West Bank

The West Bank functions in the novel less as a physically described setting than as a disputed political and commercial landscape. Characters invoke it through plans to acquire land, establish settlements, and reshape who lives there; the contrast between public ideals and private dealings makes the region a test of how religious mission, national ambition, and money can become entangled. The evidence reaches from political organizing after the Six-Day War to a proposed land exchange near Bethlehem and the prospect of settlements financed by Alexander Gideon.

Political Geography and Competing Visions

Michel Sommo’s political activity supplies an early context for the West Bank projects. Before the Six-Day War, he campaigned against the Eshkol government’s wait-and-see policy and supported taking the military initiative against Egypt and other Arab countries. After the war, he volunteered for what became the Greater Israel Movement, working in propaganda and demonstrations. He left that movement in 1971; in 1972 he helped found the Jewish Fellowship Movement and remained on its executive committee. Its postwar activism included demonstrations against troop disengagements in Sinai and the Golan Heights, as well as attempts to purchase land illegally from Arabs in the area around Bethlehem. The investigator’s report distinguishes Sommo’s political activity from personal violence: it found no evidence that he had himself taken part in a violent act of lawbreaking.

Sommo’s vision was expressed as both a political cause and a practical plan for changing the population of the land. In a letter to Manfred Zakheim, he proposed paying Arab owners in full for their land and property and financing one-way tickets for their departure. Zakheim answered by pointing to the enormous cost of paying two million people and questioned whether acquiring the Territories in this way could be worth selling the State of Israel. His counterproposal to exchange the coastal plain for the sacred mountains was hypothetical, but it exposed the geographic and political assumptions behind Sommo’s program: territory appeared as something that could be reassigned through a large-scale bargain, while the inhabitants’ own choices remained subordinated to that scheme.

Settlement, Belonging, and the Family Plot

The West Bank also enters the family story through the uncertain future imagined for Boaz. In a letter to Ilana, Alexander Gideon asks whether Boaz will live with religious settlers there and whether Michel has offered him a choice between a pioneering settlement and reform school. This is Gideon’s sardonic speculation, not confirmation that Boaz settles in the West Bank. Its force comes from the way Michel’s political commitments and his efforts to manage Boaz’s future become difficult to separate: settlement appears as a possible remedy for the boy’s troubles, yet also as another arena in the adults’ struggle over influence and responsibility.

Gideon’s own money is repeatedly imagined as a resource for settlement. In another letter he invokes Gush Emunim and two proposed settlements, Mazkeret Gideon and Tel Alexander, which he says will be built with his money. His phrasing turns the West Bank into a landscape marked by competing claims over inheritance as well as territory: the money is presented as his, but other characters are already trying to direct its use toward religious and political projects. The proposed settlements are not described as completed, and the letters make their construction conditional on future plans rather than established fact.

Land Deals and Networks of Influence

Zakheim’s correspondence depicts a developing business network around West Bank land. He says that a Parisian patron, Mr. N., financed Sommo’s trip to Paris and helped secure the restoration of his French nationality. Gideon’s account of the trip gives these details a proposed commercial purpose: he alleges that Sommo negotiated with a Christian religious order headquartered in Toulouse over land west of Bethlehem. According to Gideon, the order would not sell its fields but might exchange them for a substantial building and attached land inside the pre-1967 borders. He presents the arrangement as a possible three-way connection among Bethlehem, Toulouse, and the Zikhron property, while acknowledging that it depends on the other parties and on the uncertain question of selling that property. The earlier investigative report had confirmed Sommo’s Paris trip and the restoration of his French nationality, but had not established the trip’s purpose; the more specific account comes later from Gideon and should be understood as his report of the negotiations.

The business plan expands in Zakheim’s later messages. He reports that Sommo and Zohar Etgar have turned the Jewish Fellowship Movement into a reconnaissance unit or security guard for Tentpeg, an investment company formed with pious investors and discreet support from Paris. Zakheim describes Etgar as holding the company’s financial control, while the religious partners handle its claimed charitable standing. In a subsequent cable, Zakheim says Gideon’s Magdiel property has been sold to Sommo, acting for a Paris millionaire, for an exchange with a French monastery involving West Bank land; he adds that Etgar is part of the deal. The cable urges Gideon to invest his available cash in purchases in the Territories. These are Zakheim’s reports to his client, not an independent narrative account of a completed exchange, but they show how political language about redemption is joined to intermediaries, property transfers, and investment capital.

Hebron and the Language of Redemption

The appeal for money to redeem Alkalai House in Hebron places the West Bank schemes within a longer account of lost and recovered property. The Sommos request funds for the house’s purchase and renovation, describing it as a Jewish property seized by force during the 1929 Palestine riots and stating that they seek to repossess it by paying its full market price rather than through violence. The request gives a specific financial figure for that project alongside separate sums for the family’s mortgage, an additional room, and the futures of the children. The appeal therefore presents the Hebron property both as a concrete purchase and as part of a religious-national undertaking financed through private aid.

Michel later connects donations to the possibility of divine compassion and the return of Boaz, treating the family’s troubles and the redemption of land as spiritually related. Yet the political projects elsewhere in the correspondence also involve calculations of cost, discreet financing, legal status, and commercial advantage. The West Bank’s significance lies in this tension: land is described as sacred inheritance and national mission, but it is pursued through negotiations, investment schemes, and proposals affecting the people who already live there. The novel does not resolve the competing claims by depicting a completed settlement or exchange; instead, it shows how the region becomes the ground on which private family conflict and expansive political ambition converge.