Zeitoun Becomes a Symbol

A month ago, when Abdel Al-Arkan looked out of his living room window, he saw groves of olive and orange trees stretching toward the Israeli border, their branches sagging with fruit.

Al-Arkan’s window is gone now, shattered by an Israeli air strike. The trees are gone, too, torn up by tank treads, replaced by fields of reddish dirt. When he peers through the shards, Al-Arkan, 31, sees the post-apocalyptic wreckage of his neighbors’ homes, reduced to tangled heaps of concrete and re-bar.

And he realizes that his neighbors lost even more than he did. They lost everything.

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Elliott D. Woods is a VQR contributing editor.