Israeli–Arab conflict

Israeli–Arab conflict in the novel is not a distant political backdrop but a dispute that enters family correspondence, business plans, and arguments over land. Michel Sommo and Alexander Gideon discuss territorial control through purchase and population transfer, while Boaz rejects a politics that makes continued killing seem inevitable. Their disagreements reveal how the language of peaceful exchange and religious redemption can coexist with projects that would reshape who may live on the land.

Political Activism and the Territory

A private investigative report traces Michel Sommo’s movement through right-wing politics and organizations concerned with territorial expansion. It describes his views as close to the right and notes that he intermittently belonged to both Herut and the National Religious Party. In 1964, he helped organize Moledet, a group of North African intellectuals and students in Jerusalem; financial and ideological disagreements split the group, which ceased to exist in 1965. On the eve of the Six-Day War, Michel campaigned against the Eshkol government’s wait-and-see policy and for taking the military initiative against Egypt and other Arab countries.

After the war, Michel volunteered for what became the Greater Israel Movement, working in propaganda and demonstrations. He left in 1971, then made a public gesture of returning his National Religious Party membership card. In 1972 he helped found the Jewish Fellowship Movement and remained on its executive committee. After the Yom Kippur War, the organization demonstrated against troop disengagements in Sinai and the Golan Heights and tried to buy land illegally from Arabs around Bethlehem. Police interviewed Michel twice in connection with his activities, in October 1974 and April 1975, but did not charge him. The report says it found no evidence that he personally took part in violent lawbreaking; it also records his published advocacy of encouraging Arabs to leave Israel and the occupied territories through peaceful means and financial inducements. The distinction between his documented political activity and the report’s account of violence is important: the conflict is shown operating through campaigns, transactions, and proposals for population movement as well as military action.

Purchase, Redemption, and Population Transfer

The struggle over territory also appears in a financial request to Gideon. The Sommos ask for $95,000 toward buying and renovating Alkalai House in the Jewish Quarter of Old Hebron. Their letter describes it as Jewish property seized during the 1929 Palestine riots and presents its recovery as an effort to repossess it by paying the full market price rather than by violence. The appeal thus joins a particular property claim to a larger religious and national purpose: land is not simply an investment but something to be redeemed.

Gideon’s reply tests the practical and ethical claims of Michel’s territorial program. Michel’s prospectus proposes paying Arabs in full for their land and property and providing a one-way ticket at public expense. Gideon calculates the scale of the plan by multiplying a proposed payment of $20,000 by two million Arabs, and questions whether financing that migration would require selling the entire state. He suggests, with deliberate irony, exchanging the coastal plain for the sacred mountains instead. His objection does not amount to a developed alternative settlement policy; it exposes the gulf between a proposal’s language of purchase and the immense population and financial consequences it entails.

Gideon also discloses a more specific transaction Michel had not made public. According to his letter, a Paris-based former Betar associate financed Michel’s trip to Paris and helped secure the restoration of French citizenship, which Michel had relinquished in 1963. Gideon says that Michel travelled to Paris for four days in December to negotiate on behalf of the Jewish Fellowship Movement with a Christian religious order headquartered in Toulouse. The order, he writes, would not sell its land west of Bethlehem but might exchange it for a substantial building and adjoining land within the pre-1967 borders. Gideon links this proposed exchange with the possible sale of his own property in Zikhron Yaakov, describing a triangle of interests connecting Bethlehem, Toulouse, and Zikhron. The plan makes territorial politics look at once religious, commercial, and dependent on private money and property.

Competing Moral Languages

Michel’s arguments combine an appeal to payment and peaceful departure with a sharply generalizing account of Arabs. In a letter to Boaz, he acknowledges positive qualities and religious affinities, yet also describes bloodshed as deeply rooted in Arab tradition and contrasts that characterization with his understanding of Jewish redemption through justice. The letter turns political disagreement into a choice between moral and religious frameworks. Its appeal to justice is complicated by the fact that Michel also advocates departure from the land, even when he insists that people should leave with wealth and dignity.

Boaz challenges the premise that either community’s deaths can be treated as acceptable collateral for national aims. He calls himself a Zionist, but defines that commitment through the hope that people should be all right and that everyone should contribute something to the country. He condemns the cycle of political argument, retaliation, killing, and bombing, and insists that Arabs remain human beings whose deaths matter. His position does not erase the conflict or offer a political settlement; it refuses the transformation of human beings into obstacles or abstractions. His insistence on work and ordinary living stands against the use of scripture and politics as substitutes for life.

Conflict Within Private Life

The dispute over land becomes entangled with the Sommo family’s finances and Gideon’s obligation to them. After sending $107,000 in three unequal installments, Gideon receives Michel’s renewed demand for $120,000 for the Hebron project. Michel interprets the smaller contribution as evidence that the Alkalai House request has been dropped, and presents further support as both a sacred cause and a possible means of atonement. The appeal links political redemption to family wrongs and divine justice, making money serve at once as material aid, religious offering, and leverage in a strained relationship.

Ilana’s account of Michel’s changing business life gives the political program a domestic setting. Religious land dealers visit after the Sabbath, and Michel discusses building plots, grants, property law, loans, working capital, and investment with them. Ilana reports his confidence that Gideon’s money or property will eventually be available to the family, and his expectation that donations invested in land redemption will prosper. These scenes show the conflict entering the home not only as ideology but as a network of visitors, financial calculations, and anticipated inheritance. Across the competing proposals, land carries material value and sacred meaning, while the people whose lives are at stake risk being reduced to figures in a plan. Boaz’s insistence on their humanity marks the sharpest moral resistance to that reduction.