“Like, I marry a wife, and they take her, and then give me back the legs of the wife,” Ali Ayyad joked, and we all laughed. “Did they offer you money for their use of the hotel?” I asked. Ayyad said, “You agree to rent to them, it’s like this: They say, we will give you a ring as payment. But in order to give it to you, we need to cut off your hand. Then, we will put your hand in a freezer for one hundred years. If you ask, where is my ring, they say: We are still preparing the ring.” We all laughed again. Ayyad’s entire family is in Abu Dis, but on the other side of the huge concrete separation barrier. It takes him one hour and $20 USD in taxi fare to visit his relatives, who, before the wall went up, were a one-minute walk down the road. Can you call to them? I asked. “Yes,” he said, “from the roof we can shout hello.”

“I want to live in peace,” Ayyad told me. “I want to take my family to Tiberius to swim in the sea, I want that kind of life, of happiness and pleasure. Instead, no one has pleasure. We are afraid and the Israelis are afraid. We are all the sons of Abraham. We have only one God. There is no paradise. This place is paradise, but we are wasting it. When you die, you can’t take anything with you, no dollars, no euros, no black whiskey, no red whiskey, nothing. You sleep alone. So what is the point. We all need peace. We want peace.”