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command.
    Israeli society and its military were changing, the collective receding and the individual coming to the fore, and the flag became a focus for people’s unease. Some thought part of the blame lay with the growing involvement of parents in their children’s army service: it was becoming common in those days for mothers to call their sons’ commanders to lodge complaints, a collision between one of the country’s most important institutions, the army, and its most important institution, the family. Or perhaps, some suggested, it had to do with tolerance for soldiers crying at military funerals—there was a debate in those days about whether this was appropriate. “When fear and crying become respectable subjects that are discussed and encouraged, it’s hard to get angry at soldiers in an isolated post,” wrote one journalist.
    Back in Israel, two of Eran’s comrades were hitchhiking at an intersection when a man pulled up, identified their uniform insignia, and said, “You’re the cowards, right?” One of the soldiers leaned into the car window and punched him in the face.

10
    I N THE SAME week of the Pumpkin Incident the newspapers were reporting a triumphant visit by our prime minister to the king of Morocco in Casablanca. A front-page article was headlined “A Bank, Not a Tank.” Reading the headlines from those days in late October and November 1994 is like reading the journal entries of a child you can barely recognize as yourself or one of those notebooks people keep beside their bed to record their dreams. The word
peace
was used without irony. Peace! Now it feels like the word
telegraph
or
wedlock
—a curio. This was, as I’ve mentioned, the heyday of the euphoria over the new Middle East.
    Some decided that the Pumpkin Incident was linked to the anticipated arrival of peace. “The fighting spirit has been broken,” wrote one analyst of the soldiers who had abandoned their posts on the hill, “because no one wants to be a war’s last fatality, and many feel that the 100 Years’ War is about to be over.” Should we laugh at this line, or weep?
    A new Middle East was being born just then, but not the one anyone imagined. It was happening in the scrub among boulders and concrete fortifications on a hill in the south of Lebanon. Only a few young people were present for the delivery.

11
    A FEW WEEKS after the Pumpkin Incident and not long after Avi arrived on the hill, guerrillas ambushed an army convoy coming from Israel. They emerged from the houses of a village that cowered beneath Beaufort Castle, and then they disappeared back inside. This village, Arnoun, was directly on the line between the security zone and Lebanon proper, caught on a border not of its making and battered and half deserted as a result.
    Avi’s company commander was Yohai, one of those rare officers with an instinctive understanding of young soldiers and a clear idea of what to do always, the idea generally being to attack. Yohai had identified Avi as a soldier who did not automatically obey orders; the commander appreciated this quality. When news of the convoy came Yohai didn’t wait for orders. He just rounded up Avi and a few others, took two armored vehicles, swung onto the dirt road that led south along the ridge, and headed for the fighting.
    When they reached the village they went room by room through two abandoned houses near where the guerrillas had been seen. The soldiers went in shooting and throwing grenades. No one was there. Outside, Avi raised his rifle and fired his pretty grenades with their champagne-cork pop, followed a moment later by the thud of the explosion, narrowly missing an Israeli officer of high rank who had appeared from somewhere to join the action.
    When the soldiers burst into the next house through a fresh shell hole in the wall it was clear that people lived there. There were couches, carpets, a fridge. You