I was born in Hurfeish, a poor village with no running water and no electricity. Once a week I would walk with my mother to the spring to bring drinking and cooking water. My mother did the laundry at the washerwomen’s spring — a kind of pool right next to the spring. I first saw my father when I was about 11. He worked in the Negev and would come home once a year. We ate meat once a year, on a holiday, or if one of the villagers’ cows fell ill — someone would slaughter it and hand out the meat to people, and in return they’d send him pots of vegetables, fruit, and eggs. I studied in an elementary school built of clay — classrooms that had once served the Turkish administration, a stone structure with a clay floor. But even with all that, I enjoyed my life. For high school, my parents sent me to a modern boarding school because it was free, whereas locally I would have had to pay for transportation and food. I saw a bed for the first time in my life at that boarding school — and the horse stables there were more modern than the house I lived in. I studied there, enlisted from there, and when I finished my service I moved to Tel Aviv. My life was split between Tel Aviv and the West Bank. There, I came to know the Palestinians in depth, and I saw that they were exactly like us — resemblance is measured by shared aspirations. I always knew that one day the Palestinians would do to us what they did in October. It’s possible that was Hamas’s original plan (the substance of that book) — and it’s possible the plan changed, since it ended up taking much longer.