Sixth Day War

The Six-Day War enters the novel less as a battlefield narrative than as a dividing point in family memory and political life. Alexander Gideon returns from America to serve as a tank battalion commander in the Sinai, while Michel Sommo campaigns before the war for military action and afterward joins a movement devoted to territorial expansion. For Ilana Sommo, the war is also inseparable from a remembered summer in Ashkelon, when Alexander and young Boaz faced danger at sea together.

Military Service and Family Distance

Ilana recalls that Alexander returned from America to take part in the war as commander of a tank battalion in the Sinai, then left again. Her account places his military service inside a larger pattern of absence: when she writes to him about Boaz’s impending expulsion from school, his last image of the boy is still that of an eight-year-old, although Boaz is now sixteen. The war thus marks a point in the family’s chronology without bringing Alexander back into its daily life.

Michel Sommo’s Political Activity

The war also frames Michel Sommo’s turn toward political activism. On its eve, he campaigned and gathered signatures against the Eshkol government’s wait-and-see policy, advocating military initiative against Egypt and other Arab countries. Immediately afterward, he volunteered for an active role in the Greater Israel Movement, where he specialized in propaganda and demonstrations. His later political course included involvement in the Jewish Fellowship Movement and protests against troop disengagements in the Sinai and the Golan Heights after the Yom Kippur War. The sequence makes the Six-Day War a point of departure for activism that continued well beyond the fighting itself.

Ashkelon and the Recalled Sea

In a later memory, Ilana links the summer in Ashkelon around the war to Alexander and Boaz’s shared encounter with the sea. Alexander had built a raft from wooden posts tied with rope, without nails, and told Boaz stories of seafarers and voyages while teaching him sailors’ knots. When a whirlpool put Ilana and Boaz in danger, Alexander called for help; fishermen rescued them, and he carried Ilana and the boy ashore. The recollection gives the war’s historical marker an intimate counter-image: not a description of combat, but a family crisis in which Alexander’s physical courage briefly holds the three of them together.

Political and Narrative Significance

The novel sets these memories beside Michel’s later efforts to acquire land in the territories through political and financial schemes. His postwar activism and land-redemption language connect the war’s aftermath to competing visions of territorial control, while Alexander’s service remains bound to a more private history of separation and parental care. Because the war is recalled through letters, reports, and retrospective family memory rather than narrated as a battle sequence, its significance lies in the lives and political commitments it organizes around itself.