Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation. Colm Toibin

took place between the Adam settlement and Qalandiya checkpoints, in what is called Area C of the West Bank, which is entirely under Israeli control. The likelihood of something like this occurring was well known. Later, a report from Ir Amim, an Israeli human rights NGO, established that the tragedy resulted from the multiple challenges of living beyond the separation barrier. Roads were substandard. The bus was unsafe, there were too many children on the bus, the children had no access to education in their own communities, and there was no oversight.

      “When the accident happened, we didn’t know how to cope with it,” Baha told me. Someone got up on a loading dock in the camp and called out the names of the dead. Afterward, Baha and Adel both cried all the time. They felt that the lives of Shuafat’s children were disposable. They decided to start their own volunteer emergency team, through WhatsApp, and it now has eighty members, who are trained in first aid, each with special skills they are ready to employ at a moment’s notice. They are saving up to purchase their own Shuafat camp ambulance, whose volunteer drivers will be trained medical professionals, like Baha’s wife, Hiba, who is a nurse.

      Baha, I noticed, seemed more optimistic about the emergency team, and about the future, than Adel did. At one point, Adel, who has a shattered and frantic, but loving, warm energy, turned to me and said, “We are orphans here.”

      Adel’s daughter Mira, who had been transferred from her wheelchair to the couch, sat and fidgeted. She understood no English but was forced to quietly pretend she was listening. I kept smiling at her, and she smiled back. I was desperate to give her something, to promise something. It’s very difficult to see a child who has suffered so tremendously. It’s basically unbearable. I should give her the ring I was wearing, I thought. But then I saw that it would never fit her fingers, which were very swollen and large, despite her young age; her development, after the fire, was thwarted because her bones could not properly grow. I’ll give her my earrings, was my next idea, and then I realized that her ears had been burned off in the fire. I felt obscene. I sat and smiled as if my oversize teeth could beam a protective fiction over this poor child, blind us both to the truth, that no shallow gesture or petty generosity would make any lasting difference.

      THE TRAVEL AGENCY IN THE SHUAFAT REFUGEE CAMP MALL IS CALLED Hope. There is a toy store in the mall called The Happy Child. The children I met were all Baha’s kids, part of his group, on his team, drafting off his energy, which was relentlessly upbeat.

      I have to recreate with all the precision I can manage, to remember what I am able to about Baha. I see Baha in his pink polo shirt, tall and handsome, but with a soft belly that somehow reinforces his integrity, makes him imperfectly, perfectly human. Baha singing “Bella Ciao” in well-keyed Italian, a language he’d learned at age nineteen, on the trip that changed his life, working with Vento di Terra, a community development and human rights NGO based in Italy. Later, I sent a video of Baha singing to various Italian friends, leftists who were thrilled that a guy in a Palestinian refugee camp knew the words to “Bella Ciao.”

      Baha’s friends and relatives all hugging me and cheek-kissing me, the women bringing out boxes that contained their hand-embroidered wedding dresses, insisting I try on each dress, whose colors and designs specified where they were from—one black with white stitching, from Ramallah. Cream with red, Jerusalem. In each case we took a photo, laughing, me in each dress, with the woman it belonged to on my arm.

      Everyone imploring me to come back, and to bring Remy, my eight-year-old, and I was sure that I would come back, and bring Remy, because I had fallen in love with these people.

      And in the background of the hugs and kisses, in almost every home where we spent time, the TV playing the Islamic channel, Palestine-Al-Yawm, a relentless montage of blood, smoke, fire, and keffiyeh-wrapped fighters with M16s.

      The constant hospitality. Coffee, tea, mint lemonade, ice water, all the drinks I politely accepted. Drank and then sloshed along, past faded wheatpastes of jihad martyrs.

      Come back. Bring Remy. I will, I told them, and I meant it.

      Late at night, Baha and his wife, Hiba, decided to show me their digital wedding photobook. It was midnight, their two young daughters asleep on couches around us. Hiba propped her iPad on her belly—she was five months’ pregnant, expecting her third child, a boy—and we looked at every last image, hundreds of images, of her and Baha in highly curated poses and stiff wedding clothes, her fake pearl and rhinestone tiara, her beautiful face neutralized by heavy makeup, but the makeup part of the ritual, and the ritual part of the glory. The two of them in a lush park in West Jerusalem. Every picture we looked at was, for them watching me see the images, a new delight: there were more and more and more. For me, they all started to run together, it was now one in the morning, I was exhausted, but I made myself regard each photograph as something unique, a vital integer in the stream of these people’s refusal to be reduced.

      I slept in what they called their Arabic room, on low cushions, a barred window above me issuing a cool breeze. I listened to roosters crow, and the semiautomatic weapons being fired at a nearby wedding celebration, and eventually I drifted into the calmest, heaviest sleep I’d had in months.

      The next day, Baha had meetings to attend to try to solve the water problem. I spoke to Hiba about their kids. She asked me at what age Remy had started his piano lessons. “I want music lessons for the girls,” she said, “I think it’s very good for their development.” As she said it, more machine gun fire erupted from the roof of a nearby building. “I want them to know the feel, the smells, of a different environment. To be able to imagine other lives.”

      When I think of Hiba Nababta wanting what I want for my child, her rightful desire that her kids should have an equal chance, everything feels hopeless, and more obscene, even, than my wanting to give earrings to a child without ears.

      I went with Hiba that morning to her mother’s house, where Hiba’s mother and her sisters were preparing an exquisite meal of stuffed grape leaves and stuffed squashes, the grape leaves and vegetables grown on her mother’s patio in the camp. We were all women, eating together in relaxed company. A sister-in-law came downstairs to join us, sleepy, beautiful, thin, with long red nails and hair dyed honey blond, in her pajamas and slippers. She said that she was leaving for New Jersey, in just a few days, with her husband, Hiba’s brother, and their new baby. Relatives had arranged for them to immigrate. She would learn English and go to school.

      When it was time to say goodbye, a younger sister was appointed to walk me to the checkpoint. Halfway there, I assured her I could walk alone.

      On the main road, shopkeepers came out to wave and smile. Everyone seemed to know who I was, the American who had come to meet with Baha.

      At the checkpoint, the Palestinian boy in front of me was detained. I was next, and the soldiers were shocked to see an American, as they would have been shocked to see any non-Palestinian. There was much consternation in the reinforced checkpoint station. My passport went from hand to hand. Finally, the commander approached the scratched window. “You’re a Jew, right?” he blurted into the microphone. For the context in which he asked, for its reasoning, I said no. But in fact, I’m ethnically half-Jewish, on my father’s side, although I was not raised with any religious or even a cultural connection to Judaism. My mother is a white protestant from Tennessee. I might have said “yes, partly,” but I found the question unanswerable, on account of its conflation of Zionism and Jewish identity. My Yiddish-speaking Odessan great-grandfather was a clothing merchant on Orchard Street. My grandfather worked in his shop as a boy. That is classically Jewish, but my sense of self, of what it might mean to inherit some trace of that lineage, was not the kind of patrimony the soldier was asking after. I was eventually waved along.

      The day I left Shuafat camp was April 17. Fifteen days later, on May 2, Baha Nababta was murdered in the camp. An unknown person approached on a motorcycle as Baha worked with roughly a hundred fellow camp residents to pave a road. In front of this very large crowd of people, working together, the person on the motorcycle shot at Baha ten times and fled. Seven bullets hit him.

      It is now November. Baha’s wife, Hiba, has given birth to their son. His father is gone. His mother is widowed. But a baby—a baby can thrive no matter. A baby won’t even know, until