Writing Fiction in the Shadow of Jerusalem

I started writing fiction while a cloud of death and mourning hung heavy over Jerusalem. To be clear: death and mourning are always hovering in the air over Jerusalem. It is not a joyful city. But in this period, beginning in early fall of 2015, death and mourning were increasingly part of the daily reality of almost every Jerusalemite I knew, and were spreading elsewhere, throughout Israel-Palestine.

In late September of that year, a car driven by a sixty-four-year-old Israeli man named Alexander Levlovitz was stoned by a number of Palestinian youths in Jerusalem. He crashed into a pole and was killed. A few days later, an Israeli couple were shot and killed by Palestinian gunmen while driving in the West Bank with their four children, who were not physically harmed. In the days and weeks that followed, the Israeli military began a trigger-happy campaign of suppressing any, some two hundred Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces—some of them armed with lethal weapons and attempting to carry out attacks; some of them throwing stones at army posts, vehicles, or checkpoints; some of them entirely unarmed; some of them small children, like thirteen-year-old Abdel Rahman Obeidallah. During the same period, twenty-eight Israelis had been stabbed, axed, run over, or shot to death by Palestinians, and an Eritrean refugee named Haftom Zarhum was beaten to death in a bus station after a group of Israelis mistakenly identified him as the Palestinian perpetrator of a shooting attack that had just taken place there.