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Israel’s long Lebanon war in earnest—a war not with the state of Lebanon but with armed groups exploiting the weakness of the Lebanese government to their own ends. Over the years this conflict has changed in nature, and some of the participants have changed. It has more often been at the periphery of outside attention than at the center, but a wise observer keeps an eye on it always. It pauses on occasion but has never ended, and it is punctuated every so often by the tidal movements of our military back and forth across the frontier. It gained intensity in the mid- and late 1970s, when Avi and most of the other characters in this book were born, and has run parallel to our lives since then.
    In June 1982 convoys of Israeli troops pushed into Lebanon, embarked on a misguided intervention with one of Lebanon’s Christian factions. Soldiers captured Beaufort Castle from Palestinian fighters and turned it into a permanent military position. Israeli divisions rolled north toward Beirut and toward a morass that summer and fall that has been described by others. My interest here is in events that came later and have never been recorded, so I’ll skip the earlier details: the attacks by Palestinian squads on civilian buses and schools inside Israel before the invasion; the army’s devastating bombardment of Beirut in the summer of 1982 and the successful expulsion of the Palestine Liberation Organization; the way Israel decided this wasn’t enough and attempted to force the installation of a friendly government in Lebanon, was foiled, saw its Christian allies massacre residents in two Palestinian refugee camps, and became embroiled in the Lebanese civil war. Israelis call this “sinking into the Lebanese mud.”
    In 1985, after protests at home and with dissent in the ranks, the army pulled back to the “security zone,” a narrow strip of Lebanese land along the border. At this point the writing peters out, more or less, even though Israel remained there for fifteen more years.
    After the invasion Israel found itself facing an enemy other than the one it thought it was fighting. These were not Palestinians but local Shiites calling themselves the Party of God, Hezbollah, funded and trained by the regime of the ayatollahs in Iran. These fighters appeared with new energies and a tactic, the suicide bomber, which turned out to be the signal innovation of the modern Middle East—the region’s most notable contribution to our times, the perfect illustration of what it has done to itself. The men of Hezbollah grew in sophistication and strength, driven by the expertise, ideology, and cash of their Iranian patrons, feeding off the resentment caused by Israel’s presence in Lebanon and riding the wave of religious war that had begun to crest in those years in this part of the world and which has now conclusively ravaged it. By the early 1990s the other armed groups had faded, Hezbollah had come into its own, the outline of the security zone war had been set, and the conditions had been created for our story.
    The year 1994, when Avi was drafted, found the Israelis dug in at positions across the south of Lebanon: a perilous little world of hilltops peering at each other through binoculars and sending radio messages flitting back and forth over the canyons, like the bonfires relaying word of the new moon from Jerusalem over the summits in the rabbinic writings, “from the Mount of Olives to Sartaba, from Sartaba to Grofina, from Grofina to Hoveran, from Hoveran to Beit Baltin,” and on to Babylon.
    This was the security zone, from Mount Hermon in the east to the Mediterranean in the west. It was meant to keep guerrillas away from the border and protect the people of Israel’s north: the frontier turkey farmers, the canners of corn and peas in urban factories, the Hebrew-speaking Arab plumbers, the beauties of Jewish Leningrad circa 1958, newly arrived in Israel with the great