One night’s massacre would have been enough to produce the outcry that resulted once the first news reports, photos and TV pictures were sent around the world. That the bloodletting was allowed to continue after we knew what was going on, beyond the cost in innocent lives, made the fallout even worse. In Israel, the response was unlike anything in the past. There had been some opposition to the war: from parts of Labor, from political groups further to the left and particularly the pressure group Peace Now, formed in 1978 to protest the Begin government’s obvious desire to use the peace with Egypt as a means to limit, rather than actively explore, prospects for a wider agreement with the Palestinians. After Sabra and Shatila, Peace Now was the driving force behind demands for an inquiry into the Israeli role into what had happened. But the trauma went deeper. Israelis of all political stripes jammed shoulder-to-shoulder into the Kings of Israeli Square in the heart of Tel Aviv a week after the massacre. There were soldiers, too: 20somethings back from the fighting and reservists a decade or more older. Some estimates put the size of the crowd at as many as 400,000, almost ten percent of the population of Israel at the time. The protest was nominally aimed at forcing the government to empower a commission of inquiry, which it did a couple of days later. But the mood in the square was more like an outpouring of shock and shame. While the catalyst was the massacre in the camps, it tapped into a rumble of growing questions, and doubts, about the war itself, which had been building ever since the prolonged siege of west Beirut: what the invasion was for, how it had been planned and prosecuted, and what it said about our country, our government and our armed forces. I was at home with Nava, watching the coverage of the demonstration on television. I shared the protesters’ view that an inquiry was needed. In the days since my phone call to Tsila Drori, ’'d remained troub