National Religious Party

The National Religious Party is a recurring marker of Michel Sommo’s shifting political alignments, rather than a fully depicted institution with a documented program or internal structure. The novel traces Sommo’s intermittent membership alongside his work in other political groups and his pursuit of land projects, showing how party affiliation sits within a wider field of religious-nationalist activism without making every associated venture an official party undertaking.

Membership and Political Setting

A private investigation report places the National Religious Party among the right-wing affiliations of Sommo and his family. His eldest brother and other relatives are described as known activists in the Herut Bloc, with some also active in the National Religious Party. Sommo himself had been a paid-up member of both parties at different times, though his membership was intermittent.

The report sets those affiliations within a longer sequence of organizing. In 1964, Sommo helped organize Moledet, a group of North African intellectuals and students in Jerusalem; it divided over financial and ideological questions and disappeared in 1965. On the eve of the Six-Day War, he campaigned against the Eshkol government’s wait-and-see policy and for military initiative against Egypt and other Arab countries. These activities establish his political engagement, but the evidence distinguishes them from work done directly for the National Religious Party.

Departures and Return

Immediately after the Six-Day War, Sommo volunteered for the Greater Israel Movement, where he specialized in propaganda and demonstrations. In 1971 he abruptly left that movement and soon made a conspicuous display of handing in his National Religious Party membership card. The sequence records a public break with the party as well as his departure from the movement; it does not specify his reasons for either action.

In 1972, Sommo became one of the founders of the Jewish Fellowship Movement and remained on its executive committee. After the Yom Kippur War, that organization demonstrated against troop disengagements in the Sinai and the Golan Heights and attempted to purchase land illegally from Arabs near Bethlehem. Police interviewed Sommo twice in connection with the group, in October 1974 and April 1975, but did not charge him. The report states that it found no evidence of his personal involvement in violent lawbreaking. Later, while describing his changing domestic and business life, Ilana reports that Sommo has rejoined the National Religious Party. The novel thus presents membership as reversible, amid overlapping political affiliations rather than as a steady institutional career.

Land Politics and Private Enterprise

Sommo’s party affiliation appears alongside, but is not shown to control, a program of political activity that joins religious claims to land dealings. In a letter about a proposed purchase in Hebron, his family requests funds for the purchase and renovation of Alkalai House in the Jewish Quarter of Old Hebron. The request frames the property as having been seized during the 1929 Palestine riots and describes repossession through payment of the full market price, not violence. The same appeal seeks substantial sums for the family’s mortgage, an additional room, and the children’s futures. These are requests made to Alexander Gideon, not documented National Religious Party initiatives.

Sommo’s own explanations cast financial support as connected to shame, repentance, and the redemption of land. He presents his role as symbolic and says that he watches over Gideon’s son; when pressed by Manfred Zakheim about the proposed funding, he defends the land project through a religious argument about Jewish rights to the land. In a later exchange, Zakheim describes Sommo’s organization’s proposal to compensate Arabs for their property and provide one-way tickets, while questioning the cost and political logic of the plan. The episode places land transfer, payment, and population movement in the same political conversation, but again does not attribute the proposal to the party as an institution.

Narrative Significance and Limits

The National Religious Party’s clearest function in the narrative is to help register Sommo’s changing public identity: intermittent party member, conspicuous resigner, organizer in a separate movement, and later returnee. Around that sequence, political commitment is repeatedly joined to fundraising, lobbying, religious language, and property development. Sommo’s renewed membership occurs as he sells the family flat and pursues a home in Jerusalem’s Old City, while his business dealings and land projects expand; the novel places these developments together without asserting that one caused the other.

The distinction between party affiliation and private or movement-based action matters. The evidence gives details about Sommo’s memberships and activities, but little about the National Religious Party’s organization, policy, or formal role in the land transactions. Its presence therefore supplies political context, while the concrete initiatives belong to the people and associations pursuing them. The resulting portrait is of affiliation as one part of a fluid network where religious-nationalist claims, personal advancement, and property interests repeatedly meet.