Sinai Peninsula

The Sinai Peninsula occupies two sharply contrasting positions in the novel: it is the setting of Alexander Gideon’s remembered military violence and a territory imagined by political and business operators as a future field for development. The first association is intimate and retrospective, carried by a former tank commander’s memories; the second is strategic, folded into arguments about land, government, and national redemption. The peninsula thus links private remorse to public ambition without allowing either to remain abstract.

Military Setting and Personal Memory

The novel establishes the Sinai Peninsula as a place where Alexander Gideon served as commander of a tank battalion. Ilana Sommo recalls that he returned from America to take part in the war before leaving again. His role gives the peninsula a specific biographical weight: it is not simply a distant theater in political discussion, but part of the experience that shaped Gideon’s recollection of himself and his capacity for violence.

That past returns in a letter written from Chicago. During a power cut, the pale emergency lighting recalls the desert landscape and the tank battles Gideon associates with it. He describes moving with his unit across the terrain, firing on signs of life, and later planning operations over a map beneath the night sky. The remembered campaign is presented not as a detached military report but as an image of his former power, in which movement, machinery, and destruction had seemed to dominate the landscape. In the same letter, he tries to account for the end of his marriage to Ilana and for the hatred that is now fading. The Sinai memory therefore enters a confession about personal failure: the man who could once act decisively in war says he no longer has an answer for the damage in his private life.

A separate recollection locates one episode near Bir Tamadeh in the Sinai. Gideon remembers a camel walking along a low ridge at a range of two thousand yards while his tank crew took turns trying to hit it. The anecdote turns on the contrast between the animal’s calm movement and the crew’s competition, ending when a Bedouin appears and Gideon orders the firing to stop and the unit to leave. In the novel’s later telling, the episode condenses the distance between military command and the living world it places in danger. Its conclusion is not a victory but a withdrawal prompted by the appearance of a person in the supposedly empty firing area.

War, Politics, and Territorial Claims

The peninsula also appears in the political history surrounding Michel-Henri Sommo. Before the Six-Day War, Sommo campaigned against the Eshkol government’s policy of waiting and advocated taking the military initiative against Egypt and other Arab countries. After the war he joined the Greater Israel Movement, taking part in propaganda and demonstrations. His later activism included opposition to troop disengagements in the Sinai and the Golan Heights after the Yom Kippur War. These episodes place the Sinai within a continuing dispute over military withdrawal and the territorial consequences of war.

The novel does not present these political positions as identical to Gideon’s personal memories. For Sommo and the movements he joined, the peninsula is part of a contested national map and a subject of public mobilization. For Gideon, it is also the remembered ground of military action. The difference matters: political rhetoric can treat territory as a strategic possession or a future opportunity, while the recollections of battle disclose the human consequences obscured by that language.

A Projected Frontier for Development

In correspondence with Sommo, Manfred M. Zakheim describes the Sinai as one of several regions that could become newly available to development if political power changes. He links the anticipated opening of the Sinai, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip to the prospects of Sommo and his prospective business partner Zohar Etgar. In a later argument to Gideon, Zakheim again predicts that a change of government will release land in the West Bank and Sinai for urban development and make it extraordinarily valuable. These are Zakheim’s forecasts and sales arguments, not neutral descriptions of an accomplished transformation.

The projected future connects property transactions to the political causes Sommo publicly advances. Elsewhere, Zakheim describes efforts to turn Sommo toward Zionist real-estate activity and to attach Etgar to him as a safeguard. He presents his own plan as a combination of Gideon’s money, his own strategic judgment, Sommo’s connections, and Etgar’s energy. In that scheme, the Sinai is not merely a military memory or a disputed territory; it is an anticipated source of commercial opportunity whose value depends on a predicted political shift.

Sommo’s account of buying land and compensating Arab owners also exposes the tension within such projects. His proposal imagines paying residents for property and financing their departure, while Gideon challenges the scale and cost of that plan. The Sinai appears within the same broader vocabulary of territorial acquisition and development, but the evidence does not establish a specific Sinai transaction. What it does show is how the peninsula can be absorbed into a political imagination in which land is discussed as both national mission and investable asset.

Narrative Significance

The Sinai Peninsula gathers the novel’s competing languages of land into one charged location. Gideon’s recollections resist the clean abstractions of strategic planning: the desert is remembered through military operations and a concrete encounter near Bir Tamadeh. Zakheim’s letters, by contrast, project a future in which the region’s worth lies in development opportunities awaiting a change of government. Between those views lies the book’s central tension between lived consequences and claims made in the name of territory.

The place also binds Gideon’s private and public histories. His remembered service in the Sinai surfaces while he is trying to understand his marriage and his own capacity for harm; political letters later make the same region a marker of ambition and projected profit. The peninsula consequently does not resolve into a single symbol. It remains at once a battlefield carried in memory, a contested object of political argument, and a promised landscape of development whose projected value depends on decisions affecting the people who already live on the land.