Jewish Fellowship Movement

The Jewish Fellowship Movement is a religious-nationalist organization whose stated work of land redemption connects religious conviction to political organizing and property transactions. Founded in 1972 by Michel-Henri Sommo and others, it becomes both a vehicle for territorial advocacy and a network for pursuing land deals. Its importance in the novel lies in how its language of sacred duty accompanies practical arrangements involving money, legal status, lobbying, and the movement of people from contested land.

Origins and political development

The movement grew from Michel-Henri Sommo’s earlier political activity. In 1964, he helped organize Moledet, a group of North African intellectuals and students in Jerusalem. It split over financial and ideological differences and ceased to exist the following year. Sommo was intermittently a paid-up member of the Herut Bloc and the National Religious Party, and on the eve of the Six-Day War he campaigned against the government’s wait-and-see policy and for military initiative.

After the Six-Day War, Sommo volunteered for work in what became the Greater Israel Movement, concentrating on propaganda and demonstrations. He left it in 1971, then made a public show of returning 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. Sommo remained on its executive committee. His successive affiliations show a continuing commitment to territorial expansion, even as he changed organizational settings and presented his political role in increasingly religious terms.

After the Yom Kippur War, the movement took part in demonstrations against troop disengagements in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. It was also involved in attempts to purchase land illegally from Arabs near Bethlehem. Investigators interviewed Sommo twice about the organization’s activities, in October 1974 and April 1975, but he was not charged. The report says it found no evidence that he had personally taken part in violent lawbreaking; it also records his published advocacy of encouraging Arabs to leave Israel and the occupied territories through financial inducements. These distinctions matter: the movement’s political program, its means of pursuing it, and Sommo’s personal legal responsibility are not presented as identical.

Land redemption and political methods

The organization presents land acquisition as a religious and national mission. In a letter to Manfred M. Zakheim, Sommo proposes the latter as a member and as the movement’s legal representative, either voluntarily or for proper fees. He also asks him to manage private property for Sommo and his family, saying that some property has already been restored and expressing confidence that more will follow. Sommo offers the possibility of a business partnership, with investment through the organization in enterprises connected to the redemption of territories. Religious purpose and commercial operation are thus placed in the same proposal.

Zakheim declines to represent the movement or manage Sommo’s affairs, citing both ethical and practical considerations, but offers informal advice. In subsequent correspondence, he describes a plan under which Arabs would be paid for their land and property and given one-way tickets at public expense. He challenges the financial scale of that proposal and questions the cost of acquiring the Territories in this way. His response exposes a tension in the movement’s presentation: compensation and formal transactions are offered as evidence of peaceful conduct, while the intended outcome includes the departure of the people being paid to leave.

The movement’s land activity also involves dealings beyond direct purchases from Arab owners. Zakheim reports that Sommo travelled to Paris to negotiate on behalf of the organization with a Christian religious order headquartered in Toulouse, concerning its land west of Bethlehem. According to his account, the order might exchange its fields near Bethlehem for a building and associated land within the pre-1967 borders. Zakheim further attributes the arrangement to the involvement of a Paris-based financier, who had also helped restore Sommo’s French citizenship. The proposed exchange links religious institutions, cross-border contacts, citizenship, and property strategy; the correspondence presents these details as Zakheim’s investigation and interpretation, rather than as an independently narrated account.

From religious association to business network

Sommo’s activity increasingly joins advocacy to investment and lobbying. In an account to Alexander A. Gideon, Zakheim says that Sommo and Zohar Etgar have made the Jewish Fellowship Movement into a reconnaissance or security unit serving an investment company called Tentpeg, formed with a group of religious investors and discreet backing from Paris. Zakheim describes Etgar as controlling the company’s financial operations and says that the partners have obtained charitable status by presenting the enterprise to the revenue authorities as a kind of orphanage. These are details conveyed by Zakheim, who is at once an observer of the organization’s methods and a potential intermediary in its business.

Zakheim also depicts Sommo as lobbying party and government officials, seeking permits and advancing investments south of Jerusalem. In his account, Sommo moves among political figures and officials in the Military Administration, the Ministry of Trade and Industry, and the Israel Land Authority, mixing religious appeals with persuasion and negotiation. The contrast between Sommo’s teaching career and his near-constant work for land redemption is explicit in a later letter from Sommo: he says that he has left teaching and now works almost day and night with comrades from the movement. He describes the group as including three reformed sinners and invites Boaz Brandstetter to visit or join, suggesting a security role and the opportunity to learn Torah. The organization is therefore also represented as a community able to offer belonging, work, and a new religious direction.

Money, faith, and narrative significance

The Jewish Fellowship Movement becomes entangled with the financial support Alexander A. Gideon provides to the Sommo family. When Gideon’s lawyer, Manfred M. Zakheim, questions a large donation, Sommo interprets it as a chance to turn Gideon’s shame and repentance toward religious atonement. The donation is not itself the same thing as the movement’s business activity, but Sommo places both within a religious account of repairing wrongs and redeeming land. Zakheim, by contrast, suspects that the donation is being treated as a means of gaining influence and warns Gideon against allowing his money to be used in messianic investments.

The property schemes also intersect with Gideon’s estate and the family’s uncertain future. Sommo’s wife, Ilana, describes her husband as increasingly confident that Gideon’s money or property will eventually pass to the family, and reports that he teaches her about plots, loans, infrastructure costs, and development. Zakheim later proposes using Gideon’s funds to draw Sommo into a partnership and steer his activities. These competing accounts make money a point of leverage among the movement, the family, Gideon, and his lawyer, without reducing the organization to a single person’s private ambitions.

The movement’s significance rests in that convergence. Its religious vocabulary makes land acquisition part of a sacred mission; its public and political work seeks to change territorial arrangements; and its transactions depend on networks of investors, officials, lawyers, and property holders. The novel shows the distance between the language of voluntary purchase and the population transfer imagined as its result, while also showing how financial gifts and personal relationships can be recruited into the same project. The Jewish Fellowship Movement is consequently both a political organization and a mechanism through which religious purpose, private wealth, and territorial power become difficult to separate.