Sleeping Children

For a period of years during the Victorian era, there existed a fashion for sculpting marble figures of sleeping children. The master of this genre was William Henry Rinehart, an American working in Rome. Rinehart occupied a studio tucked into the artists’ quarter near the Spanish Steps, a dense warren of workshops displaying long shelves of plaster busts, like the “wares of a crockery-shop or cheeses in a dairy-house,” according to one visitor. Tourists could find the sculptor, an auburn-bearded man with bright-blue eyes, at work before a tall, swiveling stool, atop which he would shape a clay sketch called a bozzetto. Usually he sculpted from live models: his neighbors’ plump, cherubic toddlers.

These sculptures, which Rinehart’s workshop eventually copied into marble, proved enormously popular. His team reproduced one piece, Sleeping Children, which he sketched in 1859, as many as nineteen times. His secret lay partly in the material he used. Ox-drawn carts would haul blocks of Carrara marble down to Rome from the hilltop quarries in Tuscany. Once Rinehart and his crew had shaped and polished the sculptures, the light had a way of diffusing through their surfaces, just as it does with human skin, giving the works an extraordinarily lifelike appearance. This is partly why so many tourists went through the trouble of traveling to his studio to see artworks in person; plaster reproductions did not compare. Goethe, on his own voyage through Italy, had observed that marble lent sculpted figures the “bloom of eternal youth.”

Rinehart’s other preoccupation was classical mythology. His masterpiece, Latona and Her Children, Apollo and Diana, sculpted in 1874, depicts the goddess Latona with her two sleeping infants—the god of the sun and the goddess of the moon—resting against her. In classical art such groupings of female figures with babies were known as kourotrophoi, from the Greek words for “child” and “nurturer.” With Latona’s serenely bowed head and protective cloak, the sculpture evokes the Madonna and Child images of the Renaissance. But not quite: Its subjects are pagan deities. And on Latona’s lap rest not one infant god but two, multiple.

Once, many years ago, I found myself within steps of Rinehart’s old studio in Rome, though I did not realize it at the time. I had been staying in the city for almost a week by myself, in a hotel near the Villa Borghese, but I remember almost nothing else of my time there. I was working as a journalist and had covered three wars in the space of a year. Physically and mentally, I was exhausted; in retrospect, I am certain that I was ill. I can recall drinking Brunello for breakfast and smoking a half dozen cigarettes before 9 am. At some point in the morning, after gathering enough energy to pull myself out of bed, I would wander down to the Via Condotti, order an espresso, and gaze vacantly at the passing pedestrians. One day I walked past the Trevi Fountain but otherwise saw no historical sites. I am not sure exactly why I had decided to come that winter to the Eternal City, but I know I had grown to distrust eternal things.

Freedom, for instance—or, at least, its universal export from Washington, DC. “The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world,” my president had proclaimed in his State of the Union address two years before. “It is God’s gift to humanity.” This was a vision that he seemed to take seriously; in my naivete, I took it seriously too. It was still the early, optimistic days of George W. Bush’s second term. The insurgency in Iraq had not yet reached its peak. The White House was promoting democratic reforms across the Middle East, from Baghdad to Beirut, and my editors at Newsweek deployed me to take notes on the results. Shortly after Bush’s second inaugural, in 2005, I made my first trip to the Gaza Strip, where I was to report on the municipal elections in Rafah, a sun-bleached city of 150,000 along the Egyptian border.

It was a bright Mediterranean day. Vendors pulled donkey carts stuffed with oranges and grapefruits. The streets were jammed with kids in school uniforms. Fatah, the ruling Palestinian party founded by Yasir Arafat and other activists in the 1950s, was doing its best to fight off an electoral challenge from the Islamists in Hamas, who were gaining in popularity and strength. Vans with loudspeakers blared campaign slogans. Fatah loyalists waved yellow flags; Hamas supporters hoisted green ones. Both factions had embraced the rage for elections, and everyone was commenting on how alive Rafah felt. “I only used to come here for funerals,” my translator told me as we sat surveying the dueling campaign operations from a restaurant balcony overlooking the street.

For nearly four decades Fatah had dominated Palestinian politics. The organization’s appeal had initially stemmed from its ethos of resistance. More than seven hundred thousand Palestinians had been driven from or had fled their homes during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. In an effort to regain lost territory, Fatah guerrillas known as feda’iyin—“those who sacrifice themselves,” in Arabic—had staged attacks on Israel from their bases in Syria and Jordan throughout the 1960s. After the Six-Day War, in 1967, when Israel defeated the Arab armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and occupied the West Bank and Gaza, the guerrillas regrouped by camping out on the heights above the east bank of the Jordan River. In 1970, however, they were crushed again—this time by the Jordanian military, a setback that came to be known as Black September. In the aftermath of these reversals, their tactics grew more radical, culminating in the killing of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games.

