Zionism

Zionism in the novel is a contested argument over what it means to serve the Jewish people and what claims may be made in the name of the land. Michel Sommo treats territorial expansion and land acquisition as a religious-political mission; Boaz Brandstetter describes Zionism as practical contribution, shared human welfare, and a refusal to let conflict replace living. Their difference gives the concept both institutional scale and intimate force: it shapes political organizations, proposed property transactions, family appeals, and a young man’s effort to define his own obligations.

A contested political vocabulary

The novel does not present Zionism as a settled label with one agreed program. Michel Sommo’s activities connect national purpose to territorial control, organized propaganda, and the settlement or purchase of land. Boaz, speaking from a history of family turmoil and violence, uses the same label for a markedly different ethic: people should contribute something, however small, and should have a reason to feel useful. For him, productive activity is an alternative to grievance and political posturing. The term therefore holds together positions that overlap in concern for the country but diverge over means, human cost, and the place of everyday life.

That contrast is not a simple division between an ideological adult and a disengaged youth. Michel presents himself as acting for national and religious purposes, while Boaz also claims a national commitment. Boaz’s account insists that concern for the country can require resisting the habits of endless argument and retaliatory violence. He recognizes the danger of hostility between Jews and Arabs without treating Arab lives as disposable. His position remains uneasy rather than serene: he condemns the cycle of violence while acknowledging the antagonisms surrounding it, and fears that the parties may destroy one another and leave only ruins and sacred texts behind.

Michel Sommo’s territorial activism

Michel’s political development is traced through organizations and campaigns. His views are described as close to the right, and he intermittently belonged to the Herut Bloc 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 divided the group, which disappeared in 1965. On the eve of the Six-Day War, Michel campaigned against the Eshkol government’s wait-and-see policy and collected signatures in favor of 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 in 1971 and soon staged a conspicuous return of his National Religious Party membership card. In 1972 he helped found the Jewish Fellowship Movement, whose membership included many young immigrants from the United States and Russia, and served on its executive committee. Following the Yom Kippur War, the movement demonstrated against troop disengagements in the Sinai and the Golan Heights and tried to purchase land illegally from Arabs near Bethlehem. Police interviewed Michel twice about the organization’s activities, in October 1974 and April 1975, but he was not charged. The investigative account says it found no evidence that he personally took part in violent lawbreaking; it also records twelve newspaper letters in which he advocated encouraging Arab residents to leave Israel and the occupied territories through peaceful means and financial inducements.

Land, money, and the language of redemption

Michel’s political project is also pursued through real-estate proposals and the movement of private wealth. In a letter seeking financial assistance, the Sommo family requested funds for family needs as well as a contribution toward buying and renovating Alkalai House in Hebron. The property was described as Jewish-owned before its seizure during the 1929 riots, and the proposed repossession was framed as a purchase at full market price rather than a violent recovery. The sums make clear that the appeal joined household security to a national and religious cause rather than treating them as unrelated concerns.

The later correspondence sharpens that connection. After Alexander Gideon sent 107,000 dollars in Israeli pounds in three unequal installments, Michel inferred that the contribution toward Alkalai House had been abandoned and pressed for 120,000 dollars for the project. He cast the donation as a sacred undertaking and linked it to repentance, divine compassion, and the hope that Boaz would return safely. In this argument, money is at once practical assistance, a means of acquiring land, and a possible instrument of moral repair.

Michel’s wider schemes involve the proposed relocation of people as well as the transfer of property. He described paying Arabs for their land and property and providing one-way tickets for them to leave. Alexander Gideon’s response questioned the financial feasibility of compensating two million people at twenty thousand dollars each, observing that the calculation would consume more than the state could afford. He also drew attention to the political logic beneath Michel’s proposal: land acquisition and population movement were being presented as a coherent national plan. The emphasis on full payment and peaceful departure does not remove the underlying asymmetry. Arab inhabitants appear within the scheme chiefly as people to be compensated and moved, not as participants defining the future of the territory.

A related transaction links Bethlehem, Toulouse, and Zikhron Yaakov. Gideon’s correspondence alleges that a Paris trip financed by a backer was used to negotiate with a Christian religious order about land west of Bethlehem, and that the order might exchange that land for a building and associated land inside the pre-1967 borders. Restored French citizenship was described as providing a legal basis for the proposed transaction. The deal remained entangled with uncertainty over Gideon’s own property in Zikhron Yaakov, which he had apparently reconsidered selling. The evidence presents negotiations and intentions, not a completed exchange; their significance lies in how political ambition, legal status, private capital, and land development converge.

Boaz Brandstetter’s alternative emphasis

Boaz’s account gives Zionism a smaller, daily scale. He associates national belonging with working, taking life more easily, and making even a modest contribution so that people remain needed. His criticism extends to his parents’ conflicts and to political and religious actors who, in his view, live through speeches and disputes instead of through life itself. This is not withdrawal from national questions: he explicitly connects his criticism of warfare to concern for the country and for the people who live there.

Michel answers Boaz through an opposing language of obligation and religious purpose. In a letter to him, Michel recalls his own childhood poverty, humiliation, and resentment, then describes joining Betar as the turning point that led him away from harming others and toward service to the nation. He presents giving oneself to others as a source of dignity and urges Boaz to weigh past wrongdoing against future good deeds. He also interprets the stars as evidence of order, purpose, and an allotted path, connecting that vision to conscience and religious observance. His invitation is concrete as well as doctrinal: he has left teaching to work on land redemption with comrades from the Jewish Fellowship Movement, offers Boaz a possible security job, and says the young man would be welcomed despite having run away from Kiryat Arba.

The invitation reveals both the reach and the limits of Michel’s approach. He tries to draw Boaz into a collective project by offering work, belonging, and a religious account of purpose. Boaz’s own stated emphasis, however, is on doing something useful without surrendering life to politics or violence. Their exchange makes Zionism a family dispute about how national responsibility should be lived, not merely a disagreement over territory.

Political and ethical tensions

Across these episodes, the novel places redemption language beside transactions, demonstrations, police interviews, and plans for population movement. Land is represented as a sacred inheritance and as property to be bought, developed, exchanged, or funded through private fortunes. The language of peaceful payment distinguishes these plans from violent seizure, yet it does not settle the question of whose political agency counts when inhabitants are expected to depart. The novel’s attention to sums, intermediaries, citizenship, and proposed exchanges makes territorial ideology materially specific.

At the same time, Boaz’s account prevents Zionism from being reduced to the adult characters’ organizational and financial agendas. His insistence on work, usefulness, and the humanity of people on opposing sides offers a counterweight to national purpose defined solely through territory or collective struggle. The concept remains unresolved: the novel neither merges Michel’s redemptive politics with Boaz’s ethic nor treats their shared attachment to the country as enough to erase their conflict over means. Zionism becomes the name under which competing obligations—to land, community, ordinary life, and other human beings—are exposed.