The Occupation

“Why are you wearing a keffiyeh, Schlomo?” Avi asked his friend as he approached him with his Uzi resting on his forearm, its stock snugged into his armpit. “I almost shot you.”

“It keeps the sun off my head and the back of my neck,” Schlomo replied.

“Oy, and you’re doing the accent, too? Funny guy.” He shook his head. “You better take that off before the IDF gets here. They don’t share your sense of humor. I’ve got to go patrol the village. I got a phone call that some of the Palis have gone crazy.”

Schlomo raised his hand to wave goodbye, but as soon as the car shrank into a distant cloud of dust, he exhaled. He was angry and terrified in equal measure. Maybe he should take the keffiyeh off, but currently it was the only thing about his person that felt like him. Everything else about the foreign body he occupied was strange.

The dance that the Sufi showed him had worked. While starvation had driven him to an act that was indistinguishable from witchcraft, now that the deed was done, he didn’t even feel hungry. Schlomo was a lot better fed than Mutaz, who now occupied his body.

Avi pulled into the village where he saw a group of soldiers standing around a Palestinian man, pointing and laughing. One of them recognized him and called him over by name. 

“What’s going on?” Avi asked. The soldier grinned and twirled his index finger next to his helmet.

“This guy’s nuts,” the soldier responded gleefully. “The hummus has slipped all the way off his pita bread. Get this – he said he’s not Palestinian. He claims to be a settler. Not just any settler, but your friend, Schlomo.”

Just then, the Palestinian man ran towards Avi with his arms outstretched and was knocked easily to the ground by rifle butts. His cheeks were sunken around a mouth that cried out, “Avi, Avi! Help me! Why are they treating me like some kind of dirty Pali?”

“Who is he?” Avi asked.

“They say his name is Mutaz Khalif,” the soldier responded. “He collapsed after doing some mumbo-jumbo dance last night and when he woke up he was like this.”

“Avi, please…” the man moaned from the ground.

“I’m asking you nicely,” Avi responded. “Keep my name out of your mouth.”

“Avi, I carried your chair at your wedding, how could you…”

Avi squeezed his trigger briefly and filled the man’s belly with a last meal of lead. The soldier looked at the widening pool of blood that sank slowly into the thirsty earth beneath what used to be Mutaz Khalif..

“No worry,” he told Avi, clapping him on the shoulder. “We all saw him attack you.” The other soldiers nodded their reassurances, knowing the steps to this particular dance.

But the Sufi continued to teach his dance as well, until nobody could pull a trigger any more because they might be killing someone they considered human.