An east wind blows in Tekoa Dalet. A plastic supermarket bag floats through the air. It catches on a bush, dances with it and blows away to somersault on the stony ground like a circus clown. A valley separates Tekoa Dalet from the Arab village of Tekoa. Nevertheless, the two places are close enough that a conversation could take place by shouting across the gully. Another gust and the plastic bag floats upward, crosses the valley, fades into the distance. Maybe it landed in the other Tekoa, got caught on a rosebush there and rested.

Shimon Palmer gazes out at the plastic bag and then goes back into the kitchen, holding a red pomegranate fallen from a tree in the yard. He picks up a gleaming knife and cuts into the fruit. Red juice pools on the wooden counter. “I told a friend of mine: Let’s cross the wadi [Arabic for gully]. Let’s go into Arab Tekoa. Let’s tell them: ‘Hello, we’re your neighbors. We’ve lived here for 10 years. It’s time we met,’” he says, offering me a handful of seeds.

A month and a half ago, Palmer’s younger brother, Asher, and Asher’s year-old son, Yehonatan, were murdered. A stone was thrown from a passing Palestinian car at their car. Two weeks after the murder, the Israel Defense Forces apprehended the cell responsible for the attack. The cell had perpetrated other similar attacks in the past.

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The murder accelerated a change in Shimon Palmer that had begun long before. A month earlier, he had hosted Palestinian residents from nearby Beit Ummar. “Sitting and talking to them, here at my home, was a transcendental experience,” he says. “Like breaking down a divider. When I talk to God, I break down the divider between heaven and Earth, and in this case, the wall is just as high. In one conversation you can shrink a lot of distance. It’s greater than the distance between life and death, and shrinking that distance is easier than most people think.”

The surrealistic farm on Tekoa Dalet where Palmer lives -- an illegal outpost two kilometers from the much older community of Tekoa -- looks like a cross between an untidy Texan pub and a dusty Amish town. In order to get there, one has to go through Tekoa, one of the first communities in which observant and non-observant people lived together and a fashionable real-estate area, passing the red-roofed houses. Then one must leave this bourgeois settlement behind and proceed toward the small communities on its fringes. During the trip to Tekoa Dalet, we see the monumental Herodion, looking out in its glory over the little points that travel along the narrow road toward the communities whose names are single letters. Only the gigantic rocks at the sides of the road prevent the car from sliding toward the steep, arid slopes over which birds glide in circles.

We have reached Tekoa Dalet. I walk between mobile homes with wooden porches, some with old swings or threadbare sofas, children’s toys, a pair of riding boots. A lovely woman wearing a cowboy hat over her long hair, pushing a stroller, passes by me. Twenty families, observant and non-observant, live here. “It’s no problem to find. We’re the house across from the bus,” Shimon Palmer tells me. “Come over. I’m home almost all the time.”

Indeed, I find the bus with no difficulty -- a round-bodied 1973 Leyland painted white, upholstered inside in pleasant white fabric, that has become the studio of his wife, Shira, a bridal gown designer. A year ago, she bought it from a junkyard, towed it to Tekoa, renovated and painted it, put in air conditioning and electricity, and today brides come to her from all over the country. The lace-covered gowns, made in an old-fashioned, kitschy style, are sold at ridiculous prices.

The entrance to the home goes through a herb garden and a vegetable patch. In the yard is a pile of stones with an oven inside, furniture parts are strewn around in no particular order, and gardening tools lie on the ground among the fruit trees. The lower portion of a mannequin leans against an old piano. Shira opens the door with a welcoming smile, apologizing that the house is disorganized -- last night she slept over at the home of her sister-in-law, Puah, Asher’s widow, and only just got home. This couple might have deserved to have a newspaper article written about them even without Shimon’s status as a bereaved brother, which gives even more significance to his surprising statements. They home-school their children and make almost everything themselves. They have goats to provide their milk and hens to provide eggs. Dark bread is baked in the oven. They have a compost toilet. The home is warm, filled with furniture that Shimon repaired or built himself, and it looks as though it was taken from an old Western. The three children -- Beresheet, 9, Nahala, 8, and Honi, 2 -- come and go through the open door. Shimon brushes dirt off his hands from working in the garden and sits with us in the living room.

