To make their story believable, Mhammad had stabbed Itamar superficially in the soft tissue of his abdomen with his own military knife, and had hit him on the head with a rock, just hard enough to leave marks and swelling to prove he was unconscious, unable to go for help. Several hours passed before the soldiers were reported missing and a search began. When they reached the woods, a bloody and dazed Itamar emerged an instant hero—but not because he’d survived an attack.

“Only Arab-killers are Israeli heroes,” Bilal said.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

Bilal sucked on a cigarette, the tip lighting up brighter. His right hand trembled.

“Two brothers we knew growing up lived nearby. Haj Ayman’s boys. They were rumored to be collaborators. I don’t think it was true, but they’d been a disgrace to their family, did drugs, went to Israeli bars and had sex with foreign women. Stuff like that. But they weren’t traitors.” He sucked on his cigarette again. “Or maybe they were. I don’t know.”

I waited quietly, remembering the newspaper stories claiming Mhammad had two accomplices found dead at the scene along with the Israeli soldiers.

Bilal looked at me. “Mhammad and Itamar knew Haj Ayman’s boys suspected them of being lovers. Mhammad sacrificed those boys, two Palestinians, for his Jewish lover.”

I was taking it all in, trying to make sense of my brief time with Mhammad, seeing the man I’d married in another light. “Or maybe he did it for you?” I asked.

He exhaled and ran his fingers through the bristles of his graying hair, cupping his temples as if to hold his thoughts in place. “Yes. He was trying to protect me,” he said, tearing up.

“I don’t know how Haj Ayman’s boys came to be at the scene. I guessed that Mhammad or Itamar lured them. Maybe with drugs. I don’t know,” Bilal said. “I don’t want to know. Itamar murdered them there. He staged the scene to support his heroic tale that he shot the Palestinian attackers before passing out from his injuries.”

“Does anyone else know?” I asked.

“No.”

“Not even Ghassan?”

“No.”

“Why me?”

He hesitated and turned back to the landscape. “You should know who you married … and who you’re planning to marry now.”

Something I could not name lodged in my throat. I had no language for such overlapping love, disappointment, disgust, and sympathy.

Their deceit, once planted in the public imagination—like the epic fabrication of a Jewish nation returning to its homeland—had grown into a living, breathing narrative that shaped lives as if it were truth.