True story.

Two weeks ago I went with a journalist friend to Abu-Snan village. He wanted to write about people from this village, an Israeli - Arab village, who were harassed by the police and military, who claimed they host terrorists from Hizballa in their houses. They told us unbelievable stories about waking up, one early morning, by military commando units banging on their doors, pointing guns to little children heads and forcing them to lie on the floor, helicopters above the village, police man searching inside houses, and all in a village inside Israel!
"What got into them?" the people of Abu-Snan asked my friend. "We are Israelis, it's not the occupied territories here!"
Two days later I left for Amsterdam, just for one week. I thought, hey, one week without hearing news all the time, terrorists, bombs, deaths, military... all my usual-unbearable-everyday-life-atmosphere.
This "silence" lasted two happy days (that's also something). On Sunday I passed accidentally by an Internet terminal reporting a suicide attack in Israel. The next day I was waken up by a phone call from home, a friend telling me that Morel, the artist, photographer and teacher from Jerusalem, whom we knew and loved was killed in this attack. The next day was September Eleven, 2001, and for the rest of my "visit" I was sitting in front of the TV broadcasting shocked CNN journalists defining new vocabularies, describing the terrorist attacks on USA.

When I returned I learned more about the attack in which Morel died. It was a unique attack, since it was the first time the suicide terrorist was an Israeli Arab. And yes, he was from Abu-Snan village, and yes, I set in his house, it was his family we interviewed, and his son I laughed with and Photographed in their store's storage space, despite his reluctance to be photographed. His father was not there, he disappeared a few days before that and they were worried for him. Later we all realized, he was then preparing for this attack, 4 days later.

To bind and complicate this proximity further more, I just received a request from Avi, the principal of the school of photography, to take over Morel's photography course this year.

The end.