He was born to an American Christian mother and a German Christian father who decided to convert to Judaism when he was 4. When he was 15, they came to Israel, settling in Kiryat Arba for ideological reasons. All six of their children still live in the area. Shimon, the eldest, lives in Tekoa Dalet and works by computer for his father’s business, a clinical research management firm that does most of its work in the U.S. Next is an ultra-Orthodx sister who lives in Beitar Illit. Shmuel, the third sibling, works in hi-tech and lives in Jerusalem. Moshe, who joins us for part of the conversation, is a chef at the Ben Ami restaurant on Emek Refaim Street in Jerusalem (but introduces himself as a cook). He also lives in Tekoa Dalet. Asher, only 25 when he was murdered, was about to begin studying mechanical engineering. The youngest sibling, Ze’ev, who recently completed his regular army service in an IDF combat unit, like the rest of his brothers, and left to travel the world.

Several days before the Jewish New Year, on Friday, Sept. 23, Asher was driving back to his home in Kiryat Arba from Jerusalem. Puah, his wife, a nurse at Shaare Zedek Medical Center, was on duty. Their only son, Yehonatan, was in the back seat. The rock that was thrown from a passing car penetrated the windshield and struck Asher’s head. The car went off the road. Yehonatan was killed by a metal bar that penetrated his body during the accident.

“The team that came to our home said that Asher had been killed in a car accident,” Shimon recalls. “We went out to Kiryat Arba. On the way, we saw his car at the side of the road, crushed. At first, when someone said it wasn’t an accident, but an attack, I though that it was nonsense, that they were just trying to pin it on the Arabs. Later, it turned out that the nonsense came from people who had decided to lie to us deliberately.”

Asher Palmer was a gifted musician who played the violin from a young age. In high school, he studied at the musical yeshiva, Kinor David, and continued his religious studies at the high-level yeshiva in Beit El. After four years of study, he joined the IDF, where he served in a combat unit in the navy, a member of the first group to serve in the navy combat track for yeshiva students. His friends recall a pleasant, refined man. At the end of his military service, he met Puah Peretz, a nursing student from Jerusalem, and they fell in love and married. During the shiva, the seven-day mourning period, Puah marked the second anniversary of her marriage to Asher and Yehonatan’s first birthday. She is seven months pregnant and lives in Efrat with her brother, Aharon, and his family.

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“As early as Saturday, we started hearing things that didn’t seem right to us,” Shimon says. “We heard that somebody took his weapon and went through his car. That there was a hole in the windshield that had been made by a rock, and bloodstains on the front seat. But we still believed what the police officers had told us. When they said it was an accident, we accepted it.”

“We were helpless,” Shira adds. “We had no strength to take on the bureaucracy. Even a person in an ordinary situation trying to establish a business, for example, might give up because the system is insensitive, so imagine people who have gotten the worst possible news. We opened the newspaper just like you and saw a report about the accident. There were questions, but we passed them on.”

The only person to ask the tough questions was Aharon, Puah’s brother, who insisted that the police’s determination of a traffic accident made no sense. A CT scan, the overwhelming evidence on the ground and testimony from soldiers proved beyond any doubt that Asher had been killed by a rock thrown at his head. After a delay of several days, an official announcement was made that the incident had been a nationalistically motivated attack.

Shimon chooses his words carefully. “It’s likely that they didn’t want to cause an uproar around Netanyahu’s speech at the U.N. [made the day that Asher was murdered], but they could have said that the circumstances were unclear. Why hurt a grieving family? The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit released a statement that there was no stone-throwing on that road. They said in the media that Asher drove irresponsibly, at high speed. That is the last thing that anyone could say about Asher. He was a level-headed man and extremely responsible. Everyone who knew him said that it was impossible. They portrayed Asher as a crazy driver, and actually accused him of having killed himself and his child.”

“They turned him from a victim of terrorism to an irresponsible person who destroyed his family out of stupidity,” his brother, Moshe, adds. “The ambulance crew and the police who were at the scene realized right away that it was no accident. It was obvious to anyone who had eyes to see, and still the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit stated that it was an accident.”

“When we sat shiva, the terror cell continued its pattern of action,” Shira says. “A rock was thrown from a passing car at the rabbi of Nokdim. They also hurt another neighbor on the road between Tekoa and Efrat. There are plenty of ways to make us keep our heads down, but it seems that throwing a rock from a moving car without leaving any traces is one of the most effective.

“When I say ‘Palmer,’ sometimes people remember and say, ‘Oh, the guy who was in the auto accident,’” she continues. “I don’t correct them anymore because it’s so painful for me. You’re a patriot and you love your country until something like this hurts you. Our husbands do reserve duty, we’re part of this country, and suddenly we get this slap in the face, when IDF officers release such false and hurtful information, when no government representative bothers to pay a condolence call after a father and his son have been murdered. A week later, when the mosque in the Galilee was set on fire, the country’s entire leadership, including Shimon Peres, showed up there. It seems that Asher and Yehonatan weren’t important enough.”