Follow me,” the boy says shyly. He leads us through alleys where the houses are so close together that the second storeys touch one another. In the doorways of small shops, idle men watch us without a word. At the edge of the camp, my guide phones our liaison, who says: “A child will come to take you.” Ten minutes later another boy pops up beside us. We follow him through the lanes of Balata, the most violent Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank. He stops at a green iron door. We climb four steps into a sooty apartment that doubles as a bakery. Next to the bread oven we are halted by two boys, like two miniature sentries.
The boys are 15 or 16 years old, in the twilight zone between a childhood of plastic pistols and the armed manhood of live weapons and explosives. They move us from room to room, to where their brother Jum’a is sleeping. He wakes, and greets us.
