The Zombie Survival Guide - Max Brooks [30]
The resettlement camp?
Resettlement and quarantine. At that time, I just saw it as a prison. It was exactly what I’d expected to happen to us: the tents, the overcrowding, the guards, barbed wire, and the seething, baking Negev Desert sun. We felt like prisoners, we were prisoners, and although I would have never had the courage to say to my father “I told you so,” he could see it clearly in my sour face.
What I didn’t expect was the physical examinations; every day, from an army of medical personnel. Blood, skin, hair, saliva, even urine and feces4 … it was exhausting, mortifying. The only thing that made it bearable, and probably what prevented an all-out riot among some of the Muslim detainees, was that most of the doctors and nurses doing the examinations were themselves Palestinian. The doctor who examined my mother and sisters was a woman, an American woman from a place called Jersey City. The man who examined us was from Jabaliya in Gaza and had himself been a detainee only a few months before. He kept telling us, “You made the right decision to come here. You’ll see. I know it’s hard, but you’ll see it was the only way.” He told us it was all true, everything the Israelis had said. I still couldn’t bring myself to believe him, even though a growing part of me wanted to.
We stayed at Yeroham for three weeks, until our papers were processed and our medical examinations finally cleared. You know, the whole time they barely even glanced at our passports. My father had done all this work to make sure our official documents were in order. I don’t think they even cared. Unless the Israeli Defense Force or the police wanted you for some previous “unkosher” activities, all that mattered was your clean bill of health. The Ministry of Social Affairs provided us with vouchers for subsidized housing, free schooling, and a job for my father at a salary that would support the entire family. This is too good to be true, I thought as we boarded the bus for Tel Aviv. The hammer is going to fall anytime now.
It did once we entered the city of Beer Sheeba. I was asleep, I didn’t hear the shots or see the driver’s windscreen shatter. I jerked awake as I felt the bus swerve out of control. We crashed into the side of a building. People screamed, glass and blood were everywhere. My family was close to the emergency exit. My father kicked the door open and pushed us out into the street.
There was shooting, from the windows, doorways. I could see that it was soldiers versus civilians, civilians with guns or homemade bombs. This is it! I thought. My heart felt like it was going to burst! This liberation has started! Before I could do anything, run out to join my comrades in battle, someone had me by my shirt and was pulling me through the doorway of a Starbucks.
I was thrown on the floor next to my family, my sisters were crying as my mother tried to crawl on top of them. My father had a bullet wound in the shoulder. An IDF soldier shoved me on the ground, keeping my face away from the window. My blood was boiling; I started looking for something I could use as a weapon, maybe a large shard of glass to ram through the yehud’s throat.
Suddenly a door at the back of the Starbucks swung open, the soldier turned in its direction and fired. A bloody corpse hit the floor right beside us, a grenade rolled out of his twitching hand. The soldier grabbed the bomb and tried to hurl it into the street. It exploded in midair. His body shielded us from the blast. He tumbled back over the corpse of my slain Arab brother. Only he wasn’t an Arab at all. As my tears dried I noticed that he wore payess and a yarmulke and bloody tzitzit snaked