By the late 1980s, however, Fatah had increasingly sought accommodation with Israel. The Oslo Accords, negotiated secretly with Israeli leaders and signed at the White House in 1993, established a framework for the creation of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories. Yet, throughout the remainder of the decade, concessions from Israel remained few, and negotiators made little progress toward the achievement of this goal. The status quo increasingly grated on Palestinians, who finally returned to armed uprising in 2000 after Israel’s soon-to-be prime minister Ariel Sharon made a provocative visit to the Haram al-Sharif, one of Islam’s holiest sites, which is also holy to Judaism and Christianity, in which it is known as the Temple Mount. Although Fatah fighters participated in the uprising, launching about a quarter of all suicide attacks inside Israel, almost 40 percent of such attacks were conducted by a relatively new force in Palestinian political life: the Islamist group Hamas.

By my first trip to Gaza, in May 2005, it was obvious that Hamas was the rising power. The Islamists’ strategy struck me as deft and sure-footed. Their message seemed focused; their turnout machine, refined. Just like in local elections back home, the salient issues tended to be small and practical: hanging stoplights and filling potholes. I spoke with one man who told me he had cast his vote for Hamas because its candidate had fixed his mosque’s toilets. The Islamists were shrewd about cataloguing favors. A Hamas supporter in Rafah showed me an Excel spreadsheet where he kept records of all fifteen hundred of his relatives. He made a note every time Hamas distributed flour, olive oil, or rice to one of his family members. When it came time to vote, he used the same sheet to hand out campaign literature.

In its messaging Hamas positioned itself as the torchbearer of the Palestinian revolution. Fatah, it claimed, had sold out to Israel—its leaders were corrupt, and its foot soldiers were collaborators. All Fatah’s talk of peace, its overtures to Tel Aviv, had come to nothing. Force was the only solution. The Hamas rallies I reported on were spectacles, pyrotechnic displays that included men dressed as suicide bombers and burning Israeli flags. As the air turned cool one evening, I stopped by a rally in a crowded sandlot surrounded by concrete walls. Kids flocked around me, practicing their English. “How are you, fuck you,” they chirped. Ushers in green Hamas baseball caps shooed them away with sticks. Inside the rally two thousand green-bedecked Gazans roared: “Hamas, you are the gun! We are the bullets!”

Again and again I returned to Gaza during the following year. I came to look forward to the trips. Israel maintained merciless travel restrictions on Palestinians, but Gaza’s Mediterranean coastline gave the place a relaxed, beachy feel, and my days tended to conclude with a grilled filet of bream by the water. Sand spilled into the streets; prickly pear and bright bougainvillea sprouted around every corner. Gazans were funny, with a gallows humor that operated as a kind of survival mechanism. I found myself laughing during interviews. The more time I spent there, the more ordinary it all seemed. As I got to know them, even the militants struck me as regular people, their lives full of everyday banalities. I remember being at a Hamas headquarters where maps of the territory hung on the wall and a string of AK-47s dangled from hooks. In one corner a sign read: “Administration Not Responsible For Lost Items.”

A contrarian by nature, I enjoyed interviewing Hamas leaders. The group’s charter was ridiculous, full of outlandish anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. (It was impossible not to laugh when they claimed the Rotary Club was a worldwide Jewish plot). But the Hamas figures I spoke with had a way of poking holes in my nationalistic American pretensions. I had never heard anybody talk the way they did about world affairs; in the US there were guardrails on the debate that did not exist in Gaza.

I made a point on these trips of visiting Mahmoud Zahar, a cofounder of Hamas who later became the Palestinian foreign minister. Zahar kept his car parked in his living room to prevent assassins from planting a bomb under it; we did interviews in a far corner of his house—the most difficult section to attack, he explained. Brusque and wary, with a salt-and-pepper beard, Zahar sat lotus-style under a henna-colored blanket, the steam rising off his tea. During our first conversation I asked him how Hamas could condone killing civilians in suicide bombings. The Palestinians were “forced” to do it, he told me. Peaceful means had failed to end the occupation. “It is not allowed in Islam to drink alcohol,” he said. “But if you are forced to do it, you have to do it.” Americans were so hypocritical, he complained. What about all the innocents killed at Hiroshima? And look at what we were doing in Iraq, he added: Civilians were dying every day. “Do you believe this American occupation is a noble phenomenon?” he asked. “It’s a dirty thing.” When I asked whether participating in the electoral process might moderate Hamas, he seemed wary. “If people believe we will be moderate in the Western style, or a pro-Israeli style—that’s not moderate,” he said. “That’s corruption.”

