabled cowered inside. Realizing that if they came in, we would have nowhere to go but outside into the bullets, the gas, and the settlers, I decided to try to dissuade them before they got in. I ran out, still in my prayer scarf and pajamas, to once again use my “let’s be reasonable now” mantra the best that I could—this time on camera.
Later that night, my husband watched the evening news and saw a film clip of me trying to persuade the soldiers to kindly remove their jack from my front door—which, amazingly, they did. He called that night, demanding I return to Seattle with the kids.