Someone wasn’t there at dinner that evening at Yad David. Amnon, Tony’s eldest, arrived the next day, late and without apology and only just in time to join his brothers in holding aloft his sister Tal’s wedding canopy. Amnon, who lives in a corrugated iron shack down a dirt road a few kilometres from Yad David, is horribly estranged from friends and family. Of his life I have little, just a few snapshots.

First the toddler in his father’s arms. It’s actually my favourite photo of Tony. He’s home on leave from the army, holding the two year old Amnon in his arms. Oblivious to the camera, Tony has eyes only for his son. And Amnon too, as he reaches for the shiny IDF insignia on his father’s left shoulder.

Then again at seven on the trip with Steph and me. He’s a tanned and sturdy youngster now, good at school, and with quite a flair for soccer. But the fragility is beginning to show. Already there have been a couple of inexplicably tearful episodes. Seconds before this shot is taken he asks if he could take a picture with the rather expensive camera I’ve brought with me. We pose by a watermelon stall on the outskirts of Jericho, Steph, Tony, Yael, Tal and me. Just about to squeeze the shutter, Amnon drops the camera. There’s no harm done but Amnon collapses into tears. Minutes later all is well and the picture is taken.

Next, sixteen and the first time away from Israel. He’s come with his sister to stay with his Grandma in England. A good-looking boy, but already beginning to acquire that reputation for being a bit troubled. We see quite a bit of them and here and in this shot, brother and sister pose on their Grandma’s sofa, arms around each other.

Now nineteen, on weekend leave from the army. The M11 sits uncomfortably on his young shoulders, no Israeli swagger here, just a very homesick boy. Not a happy time for him, hating the army as he does, especially since his father is something of a local war hero. Still, he graciously poses with uniform and gun with my two kids for the obligatory Guardian of Israel photograph.

“Just like you!” Tony says shaking his head, “He’s so like you!” And they do say that about Amnon. “So like David!” they say. And it’s true. It’s in the build – slighter than the other Fisher men and in the forearms too, thin and dark, and the clumsiness and the handshake, damp and nervous. It’s in the temperament too – subdued, a bit melancholic, troubled. 

We’re in a minibus on our way to visit Amnon at his army base. He’s in a tank unit some sixty kilometres south of Yad David. It’s Yael’s idea, this visit. How she begged Tony to agree. How she suffered all those homesick Friday night calls from Amnon and how Tony suffered watching her suffer.

“A simple soldier” is how Amnon puts it and that’s what he is. Just one more simple soldier, getting by as best he can. But Amnon is a Kibbutznik – white, educated, the Zionist bedrock. Great things were expected - Officer School, a crack unit, a combat unit certainly.

“Look”, Tony tells me over his shoulder as I sit behind him in the minibus “You know…. everyone knows I’d have loved him to be an officer or in a crack unit.  And he could have done it you know. In the tests, the interviews, in his school record he could have done anything he wanted….but I never let him know that, I never would let him know that.…”

The truth is, that to be anything other than a simple soldier required four years instead of the prescribed three and for Amnon, for whom every single moment in the army is a living hell that was just too much.

So we sit together, camped outside the barbed wire and a furtive Amnon with his conscript haircut and green fatigues slips out for a brief picnic and some family love.

                                                                            2

The day after the wedding and it’s coming on to evening. We’re by the pool but nearly everyone has gone in now. The air is cooler and there’s just the two of us, me and Amnon. Me on a chair facing a failing sun, Amnon on the grass, knees to chest, staring at the pool.

“This peace process. Abba doesn’t like it. He says they’re giving this country away.”

“So?”

“So I just wanted you to know.”

“So I know”.

So you know. Do you want to know what I think?

“Sure, tell me.”

“I think that we should clear them all out and have done with it.”

“Well you’re not alone there. I understand there’re quite a few people in this country who feel that way.”

“Well why not? We’ve pretty well cleared them from most of the country why not just clear them from the rest?”

“Why not indeed”

Suddenly his head jerked up and he stared straight at me.

“Uncle, you’re a smart man. Have you heard of Deir Yassin?”

“Of course, Deir Yassin. Arab village attacked in 1948. A massacre took place there, right?”

“Right. In our great War of Independence. It was Irgun and Lehi. Terrorists you’d call them”.

“And what would you call them?”

“Oh Uncle I would call them freedom fighters. They killed over a hundred, raped the women, looted the village and loaded the survivors into open trucks and paraded them through the suburbs of West Jerusalem. Then they took them to a nearby quarry, put them against a wall and shot them. Did you know that as well?”

“Well more or less. Look, Amnon, what’s the problem? Everyone’s heard of Deir Yassin and anyway who cares?

“No, you don’t understand. Sure, everyone knows about Deir Yassin because Deir Yassin has gone into the history books, because Deir Yassin was the one we owned up to. We admitted it. At least, we admitted that extremists did it. And afterwards, everyone lined up to condemn what had happened.”

“Well a little bit of contrition doesn’t go amiss….”

“I don’t find it so funny….”

“Nor do I, I’m sorry.”

“Can’t you just hear them, the breast-beating. How could such a thing happen? How could Jews do such a thing? But you know what happened next? Those same people that condemned Begin and his Irgunists, those same people who threw up their hands in horror, who said that this was the work of extremists, of dissident elements, terrorists, who said this was a disgrace to the Jewish people, those same people in the Jewish Agency and Haganah, who at the time, incidentally were committing plenty of massacres of their own, those same people took loudspeaker vans round the surrounding villages and told the Arabs that if they didn’t get out, they’d get their own Deir Yassin. Did you know that? Did you know they even recorded the screams of the dying to play over the loudspeakers….the rest, as they say, is history …..”

“Amnon….”

“..So they ran and we got the lot, land, houses, property, money.

“Amnon….”