1948:
By the time he was half-way through the material in his cousin's attic Yaacov knew he had hit a gold mine. "More like a minefield," retorted his cousin Yigal. He could not understand Yaacov's excitement: why did he care about a bunch of old diaries left behind by his wife's father? The father had been an officer in the units that carried out military operations along the Palestine coast in May 1948. One of the entries detailed the frenzied events that ended with the slaughter of all the men and male teenagers in Fatima's village. A manic deputy commander, a very harsh battle the day before, and above all, the atypical decision of the villagers to stay and not run, as was usual in the hundreds of villages the troops had entered. Why he had recorded the description in his diary was a question that did not bother Yaacov for long. It was there, it was hot, and even 'sexy,' he told Yigal, and he hastened not only to Musalem, but also to the press.
(...) Finally he found the courage to look directly at Fatima's face. "I listened to the tape ... the one in which you talk." Fatima dropped her eyes. Here it comes, she thought. "I listened again and again. You say they piled the bodies, you never said they dug in the bodies. Did they dig holes? Did they throw the bodies into a mass grave"? Fatima did not answer. Ali seemed to awake from a dream or a nap:
"Did they, Mama?"
Of course they did not, but why should she tell this, her secret, to Yaacov; and what would happen to her beloved Ali if it all came out? The bulldozers needed only five to ten minutes to move the bodies into lorries, and Fatima, the best runner in her class, had followed them. Three miles she ran, and nearly collapsed, but then the vehicles stopped and the roaring bulldozers came in behind them. They excavated huge holes in the ground and shoveled the bodies into them, tidying the ground by running over it back and forth, back and forth. Years later, she found that they had planted pine trees over it, and the woods were named after the unit that had occupied her village and in memory of its own casualties in the conflict. Such pine trees became the recognized symbol of the recreation areas built over the ruined Palestinian villages of 1948.