substitute for family. Mature but romantic youths, they trained in utter seriousness, which was sometimes exaggerated, overzealous, and steeped in high-blown clich’s, in order to become heroes under the influence of the ideology they absorbed in youth movements and at school. They stuck to one another, a captive band from small adjoining neighborhoods of Jerusalem, the most Jewish city in the landscape of the Zionist rebirth. They prepared themselves to be fighters, they debated ideology with an intensity bordering on fanaticism, and at the same time they played Jewish musketeers. They lived in a little town veiled in the dust of former glory, the glory of a grand city long since faded and reduced to poverty, shrunk to a smattering of minuscule neighborhoods and a multitude of stones.Save for the Old City and several old neighborhoods, the scorched landscape, exposed to the sun, was planted mainly with stones and lined with wide-branched olive trees. Unlike the sands of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, with its endless gray stone, rocks, snakes, and empty lots gathered like flocks of lost sheep among magnificent but isolated and secluded structures–mosques, churches, holy places–was all of a piece. Stone, rock, and tree filled a topography turned occult.

When they climbed Mt. Scopus to train and prepare for battle, they considered themselves biblical heroes. They looked around and saw how the inhabited Western world ended where they stood and the desert began. All their lives they had lived physically and spiritually on the edge of the desert’s wasteland, on the verge of the mysterious,