After the massacre of the Arab village or Deir Yaseen, I took fifty babies into our nursing home. As I stood talking to the frightened women and registering the babies, a boy between three and four years of age looked at me and seeing that I was not an Arab gave a shriek and fell in a faint. I hastened to get water to revive him, but he was dead. What horrible sights had he seen to bring on heart failure?

“Deir Yaseen wasn’t just a massacre, an abstract word with numbers and grainy photos of a long-ago time. To me, Deir Yaseen is this little boy. There are stories like this for every pogrom they committed against us,” he said. Bilal surrounded himself with stories, stacked shelves of them to collect people’s pain and paste it into historic events and political analyses.

I listened, helped him work out plans, and pumped high concentrations of phthalates into the settlement’s water pipe.

We monitored Israeli media, searching for relevant news about that particular Israeli colony on Bilal’s land. After five months of pumping phthalates into the pipe, an article appeared in a local Hebrew-language newspaper describing strange symptoms among the residents. Bilal translated that the health ministry was coming under criticism for ignoring their request for an investigation. But officials fired back that the reported symptoms did not raise alarm. “Some men are growing tits. Okay, maybe they go on a diet,” a source from the ministry was quoted as saying. But there were other issues. Women were having difficulty getting pregnant. The source replied that “this happens to people sometimes. They have to keep trying or go to fertility. Plenty of other women there are pregnant.” It was true that there were a few pregnant women. But there was more: asthmatics having frequent flare-ups, new cases of wheezing and other respiratory issues.

The article was perfect. It gave us warning the authorities would come soon to investigate. We used the next few days to reverse the pump, to siphon and store as much clean water as we could; and when we saw water department trucks ride into the settlement, the pipe had been clear for four days. Nothing would show up if they tested the water. And that’s what happened. The only noteworthy result that came up in their tests was slightly elevated levels of pesticides, which had nothing to do with us. But they weren’t high enough to convincingly be the culprit, according to the article.

The settlers’ health problems persisted, however, because we went back to sabotaging the pipe when it was safe to do so.