Nakba

The Nakba names the Palestinian catastrophe of expulsion and lost home that shapes the novel’s arguments about the 1948 war and its continuing consequences. It is not presented through a single authoritative account: a roadside memorial, a debate between Michal and Hannah, Kamal’s family history, and later peace negotiations each bring a different part of that history into view. Together, these episodes show how displacement becomes both inherited memory and a live political claim, while the parties disagree over responsibility, recognition, and what a just settlement would require.

The roadside memorial and competing accounts

On the road to Jerusalem, Michal points out the rusted remains of caravans that had carried food and medicine to the city during the 1948 war. She explains that Arab armies blockaded Jerusalem, leaving civilians hungry, and shot up the supply vehicles and killed their drivers. The wrecks have been kept beside the road as a memorial. In this telling, the objects make a particular history visible: a convoy, its destroyed vehicles, and the people killed while trying to bring supplies to a besieged city.

Hannah responds by asking who started the war. Michal says that Jews accepted partition, declared a state, and were then invaded by those who rejected the compromise. Hannah counters that Jews began the conflict by settling in a country where other people already lived, taking the best land, and expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Their exchange does not resolve the dispute; it makes the clash between national accounts the scene’s subject. Each speaker places the same war within a different causal story, emphasizing different acts and different victims.

The narrator describes the argument as a rapid exchange of accusations, facts, exaggerations, and lies, with words such as independence, occupation, massacre, self-defense, and Nakba recurring among the competing terms. That list refuses to let any one slogan settle the history. The narrator had largely turned away from State of Israel and Palestinian politics after the Rabin assassination and the collapse of the Oslo process, treating the conflict as an endless source of chaos. But hearing Hannah argue with Michal draws him back in: their restrained, nearly half-hour debate ends in shared laughter as they pass the welcome sign for Jerusalem. The moment briefly makes them look like a happy family, without making their disagreement disappear.

Displacement as family history

The Nakba also enters the novel through Kamal’s account of his grandparents. In a recorded interview, he says that a village called Sylia lay north of Hod HaSharon, that his grandparents lived there, and that Jews expelled them during the Nakba. He describes the consequences not as an abstract loss of territory but as a family history altered across generations: his grandfather lost the chance to continue at Cairo University’s medical school, became a refugee, worked as a janitor at a Christian school in Ramallah, and died young of a heart attack, which Kamal calls a broken heart.

Kamal connects that inherited story to his own intended violence. He says that he went to Hod HaSharon to avenge his grandfather and planned to blow himself up while killing as many Jews as he could. He recalls concealing his destination from his parents by saying he was going to visit his fiancée in Jenin, even though, in his account, they understood what he intended from his nightly recitation of martyr verses, his growing rage, and the bulky coat he wore in November. The interview presents the Nakba’s memory as one element in the path he describes toward a planned attack; it does not make that attack a sufficient or inevitable consequence of displacement. His account shows how a history of expulsion can be carried as intimate grievance and invoked to justify further harm.

Land, refugees, and the unresolved present

The book later returns to the consequences of displacement through a round of secret negotiations in London between Israeli and Palestinian representatives. The territorial proposals appear, at first, to leave room for agreement: the State of Israel offers roughly 95 percent of the West Bank, while the Palestinian negotiators seek the whole territory with minor border adjustments intended to accommodate most Jewish settlers. Judah Loeb catches a glimpse of the maps and sees that Pisgat David falls on the Palestinian side in both versions. The settlement’s placement on the map gives the dispute a concrete geography, rather than leaving it at the level of competing principles.

Territory, however, is not the only unresolved question. The talks turn toward the division of Jerusalem, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, recognition of the State of Israel as a Jewish state, connections between Gaza and the West Bank, and the role of Hamas. The right of return places the consequences of the Nakba directly within the negotiations: a past expulsion is also a question about whether refugees and their descendants can reclaim a relationship to lost homes. The novel records the issue as one of the matters that the participants could not settle, not as a claim resolved by the initial exchange of maps.

The talks quickly deteriorate into quarrels and collapse a week after the London meetings. Both sides give Judah their off-the-record explanations for why the other side caused the failure. He wonders whether the gathering was partly a performance, allowing each party to display a willingness to compromise while portraying the other as permanently unreasonable. The episode does not confirm that suspicion, but it shows how the language of peace can coexist with competing accounts of responsibility and an inability to agree on the meaning of past dispossession.

Memory, responsibility, and the limits of settlement

Across these episodes, the Nakba is sustained by different forms of memory: wrecked caravans kept beside a road, Hannah’s challenge to Michal’s national narrative, and Kamal’s inherited account of a village, a lost education, and refugee life. These forms do not carry identical claims, and the novel does not merge them into one uncomplicated history. The memorial foregrounds the attack on supplies bound for Jerusalem; Hannah stresses Palestinian dispossession; Kamal recounts the consequences of expulsion through his family. Their juxtaposition shows why a shared vocabulary of catastrophe does not automatically produce agreement about what happened or who bears responsibility.

The negotiations suggest that even a possible territorial compromise cannot, by itself, settle the history’s human claims. Refugee return remains among the questions that undo the early warmth of the meetings, alongside Jerusalem, borders, and political recognition. The novel therefore presents the Nakba not as a closed episode confined to 1948, but as a memory repeatedly reactivated in arguments over land, family inheritance, and the terms of a future peace. Its recurrence gives the past a physical and political presence: in the vehicles left by the road, in the family history Kamal recounts, and in the maps whose lines cannot answer every question about who was displaced and what return would mean.