My childhood friend Saleh Hussein Al Khatib, whom I remember as someone with a sunny outlook on life, has turned cynical and bitter over the years. He is my age, fifty-five, but his schooling came to an end at the age of fifteen. He lives in Bethany, earns a living driving a tourist bus and has the average West Banker's insatiable thirst for politics. This he tries to satisfy by reading most of the local newspapers and magazines, following Israeli and Jordanian radio and television news reports and through endless discussions of Palestinian and Arab politics with his relatives and friends.