“Habibti,” he said. “That Israeli professor used to send me reagents for my lab when I taught chemistry, because we didn’t have the budget at our university. In return, I gave him data to publish under his name from time to time. He’s a total shit, but I can depend on him to get me reagents and compounds without asking questions. Phthalate anhydride is an inert and harmless compound. He has no idea what I’m using it for. But now I have enough to make up a large enough batch of what I need in high concentration.”

We ate so much ice cream that night we skipped dinner.

Redeeming History

REDEEMING HISTORY

THE PEOPLE OF Nablus were the first to leave their homes en masse. On Monday, July 29, 2002, the fortieth day of curfew, thousands of young men and women took to the streets, throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. Jenin had inflicted casualties on the Israeli military; Nablus was openly challenging their curfew; and Bethlehem fighters were hunkered down in the Church of the Nativity, refusing to surrender despite a terrible siege around them. Ramallah endured the heaviest military presence, because Yasser Arafat was holed up there in the Palestinian Authority’s headquarters. Each district had its own stories of what was ultimately nearly sixty terrible days of confinement that turned homes and cities into prisons.

Some younger activists said Bilal and Ghassan “did nothing”—that the leaders they looked up to “hid like rabbits” when needed. Their words hurt Bilal deeply. I suspect he felt no small measure of guilt for not doing more, for passing the hours in the decadence of love instead. He didn’t talk about it, but for a time he was not himself, as if he blamed me. It wasn’t long, though, before he returned to being the man of days past. But these vacillations would become a pattern, a tangible manifestation of the clash inside him, between the fighter who gave his life to national liberation and the husband who simply wanted love and family.

He worked longer hours in his bathroom laboratory during the two weeks after we received the powdered phthalic anhydride. He made gallons and gallons of other phthalates to pump into the water pipe flowing to the settlement once curfew was lifted.

When we were finally let out of our home prisons, the statistics were ominous. Hundreds of Palestinians dead, thousands arrested, untold disappeared, thousands more wounded or crippled, hundreds of homes demolished … and on it went. It was hard not to become numb to the violence and those sadistic numbers. I could not exist in a constant state of outrage and mourning, unlike Bilal. He sought out the individual lives, the families left behind.

“Look at this.” He showed me a Sunday Digest clipping from June 30, 1957, quoting excerpts from a diary at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem. “Read the next to last paragraph,” he said.