Pumpkinflowers by Matti Friedman

was a plastic bag. That is a real Pumpkin story, and I wanted to tell it here because I realize that isn’t how most of my stories end, but it is how most ended in real life.

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    R EPORTS BEGAN TO reach Bruria about people from nearby kibbutzim who were organizing in favor of a pullout from Lebanon. The nucleus was a group of four women who, like Bruria, had sons of army age. When the same reporter behind the first essay about the complicity of Israeli mothers interviewed them in the kibbutz newspaper two months after the crash, he called them the “four mothers,” like the four matriarchs of Genesis. This was the birth of the Four Mothers movement. It didn’t look like much at first.
    When Bruria heard that the women would be standing one Friday holding signs at an intersection, she decided to join them. A half-dozen women came, and a few photographers. Some drivers cursed them as they passed, because at this time most people still believed that without the security zone the north of Israel would be in danger, and if you opposed the army many thought you were a traitor. The mothers didn’t oppose the army, just the policy, but it was hard to make that clear. There was bad blood in the country at the time over the peace negotiations with the Palestinians, and people assumed that the mothers were from the left, which they were, though they didn’t think the argument about Lebanon needed to break down along the old political lines. Bruria began writing down the curses in a little notebook, not that they were particularly imaginative, mostly “Go fuck Arafat,” “Nasrallah’s whores,” etc., etc. Nasrallah was the secretary-general of Hezbollah.
    Bruria was opinionated and tough, the way the kibbutz assembly line used to make them, and once the matter was clear to her she could not be budged. The security zone was not the solution to a problem. It was the problem. The helicopter crash was an accident, but it had thrown the strategy into relief. Why were soldiers flying in helicopters? Because they were threatened by bombs on the roads. Why were the soldiers on the roads? Because they were traveling to a line of isolated forts in an enemy country. And why were they in these forts? No one seemed to have asked that question for a long time.
    Bruria researched the history of the security zone and found that not only had it not been seriously debated by the government in years, but there had never quite been a decision to create it in the first place. The wording of the relevant government resolution from 1984, two years after the invasion, called for the complete withdrawal of the army from Lebanon and the establishment of a buffer zone along the border that would be controlled by the South Lebanon Army, the Christian militia allied with Israel, “with the support of the Israel Defense Forces.” But the army never withdrew. And that tiny fragment of language, “with the support of the Israel Defense Forces”—in Hebrew, only two words—had led over years of creeping “support” to the Pumpkin, Beaufort Castle, convoys, ambushes, the whole landscape that became the center of the universe for so many of us, a war so long that kids who were toddlers when it started fought there when they grew up.
    The security zone had come to be seen not as a decision anyone made but as a state of nature. That’s why this war never had a name—a name would suggest a decision. Instead it was referred to simply as Lebanon. It was something that just existed and always would. This wasn’t a matter of debate as long as the price wasn’t too high. But the helicopter crash made the price too high, and that spring Bruria and a few others resolved that if no one had the courage to end it they would end it themselves.

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    O NE DAY LATE that summer mortars hit the Pumpkin. Reports of a flower went out over the radio and were soon updated to oleander. It was one of the