The land has been given over to the wicked

The land has been given over to the wicked is a recurring biblical lament in the novel, voiced by Michel Sommo against Alexander Gideon. Its force comes from the collision between Michel’s sense that he has been denied recognition and security, and the material power he attributes to Gideon. The phrase makes contested land more than a political issue: it becomes the language through which Michel interprets personal injury, inheritance, and moral authority.

The phrase as accusation

In Michel’s address to Gideon, the lament begins as a declaration that the land has been given to the wicked, then broadens into a contrast between men who possess property, power, wisdom, and public honor and those who must live on what has been discarded. Michel casts himself and his family as dependent on Gideon’s decisions: people who are permitted to inhabit unwanted houses, perform work others disdain, and approach the land only through another man’s permission. The accusation is therefore both national and intimate. Gideon’s wealth and standing become, in Michel’s speech, evidence of a larger arrangement in which some claim the land as their inheritance while others are left to ask for a place within it.

The complaint gathers force from Michel’s account of his own early life. As a young man, he says, he came to Israel with faith that its people would live as brothers and that redemption would come; instead, he lists a succession of modest jobs, from waiter and builder to night watchman and cinema ticket seller. He presents his former willingness to act as a father and teacher to Gideon’s son as a good-faith choice that has left him exposed to disappointment. The biblical lament gives this personal history a vocabulary of betrayal: Michel’s grievance is not only that he has lost an advantage, but that the promise of shared belonging has failed him.

Land, money, and political purpose

The phrase acquires additional weight from the practical land projects surrounding Michel. In a letter to Gideon, Michel and Ilana Sommo request substantial sums for their mortgage and an additional room, for the futures of their son and daughter, and for the purchase and renovation of Alkalai House in Hebron. Their letter describes the property as Jewish land seized during the 1929 Palestine riots and presents its recovery as an effort to repossess it by paying full market price rather than using violence. The appeal joins family need to a national claim, making financial assistance part of a proposed act of restoration.

Michel’s political history further complicates the language of dispossession. He took part in right-wing political organizations, campaigned against the government’s wait-and-see policy before the Six-Day War, and became active in the Greater Israel Movement after the war. Later, as a founder and executive committee member of the Jewish Fellowship Movement, he participated in campaigns against territorial disengagement and in efforts to acquire land around Bethlehem. The investigative account also records his published advocacy of encouraging Arab residents to leave through financial inducements, while noting that it found no evidence he personally took part in violent lawbreaking. Against that record, the lament is not a neutral description of who holds power: it belongs to a man who also sought to advance a political program involving territorial control and population movement.

Gideon’s counter-reading

Gideon’s correspondence answers Michel’s territorial ambitions with irony and practical objections. He questions the scale of a proposal to pay Arab landowners and provide one-way tickets, calculating that even a payment of twenty thousand dollars per person for two million people would be prohibitively expensive. He then imagines exchanging the coastal plain for the mountains, turning the proposed transfer of land into a pointedly impractical counterproposal. The exchange exposes a tension between Michel’s language of redemption and the immense financial and human consequences of the scheme.

Gideon also describes a concealed international dimension. He writes that a Paris contact financed Michel’s trip and helped secure the restoration of his French nationality, apparently to facilitate negotiations with a Christian religious order based in Toulouse. The proposed transaction would exchange the order’s fields west of Bethlehem for a building and land within Israel’s pre-1967 borders. Gideon sees a possible connection between that arrangement and his own Zikhron Yaakov property, but says his changing intentions have made the plan uncertain. In this account, land redemption is not simply an appeal to history or faith: it depends on financing, legal status, negotiations, and the anticipated transfer of specific properties.

Repetition and reversal

The phrase returns in Michel’s later denunciation of Gideon, where it is followed by a promise that forgiveness will come only after the powerful have repented and changed their conduct. Michel condemns Gideon for concentrating on private property and for bringing the country into disrepute through his writing; he then invokes the same lament again while conceding that the verses he once trusted may not protect the simple or the foolish. Its recurrence marks a reversal. Earlier, Michel had imagined that acting as a father and teacher to Gideon’s son would let him repay harm with good; now he describes that generosity as naïve and demands that Gideon return the girl to him.

The phrase thus does not settle the novel’s argument over who deserves the land. Instead, it records how a political and religious vocabulary becomes entangled with private grievance. Michel uses it to condemn a hierarchy in which Gideon appears secure and Michel dependent, even as Michel’s own political activity pursues land acquisition and territorial change. Its repeated use gives the lament the shape of an unresolved charge: a claim about injustice that exposes the speaker’s wounded hopes, but cannot by itself reconcile competing accounts of property, belonging, and redemption.