The following January Hamas defeated Fatah in the Palestinian parliamentary elections, giving the Islamists a decisive majority in the body. The group appointed a native Gazan, Ismail Haniyeh, to be the Palestinian prime minister. Weaned on the pro-democracy rhetoric coming out of the White House, I was not prepared for what happened next. Publicly Bush spun the outcome as a positive development, an example of how elections can give vent to deep-seated frustrations about corruption—and ultimately spur reforms. But Israeli and American leaders, taking Hamas at its word that it sought to destroy the Jewish state, did not ultimately welcome Gaza’s new democratically elected government. Instead they sought to subvert it.

An Israeli security official explained to me that spring that his government’s policy was simply “regime change,” to “topple” Hamas. The most astonishing thing was how openly Israeli leaders supported what would become, in effect, a slow-motion coup. First Israel’s cabinet suspended the transfer of more than $50 million each month in tax and customs revenues it collected on behalf of the Palestinians. Then it announced that it had permitted Jordan to ship hundreds of American-made M16s and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of armored vehicles to Fatah loyalists, who suddenly found themselves flush with funds to hire and train troops for an elite new force to battle the Islamists. The maneuvering spurred an arms race in the Palestinian territories. A weapons dealer I met with in Ramallah told me that the price of an M16 on the black market had doubled since the elections.

Fatah’s security services had been trained by the CIA, which I naively believed was somehow more law-abiding than other intelligence services. But the stories I was hearing in Gaza seemed like something out of 1970s Central America. Fatah deployed a brigade of men—which Gazans had nicknamed the “death squad”—to harass Hamas loyalists. I wrote about one young Hamas militant in Khan Younis, who told me how a group of men had assaulted him on the side of the road, throwing a black bag over his head and locking him and a cousin in the trunk of their car. The attackers drove them to an orchard, made them lie on their stomachs, and beat them with hammers and pipes. The young man was ultimately freed, but not before the assailants smashed his cousin’s jaw and then shot him to death.

Faced with a well-armed foe supported by Israel and the United States, Hamas fought back. The Fatah leaders I visited that spring seemed increasingly weary and embattled. In late May a bomb exploded in an elevator at the Fatah-controlled Palestinian intelligence headquarters, sending the intel chief tumbling down four floors of the smoke-filled shaft. The following day the bodyguards of another Fatah leader found a 154-pound bomb buried at the end of his driveway— “enough to blow up a tank,” he told me, as he sat in his Gaza City office with the window shades tightly drawn.

Media accounts—including my own—tended to portray these internecine battles as a symptom of Palestinian dysfunction. For the story I had written about the dueling reprisals that spring between Fatah and Hamas, an editor had added the headline: “The Gangs of Gaza.” The implication was that the problem was somehow homegrown, that violence was endemic in Palestinian culture, and that there was a fundamentally criminal and barbaric cast to the entire place. It was the kind of framing that obscured the role of outside forces. In the months to come US policymakers would redouble their efforts to encourage shipments of automatic weapons and tens of millions of dollars from Arab allies to Fatah strongmen.

Only gradually did it dawn on me that this was happening. I was twenty-eight when I began reporting on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and I was a slow learner. But the longer I spent covering the region, the more I came to understand how misleading the rhetoric coming out of Washington was, with all its talk about supporting freedom and democracy. Hamas—whatever its danger to Israel, whatever its rejectionist platform—had been democratically elected to lead the Palestinian legislature. Attempting to overthrow it through proxies and death squads was little different from the worst abuses of the Cold War, when American operatives helped overthrow the prime minister of Iran and backed ruthless anti-Communist militias in El Salvador. What was happening in and to Gaza was not really about democracy at all—or any kind of universal, God-given values. It was simply about power.

The tension between Israel and Hamas finally broke at the end of June. Israeli commandos crept into a village near Rafah and snatched two men they said were Hamas members; the following day Islamist militants crossed the border through a tunnel and then killed two Israeli soldiers and kidnapped a third, Gilad Shalit. A couple of weeks later, on my way into Gaza, I learned that the Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah had joined the fighting on Israel’s northern border, killing and kidnapping several more Israeli soldiers. The escalation suddenly put the whole region in play, with Israel fighting enemies on two fronts.

