A covered porch faces west, looking out at the green expanse of the Ayalon Valley. His family had been living in East Jerusalem and wanted to escape the violence of the first intifada.
The village school, which goes from nursery through sixth grade, is fully bilingual, with equal hours of instruction in Arabic and Hebrew. Around , he secured a large parcel of land, on loan from a Trappist monastery, to attempt an experiment in nonmilitarism and religious pluralism in the middle of Israel, halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
Amir left the village at nineteen and later became a successful businessman in Tel Aviv. Now, as we talked on his porch one evening in April, he was thinking of moving to Cyprus. The sun set fast, plunging the valley into darkness. In the first weeks of the war, Amir told me, you could watch the rockets from Gaza flying in the distance and exploding in the air, like fireworks, as they were intercepted by the Israeli air-defense system.
You could also feel the earth rumble as Israeli bombs detonated in Gaza. When Amir thought about the people of Gaza, where an estimated thirty-five thousand have been killed and another 1. And I live in this country. His wife was pregnant with their second child. But I believe that as a human being you should not be complicit. Amir told me that a gap had opened between the Palestinian residents of the community and some of their Jewish neighbors.
The Jews wanted the Palestinians to denounce Hamas and its murders. The Palestinians felt that some Jews were indifferent to the devastation of Gaza. His phone buzzed. Amir was responsible for bringing beverages. We got into his white S. The houses on our left, clinging to the hillside below the road, were invisible in the dark.
