1 The principle of non-simultaneity. It is wonderful to hear children laugh down the stairs of our building. After months in which all sounds were banished from the place, save for the imagined and remembered sounds of shelling from the green-dressed army camp across the valley, the sense of normalcy creeps back, albeit only in doses. But children's laughter in the here-and-now inhabits one dimension; normalcy, the taken for granted and yet plannable course of quotidian life, inhabits the point at which dimensions intersect. I know it will not yet be a constituent of our compass of existence here. As the laughter trips down the staircase at this very moment, in the refugee camp of Tulkarm, in the Aida and Dheisheh camps of Bethlehem, in the already partly destroyed neighborhoods of Rafah, children are hearing the continuous sound of heavy fire, of planes and helicopters that pierce the ceiling of their world with a ferocity of surveillance and destruction. Not like children in the spaces over there, across the Atlantic, where the weapons are manufactured, where the master decisions and policies are made, where the new regime of domination is being secured and perfected. The principle of non-simultaneity: The existential condition which, in a world traversed by the cruelty and blindness of power, must be overcome. Solidarity. They will come to Ramallah soon enough. Then they will pass again with their gunfire close to this very place, this building. This neighborhood lies on the route of a probable entry point for their invasion force: It will not be the prime target, but will stand as part of the landscape to be mastered. The target will be the refugee camps: Al Am'ari can be reached down the road from here. My sister asks me to go over to her in Jerusalem. But I have no wish to leave. I finally understand the ordinary refusal to budge. My fear, which will no doubt raise its haunting head at the zero hour, is docile at present, prior to that inevitable moment. What raises its head insistently is refusal. What moves through my body is not the gut-clenching fist of dread, not yet, but the catapulting jolt of anger. And the will to simultaneity. How am I to leave? How many can leave the camps? Can I forget the shame I felt that night, months ago, when I first crouched in a corner of the middle room, with machine-gun fire battering the walls of the building, battering my ears and memory? The wild fear I felt and the shame that came with it provoked by the thought of that much more terrible and palpable hell of Beirut during the three months of Israel's assault and siege in the summer of 1982? The summer my newborn child finally came home: then too I could only grapple with non-simultaneity, I could only choose to acknowledge and refuse it at the same time. The Israeli Leviathan continues to exact its toll, continues to march through our lives, the small moments and the great, all marked by its imprints, the sound of its machinery. The moment of birth, the wedding, the shopping trip, the reunion with those we miss most--these were always and deeply marked long, long before Oslo and right through the period of pseudograce that was Oslo, the phase when we were being dressed for the final ceremony. Everyone cheering in the gallery while we were being gathered in the stadium. While the bounds and latitudes of the meta-colony were being drawn. 2 We are getting used to this periodic deathly assault at the hands of the Israeli army, and its allies; this fearful stream of dying, of bodies carried on the shoulders of friends and kin. Every few years we live through an interminable age of aching, an upheaval of loss, when a smile seems a distant object, a dance an impossible dream, when our whole world is forcefully plunged, once more, into a punishment of killing by a power which demands we cease to dream, punishes us for daring to will a future of our own. We are getting used to this: Patience limping soul, stand steadfast, or these young bodies, and these old ones, broken by fire, will not release the freedom of their spirit. …