On my trips that summer to Gaza, my usual Arabic translator could not join me; the spreading war was pulling her in a thousand directions. Instead she arranged for me to work with a twenty-three-year-old student from northern Gaza. Zahra, as I will call her, was a striking presence, with enormous dark eyes, prominently rounded cheekbones, and a strong rebellious streak. She wore a headscarf, as most Palestinian women in devout Gaza do, but affixed it loosely, letting a rope of black hair escape from one side. We spent long hours together—loitering around government ministries waiting to interview officials, discussing local politics, and killing time by drinking mango juice and playing tic-tac-toe on the back of my reporter’s notebook.

What I admired most about her was her audaciousness, her sense of adventure, her unwillingness to be cowed by the expectations of others. She told me that she aspired to be a politician and said she knew what that meant in Gaza: “They will kill me one day in the future.” I once spotted her studying a vocabulary list that included the words collaborating, shrapnel, and extrajudicial execution. She seemed to relish challenging her society’s norms. One afternoon, as we waited to interview a Hamas leader, she asked me if I had ever ridden a horse. I told her that I had. She explained that if she tried to ride a horse in Gaza, “people would talk.” Maybe on the beach, where nobody could see, she said.

Zahra was no Islamist, yet she was appalled by Israel’s brutal tactics and seemed to quietly relish watching its military suffer setbacks. She may not have been objective—an impossibility in Gaza—but she was completely fearless. One afternoon, at a restaurant by the beach, she arranged for us to meet a militant from a splinter group calling itself the Army of Islam. An Israeli drone buzzed overhead: a sound like a lawn mower. All I can remember about the guy we met is his bloodshot eyes and the way he kept shifting in his seat to avoid sitting on the 9mm tucked into his waistband. He suggested he take us to interview his group’s commander, but we would have to let him blindfold us first, and we would need to go in the middle of the night. Zahra was ready; I was skittish. The following spring the same group held a BBC journalist captive for nearly four months.

Zahra lived with her parents in Beit Hanoun, a farming village in northern Gaza. As the fighting intensified that summer, Israel increasingly shelled the citrus groves around her neighborhood—a popular site for the launching of homemade rockets. On my way in and out of Gaza, I could see the mushroom clouds of white smoke from the howitzer shells rising over the village. Sometimes this shelling sounded like rolling thunderclaps; other times, like a kind of metallic reverberation, as if someone were beating a cookie sheet against a carpet. Increasingly the place resembled an all-out war zone. One afternoon, as Zahra and I sat waiting for an interview, a bunch of white balloons appeared overhead and then popped, sending hundreds of tiny leaflets fluttering down on Gaza like glitter against the blue sky. The fliers warned Gazans that the attacks would begin again soon and urged them not to let militants “ruin your lives.” People scooped the pieces of paper up and saved them like souvenirs.

By early autumn my regular translator had returned to work, but I still made a point of visiting Zahra whenever I came to Gaza. I remember one occasion when I had waited all day to interview a Hamas leader: My translator had brought along a big box of chocolates to congratulate the official on the wedding of his son, but the official never showed. I suggested we drive up to Zahra’s house instead. When I knocked at the door, she opened it. She wasn’t wearing a headscarf, and waves of black hair rolled down her shoulders. I gave her the chocolates. “For me?” she said. We sat on cushions on the living room floor. Her mother made sweet tea. Her sister’s baby lay sleeping in a cradle in the corner. The electricity rolled off and on. Zahra and I smiled at each other in the light of candles and kerosene lamps.

All fall the war got worse. The fighting seemed to be inching closer to Zahra’s home. One morning she called me shortly before 6 am and told me that the Israeli army had invaded Beit Hanoun. “I can see the soldiers. They’re right in front of my house,” she said. “I feel like I’m in an action movie!” I told her to stay inside, but it was useless to offer advice. She would never listen. After the shells landed, she ran toward them.

One morning that November a barrage of Israeli munitions hit a house in northern Gaza, killing nineteen people—almost all from one family, including eight children. After hearing the explosion, Zahra had run to the scene. Over the phone, she described the horrific aftermath: an array of scattered body parts. I jumped in my car and sped to where she had been.

At the grim Erez Crossing, a thin shaft of sunlight filtered through a scrim of chicken wire. Inside, mounds of bulldozed dirt and cobblestones had been heaped beside fig trees and prickly pear cactus. Roadside merchants, capitalizing on the frequent blackouts, sold kerosene lamps and white tapers. Gazans crowded makeshift outdoor mourning houses, gathering on white plastic chairs under the shade of tarps. On the concrete walls, graffiti congratulated the martyrs on their “weddings”—meaning their deaths.

