“OPERATION PEACE FOR GALILEE—that’s what they called it. My God, even Orwell couldn’t have come up with a better name. On June 4, 1982, the Israelis invaded Lebanon to finish off the PLO once and for all. To us it all seemed so familiar. An Israeli armored column heading north up the coast road, only now the coast road was in Lebanon instead of Palestine, and the soldiers were members of the IDF instead of the Haganah. We knew things were going to get bad. Ein al-Hilweh was known as Fatahland, capital of Diaspora Palestine. On June 8, the battle for the camp began. The Israelis sent in their paratroopers. Our men fought back with the courage of lions—alley to alley, house to house, from the mosques and the hospitals. Any fighter who tried to surrender was shot. The word went out: the battle for Ein al-Hilweh was to be a fight to the last man.

“The Israelis changed their tactics. They used their aircraft and artillery to raze the camp, block by block, sector by sector. Then their paratroopers would sweep down and massacre our fighters. Every few hours the Israelis would pause and ask us to surrender. Each time the answer was the same: never. It went on like this for a week. I lost one brother on the first day of the battle, my other brother on the fourth day. On the last day of fighting, my mother was mistaken for a guerrilla as she crawled out of the rubble and was shot to death by the Israelis.

“When it was finally over, Ein al-Hilweh was a wasteland. For the second time, the Jews had turned my home into rubble. I lost my brothers, I lost my mother. You ask me why I’m here. I’m here because of Sumayriyya and Ein al-Hilweh. This is what Zionism has meant to me. I have no choice but to fight.”

“What happened after Ein al-Hilweh? Where did you go?”

The girl shook her head. “I’ve told you enough already,” she said. “Too much.”

“I want to hear the rest of it.”

“Drive,” she said. “It’s almost time to see your wife.”

Gabriel looked at the clock: 6:00 P.M. Ten miles to Paris.

25 ST-DENIS, NORTHERN PARIS

25

ST-DENIS, NORTHERN PARIS

AMIRA ASSAF CLOSED THE DOOR OF THE FLAT behind her. The corridor, a long gray cement tunnel, was in semidarkness, lit only by the occasional flickering fluorescent tube. She pushed the wheelchair toward the bank of elevators. A woman, Moroccan by the sound of her accent, was yelling at her two young children. Farther on, a trio of African boys was listening to American hip-hop music on a portable stereo. This is what remained of the French empire, she thought, a few islands in the Caribbean and the human warehouses of St-Denis.