***

I agonized over what gifts to bring my cousins. They read only religious books. Toys for the children would have to be vetted for appropriateness, and besides, there were so many of them. Even food or wine would be tricky; since Judaism has no formal hierarchy like the church, one way rabbis establish their authority is by issuing their own rulings on minute points of Jewish law, so a cake or bottle bearing a hekhsher, a kosher certificate, from one rabbinic court might be rejected by the followers of another. The best suggestion I could get, after making phone calls to various other family members, was to bring fresh fruit, which of course enjoys a hekhsher from the Almighty Himself. Before leaving Jerusalem I had bought several pounds of grapes and mangoes.

These turned out to be a good choice. Yael, the wife of my cousin Bnaya, was rushed off her feet and glad of something to be able to give visitors. They lived in a house in the largest settlement, Neve Dekalim, that was mean and spartan by Gush Katif standards, with their seven children crowded two and three to a room. The furniture and decorations were all minimal, and Yael dished up meals of tinned food on disposable plastic plates.

The ice broke quickly. The young children were a delightful and unruly bunch, who after a few stares were climbing all over me. The eldest son, six-year-old Naftali—named after his deceased great-grandfather, my great-uncle—was boisterous, mischievous, and opinionated, bouncing on the furniture and talking non-stop.

As Yael and I discussed the disengagement—I used their word for it, girush—Naftali butted in, displaying his grasp of the settlers’ political arguments against it. “If they make us leave the terror will only get worse because they’ll fire rockets at all the other towns near here,” he said. Then he took me outside to show me where a Qassam rocket or a mortar shell had fallen a few days before, just across the street from their house. It was a pockmark in the tarmac, the size of a couple of fists. Had it not been for the shattered rear window of a van next to it, it could have been a small pothole.

A little later my other cousin, Bnaya’s sister Yifat, came by. Still in her 30s after bearing nine children, Yifat was trim and energetic, and carried herself with a steely determination. With her was one of her daughters, Moriah, a 12-year-old who combined her mother’s iron will with the fierceness of youth. Yifat recounted how Moriah had recently appeared on television, facing off against Israeli soldiers and police. “She was standing in front of a line of policewomen,” Yifat said, “and she said, ‘Which one of you is going to take me away? You? Or you? Or you?’ And the commentators in the studio were asking, ‘What kind of person could bring up a child to talk to soldiers that way?’”