An Intifadeh Of the Soul

Now, after five days, the army lifts the curfew.

In a bright June morning, all the locked-up normalities come tumbling into the streets of Nablus -- the fruits and vegetables, the figs and grape leaves and fragrant mint, the baklava with its hovering bees, the butchered goats and lambs and live chicks in cardboard boxes, rectangles of softly agitating yellow fluff. The narrow alleys of the Casbah fill with the smells and bustle of marketing after curfew. Palestinian life in the steep-sided hills of the occupied West Bank makes one of its dreamlike passages back to the state of mind in...