Israeli military occupation

The Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is a central point of political and moral conflict in the novel, where arguments over territory become inseparable from questions of historical memory, Jewish identity, military responsibility, and the prospects for peace. The occupation is not presented through a single settled account: characters dispute the history that produced it, Chaim Lerner condemns its effects, Palestinian testimony gives displacement a personal history, and later negotiations expose both the possibility and the limits of territorial compromise.

Competing Histories and Political Language

The conflict enters personal conversation as a clash of historical narratives. In an argument with Michal, Hannah rejects Michal’s account of the creation of Israel, asserting that Jews settled land where others already lived, took the best land, and expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. The exchange quickly expands beyond the immediate dispute into a barrage of competing terms, including independence, the Nakba, occupation, liberation, massacre, self-defense, and terrorism. The scene does not resolve these claims; its force lies in showing how the same history is organized into opposed accounts of legitimacy and injury.

Chaim Lerner gives the occupation a different kind of prominence: it is, in his view, not only a political policy but a danger to the culture and memory invoked to justify it. At a packed speaking engagement in Pisgat David, he tells the settlers that their actions in the territories doom Israel to perpetual war and create a permanent occupation that corrupts Jewish culture and memory. He goes further, drawing parallels between the settlers’ ambitions in the territories and Hitler’s ambitions. The audience’s initial laughter gives way to a much more tense response when he turns from jokes and Holocaust stories to accusation. Chaim describes his purpose as provoking dialogue, but the episode also shows the cost of making the Holocaust a measure against which contemporary Jewish political action is judged.

Territory Made Visible

Pisgat David complicates the narrator’s expectations of a West Bank settlement. Instead of the tents, guard towers, soldiers, and barbed wire he anticipates, he encounters a colorful welcome sign and a residential town of two-story red-roofed houses, driveways, garages, lawns, and children tossing an American football. The settlement looks to him more like an American suburb than the Jerusalem and Tel Aviv settings he knows. That ordinary domestic appearance does not settle the political dispute over the territory; rather, it places settled civilian life alongside Chaim’s condemnation of permanent occupation and makes the settlement’s physical presence part of the argument.

The London negotiations later render that territorial dispute concrete in maps. Israel offers roughly 95 percent of the West Bank, while the Palestinian negotiators insist on the whole territory, with minor border adjustments to accommodate most Jewish settlers. The narrator is not permitted to study the maps, but catches enough of a glimpse to see Pisgat David on the Palestinian side in both versions. The detail connects the apparently settled homes of the earlier visit to a still-unresolved question of sovereignty: what looks permanent at street level remains subject to negotiation on paper.

Displacement, Testimony, and Military Responsibility

Kamal’s recorded account links the conflict in the present to his family’s experience of displacement. He says that his grandparents lived in the Arab village of Sylia, near Hod Hasharon, and were expelled during the Nakba. In his account, his grandfather’s displacement prevented him from continuing his medical studies at Cairo University; he became a janitor at a Christian school in Ramallah and died young. Kamal describes his planned attack on a Sbarro restaurant in Hod Hasharon as revenge for his grandfather, while also recounting how he concealed his destination from his parents and left wearing a bulky coat. The account explains the history and personal grievance he gives for his actions without converting that explanation into justification.

The novel also places the occupation alongside the question of what soldiers do, and fail to do, amid violence. In Chaim’s account of the Sabra and Chatila massacre, his unit hears gunfire, Arabic commands, and what sound to them like children screaming. He says that hundreds of civilians were killed, including children, mothers, and babies, while his unit did not intervene; he describes himself remaining at his post, touching his rifle as he waited for orders that did not come. The episode is presented as his testimony about military inaction during an atrocity, not as a complete account of the occupation. Its relevance is the burden it places on the Israeli soldier’s claim to be merely a bystander when violence unfolds nearby.

Another account locates military force in the occupied zone of Southern Lebanon. A soldier tells the narrator that Yoav Lerner’s case has become known among those who served there: Yoav is said to have shot two ten-year-old children, although he claims not to remember doing so. The report is brief and mediated through another character, and the motives and circumstances remain disputed. Its inclusion broadens the novel’s attention from political declarations about territory to the human consequences of armed control and the difficulty of establishing responsibility in a military setting.

Opposition, Negotiation, and Continuing Conflict

Chaim’s criticism of the occupation appears as part of a wider disillusionment with Israel and Zionism. A colleague claims that Chaim was preparing a devastating statement condemning the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank as a human-rights disaster and describing Zionism as infected by a destructive ideological virus. The account is expressly uncertain: Chaim’s family denies that he planned to publish such a statement, and says they heard no fundamental critique from him beyond ordinary Israeli grumbling. Another close colleague, however, says he saw a draft in which Chaim had effectively disowned the Jewish state. The novel preserves the disagreement rather than presenting the alleged statement as established fact.

Years later, the London meetings offer a tentative but fragile alternative to confrontation. The two sides are not initially far apart over territory, and the first exchange of maps seems promising. The talks then deteriorate over Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees’ right of return, recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, links between Gaza and the West Bank, and the role of Hamas. They collapse a week after the meetings. The narrator suspects that the talks may have served partly as a performance through which each side could claim willingness to compromise while blaming the other for failure, but presents this as his own doubt, not a proven account of the negotiators’ intentions.

The aftermath resists any simple narrative of resolution. Suicide bombings diminish as Israel builds its West Bank barrier, but the broader conflict continues: Hamas missiles and flammable kites from Gaza are followed by Israeli bombs, tanks, and new settlements, while the West Bank remains exposed to terrorist violence and Israel to attacks within its own borders. In this way, the occupation persists in the book both as a dispute over land and as a recurring structure of violence that outlasts a round of diplomacy. The contrast between settlement homes, tentative map lines, and renewed attacks gives the political argument its unresolved ending.