Israel is both the setting of the Sommo and Gideon families’ lives and the territory over which their moral and political disagreements turn. Jerusalem provides the domestic and institutional ground of marriage, religious observance, and financial strain; other places, including Hebron, Bethlehem, and Zikhron Yaakov, give disputes over land a concrete form. The country is never simply a backdrop: characters argue over who belongs, what justice requires, and whether a national or religious purpose can justify the treatment of other people.

Home, Family, and Daily Life

For Michel Sommo and Ilana Sommo, Israel is the place where a family household must be maintained amid competing obligations. A report on Michel’s finances describes a Jerusalem home with a substantial monthly mortgage, school fees for Boaz Brandstetter, and a regular donation to the Jewish Fellowship Movement. The household keeps kosher and observes the Sabbath, while also living a moderately religious life that includes going to the cinema. These details place political commitment alongside ordinary expenses and practices: a donation is budgeted as carefully as housing and education, even while other bills fall into arrears.

Jerusalem is also the site of the family’s unsettled history. Ilana had previously been married to Alexander Gideon, and their 1968 divorce left financial and parental questions unresolved in the characters’ minds even after the court dismissed the maintenance claim. The Rabbinical Court ruled against Ilana’s claim to a ketubah and maintenance, while the Jerusalem District Court recorded that the blood-test results concerning Boaz’s paternity were inconclusive and that both parties declined tissue testing. The court then struck out Ilana’s claim after the parties declared that they had no further demands on each other. That legal closure did not settle the emotional or familial consequences of the separation.

Michel’s attachment to Israel is bound up with his own migration and experience of social exclusion. He recalls coming from the Sorbonne with faith that people in Israel would live as brothers, only to find himself working as a builder, night watchman, cinema ticket seller, and regimental policeman. He also remembers being mistaken for an Arab while working as a waiter, a misrecognition that sharpened his sense of being an outsider in the country to which he had come. His account makes belonging less an assured status than a promise tested by work, appearance, origin, and the treatment a person receives.

Land, Property, and Political Programs

The country’s territorial disputes enter the family’s correspondence as requests for money and competing plans for property. In one appeal, the Sommos seek funds to redeem and renovate Alkalai House in Hebron’s Jewish Quarter of the Old City. They describe it as Jewish property seized during the 1929 riots and present their effort to repossess it as a purchase at full market price rather than a violent seizure. The requested contribution is framed not merely as financial assistance but as support for a sacred project. In a later letter Michel asks Alexander for a larger contribution to the same cause, linking the proposed redemption of land with the hope that divine compassion might protect Boaz.

The gap between public principle and practical transaction becomes especially visible in the correspondence about Bethlehem and the West Bank. A private-investigation report records Michel’s involvement in political activism, including activity around the Greater Israel Movement and the Jewish Fellowship Movement. It also reports that the latter organization pursued attempts to purchase land illegally from Arabs near Bethlehem, while stating that investigators found no evidence that Michel himself had participated in violent lawbreaking. The same report describes his published advocacy of encouraging Arab residents to leave Israel and the occupied territories through financial inducements. Its account complicates the language of peaceful transfer: a proposal may reject physical violence while still imagining a large-scale rearrangement of who lives where.

Alexander’s reply to Michel exposes further interests behind the land agenda. He describes a plan to pay Arab landowners and provide one-way tickets, then questions the immense cost of compensating millions of people. He also reveals that a Paris-based financier helped fund Michel’s trip to Paris and secure the restoration of his French nationality. According to Alexander, Michel travelled to negotiate with a Christian religious order headquartered in Toulouse over land west of Bethlehem; the proposed exchange would trade those fields for a building and adjoining land inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders. The negotiations remain incomplete in the evidence, and Alexander’s account is itself part of an adversarial exchange, but it connects religious claims, private financing, citizenship, and property dealing in a single political operation.

War, Activism, and Competing National Visions

Israel’s political history is invoked through the characters’ different responses to war and territorial expansion. Michel’s report describes him as active in campaigning against the Eshkol government’s wait-and-see policy on the eve of the Six-Day War. After the war he volunteered for work in what became the Greater Israel Movement, particularly propaganda and demonstrations, before leaving it in 1971. He later helped found the Jewish Fellowship Movement and remained on its executive committee. After the Yom Kippur War, the organization demonstrated against troop disengagements in the Sinai and Golan Heights. The report also notes police interviews connected with Michel’s activities, but no charge against him.

Michel’s political language does not reduce his position to a simple rejection of Arabs. In a letter to Boaz, he acknowledges what he calls positive and noble qualities in Arab people while arguing that bloodshed is deeply embedded in their tradition. He contrasts that claim with a religious account of Zionism as redemption through justice. In another letter he insists that Arabs should be able to live peacefully according to their customs and return to their homeland, and says that land should be exchanged for payment rather than taken by force. The tension between these positions matters: his advocacy of peaceful compensation coexists with a political program that would encourage Arab departure and expand Jewish control of land.

Boaz challenges the adults’ political habits from a different position. He describes himself as a Zionist who wants people to be well and to contribute something, however small, to the country. For him, the central failure is that people substitute arguments, speeches, and killing for the work of living. He rejects the idea that Arabs cease to be human because they are enemies, even as he recognizes their capacity for wrongdoing. His view turns national belonging toward shared human dignity and practical participation, rather than toward land redemption alone. The clash between Michel’s religious-national framework and Boaz’s insistence on ordinary life makes Israel a debate conducted within the family as much as between political movements.

Return, Memory, and an Unsettled Promise

Israel is also the destination to which Alexander returns after years away in the United States. Seriously ill with kidney cancer, he comes back without advance notice, intending to see Boaz and to stay in the house where he grew up. Ilana remains with him for a time to care for him before he is expected to enter Hadassah Hospital for treatment. His return brings the country into the intimate register of illness, past marriage, and unfinished responsibility: the place he left is also where his former family and childhood home still await him.

Michel’s responses to Alexander’s return reveal how private injury and public history become entangled. He accuses Alexander of having caused suffering to Ilana and Boaz and contrasts his own claimed refusal to harm anyone with Alexander’s wartime record. He remembers arriving in Israel with idealistic expectations and describes the disappointment of finding himself pushed to the margins. At the same time, his letters repeatedly imagine that land redemption, religious duty, and the repair of family wrongs may be joined. Israel thus carries both the promise of refuge and the burden of being made to answer for betrayals that a political project cannot simply undo.

The novel’s late reflections leave the promise unresolved. Ilana recalls the pioneer songs that once stirred her with the sense that a land existed but had not yet been found. In her account, the country’s promise has been obscured by estrangement and destruction, even as longing for it persists. Israel remains home, political cause, and hoped-for moral community, but no character can make those meanings coincide. The distance between a redeemed land and a livable one is the country’s central significance in the story: it is a place people seek to possess, a home they have struggled to enter, and a promise whose fulfillment remains uncertain.