Bilal had found the diary and read it as any nosy little brother would. It had spoken of love and longing for Tamara. “He made a point in his diary to write that Tamara spoke Arabic fluently, which seemed strange, but I didn’t think much of it then. They both played the oud, and they bonded over music,” Bilal said.

Mhammad and Itamar had been shy and awkward, peeling away from the group at the camp. Rumors ignited, and their isolation brought them closer. Eventually they lost their virginity to each other.

“He wrote about it. I was so curious about this Tamara girl.”

At some point, Bilal suspected his brother of being a collaborator. “I observed a strange interaction between him and a soldier at a checkpoint. There was a familiarity in the way they looked at each other … like my brother was angry, and the soldier was apologetic.”

But it would be another two years before the fateful day that set the course of all our lives.

“Mhammad and I drifted apart,” he said. “I was finishing high school, heading to university, and heavily invested in the resistance. Most of us wanted to join the PLO. It was all we talked about. It made us feel like real men. We thought we were going to liberate Palestine within a few years. My brother was already at university and worked at a restaurant in Jerusalem. Back then, Jerusalem wasn’t yet closed to us. I suppose he was going to see Itamar too. You know, even when they were together, they still called each other Tamara and Delilah—that was my brother’s nickname.”

“How do you know? I mean, that he was going to see Itamar?”

Bilal recalled acts of disorganized resistance that had preceded the Intifada. “At first I was just participating in street demonstrations. Later, I did more hard-core planning. Only my comrades knew. We regularly sabotaged shipping trucks and military vehicles with tire-busting nails. At one point, we took out a whole electrical grid to a settlement block.”

“But what does that have to do with Mhammad and Tamara—I mean, Itamar?”

“I decided to follow Mhammad once. I needed to be sure he wasn’t a collaborator. It was difficult, because he took two taxis, then went into the woods on foot. But I managed, and when I got close enough, I saw him in a passionate embrace with an Israeli soldier, still in uniform. I was still young, naïve enough that I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. He was kissing a man as he would a woman—and not just a man, but an enemy soldier. Their shirts were off, and they were pawing at one another.” There was palpable disgust in Bilal’s voice. I wondered if it was because his brother was intimate with another man, or because he was intimate with an Israeli soldier.