At the scene of the attack—a four-story concrete house with seafoam-green shutters—charred carob and papaya leaves floated in pools of muddy water mingled with blood. Generators purred; oblivious roosters ambled around. A neighbor with eyes red from crying offered to walk me through the shrapnel-pocked house. He explained that just before sunrise an explosion had shaken him awake. He had thrown on his jacket and run outside. The shells continued to fall, killing other neighbors in front of him. A boy who’d lost a hand and a leg had begged him for his help, but he hadn’t known what to do.

He took me through the house. We stepped over piles of shattered glass and concrete, children’s shoes everywhere. We climbed to the roof, where a shell had punched a manhole-size cavity in the fourth-floor ceiling. In a room that had belonged to a thirteen-year-old named Mahmud we found a black backpack and a bunch of Pokémon notebooks covered in concrete dust. In one notebook he had copied out the story of Maryam from the Koran. In another, for his science class, the boy had written: “How do we make sure a place has life? We take a match, we light the match. If there’s a fire, we see a place has oxygen. What is the importance of having oxygen on earth? Oxygen is important for the breathing process. Sunlight is very important.” The boy had not survived.

For some reason—convinced, I suppose, of my role as a witness to this atrocity—I drove to the local morgue that afternoon. An attendant obligingly pulled out a drawer. Over the years, when I have remembered this scene, I have found that my mind—or, perhaps, my heart—has played tricks on me. It has shaped and reshaped the contents of this compartment in strange and unpredictable ways. I have learned to distrust my own recollection of it. But what I can tell you for certain is that inside this drawer was the worst thing I have ever seen in my life.

I saw Zahra one last time, the night of this shelling. After I’d finished reporting, I drove over to her house. I was leaving the following day for Baghdad and found it funny that she seemed worried about me; she was the one living in a war zone. We sat for a while with her father, an intellectual with a wavy gray beard who had moved the family to Gaza from North Africa when she was a girl. From time to time Zahra and I would slip off to talk on our own. She showed me around the house. Her bedroom was a girly space with a big makeup mirror and two twin beds. Photos of Yasir Arafat hung all over the room. As I left that night, we stood outside in the dark under the dim red-and-blue lights of her porch. She told me about the last few weeks, during the Israeli invasion. She was bored of being stuck in her house. Her brothers played cards. Her father smoked. Her mother prayed. She told me she was considering dropping out of school. She did not really see the point, she said, after what she had witnessed. She had woken up that morning and run to the house that had been shelled, taking shortcuts. The body parts had still been fresh when she’d arrived. “I saw hands,” she told me. “I saw heads.”

I will always remember what she did next—and what I did next. From her pocket she pulled a small glass dolphin. It used to be two, she explained; she had broken them apart. She gave this one to me and told me that she would keep the other while I was in Baghdad. On the back of my reporter’s notebook she scribbled, “God save you wherever you go.” At the time it felt somewhat ninth grade; in retrospect, it was one of the most tender moments of my life.

The next day I flew to Baghdad. The following summer I met my wife, an American; a few years later we had a son and moved home to the United States. I am ashamed to say that, even though I returned to Gaza many times to report, I did not contact Zahra or even think much about her over the next eighteen years. Even as Israel continued to attack Gaza—in 2008, in 2012, in 2014—I did not call to check on her. But in October 2023, as Hamas overran southern Israel and northern Gaza seemed on the verge of destruction, I could not stop wondering about how she was doing. I found her number in an old notebook, texted her, and asked if she remembered me. “Yes, I do remember,” she wrote back. “I am still in Gaza and living this nightmare with my family.” After the Hamas attack and Israel’s invasion, she had moved to a tent in one of the camps near the border with Egypt; her children were eating Bisquick and waiting in line for hours to use the restrooms. That night I tore through my attic, looking for the little glass dolphin. I would not have thrown it away; I knew I must have had it somewhere. But it was buried under a lifetime of suburban debris.

Why had I lost touch with Zahra? I can only believe it had something to do with what I saw in the drawer at the morgue on our last day together in Gaza—what she must have seen too, that morning, in an even more gruesome form. It was a vision that sent me to Rome that winter in a drunken, hopeless daze; that repelled me from anything associated with it. Inside the compartment was the dead body of a woman: a mother, now marble gray, her arm shredded like putty. A younger being, or former being, lay atop her chest, in a kind of macabre kourotrophos or Madonna and Child.

But this is not exactly right. What I saw, in fact, resembled more closely the vision of the expatriate sculptor William Henry Rinehart, whose masterwork depicting Apollo and Diana on their mother’s lap sought only to raise nature, in its cruel diversity, to art. It reflected a world governed not by a single power but eternally disrupted by competing, often warring, powers. For in the morgue that day in Gaza I saw not one lifeless child resting upon his mother’s breast but two, multiple.