Self-defense

Self-defense is a contested justification in the novel: the circumstances of threatened violence matter, but so do the people harmed, the stories told afterward, and the consequences those stories carry. Its meaning is tested both in Yoav Lerner’s account of firing during combat in Lebanon and in Michal’s explanation of how Chaim Lerner fell from a balcony.

Definition and Wartime Context

For Yoav Lerner, self-defense begins with a rule his parents gave him before military service: if his life seemed threatened but he was not completely certain, he should fire and they would deal with the consequences later. The advice reflects a family’s willingness to prioritize survival under danger, but its moral cost comes into view when Yoav applies it in a confused encounter in Lebanon. He says that he was at the rear of a half-track when stones came from children and then live rounds came from behind a fountain. His commander ordered the soldiers to return fire; Yoav’s driver did not hear the order, but Yoav says that he did. He fired two sustained bursts at what he believed were armed fighters and killed two ten-year-old boys.

The account makes the conditions of the decision central without making them settle the question of responsibility. Yoav describes a battlefield in which soldiers are told not to shoot children throwing stones, yet are also ordered to answer live fire; he says the shooters then prove to be children. His claim that he perceived weapons and acted on an order sits beside the fact that the boys had no uniforms or Kalashnikovs. The novel also records that the army eventually cleared him of responsibility, but only after his father had died. Institutional clearance, the soldier’s account of what he saw, and the harm done to the boys remain distinct parts of the story rather than interchangeable proof of innocence.

Michal’s Account of the Balcony

Michal’s account presents self-defense not as a general permission to use force, but as a claim tied to an immediate assault and a split-second effort to escape it. In her first telling, she describes confronting Chaim Lerner after calling him a liar and telling him that the ashes and remains of his family at Auschwitz were ashamed of him. When she saw him flex his palm and raise his hand to strike, she caught it and twisted it, then pushed him away toward the balcony railing. Chaim, whose knee and hip were impaired, lost his footing, fell over the railing, and struck his head. Michal acknowledged that she had killed him, but qualified the admission as self-defense.

Her fuller account clarifies the danger she says she faced. Chaim had invited her onto the balcony under the pretense of apologizing; once the door was closed, he embraced and kissed her forcibly and touched her breast. Michal shoved him away with her right arm. He grabbed her left hand, twisting it and wrenching the arm out of its socket; in pain, she pushed him hard in the chest. He struck the railing, briefly balanced on its top bar, reached toward her, and fell. The injury to Michal’s arm supplies a physical trace of the struggle, while the sequence makes the fatal push both an act of resistance and the immediate cause of Chaim’s death. Her hesitation as he reached for her, followed by his fall, keeps the scene from becoming a simple account of either deliberate killing or blameless accident.

Michal feared that the police would not believe her because Chaim was frail and she was stronger. Even if she were cleared, she thought, she would remain publicly defined as the person who killed the revered figure known as Saint of Auschwitz, ending her career. She also connected her ambition to service to her country, rather than presenting professional advancement as purely personal. The distinction between a self-defense claim and public judgment therefore matters: her account describes an immediate threat, but she expects the symbolic status of the dead man to shape how others would interpret her actions.

The eventual disclosure also separates legal exposure from reputational and political consequences. Zehava Lerner had protected Michal and helped put her dislocated arm back into its socket before the police arrived. Michal later told Judah Loeb that she had never been in legal danger; the revelation could embarrass the women and damage Chaim’s name, but not, in her view, lead to her arrest. Self-defense thus operates on two levels: as Michal’s explanation of the force used to stop an assault, and as a truth she concealed because she feared the public meaning attached to killing Chaim more than legal punishment.

Moral Injury and the Limits of Justification

Yoav Lerner’s account makes the self-defense question extend beyond the moment of firing. He says he heard the order to return fire and believed he was shooting at armed fighters; afterward, he saw two dead boys. His father, Chaim Lerner, could not treat the Lebanon War as a strategic operation detached from its victims. The massacres at Sabra and Chatila had already confronted Chaim’s unit with screams, gunfire, and the knowledge that civilians were being killed while the soldiers waited for orders. In Yoav’s telling, Chaim came to see the war through the moral reversal of the powerful harming the vulnerable: his recurring nightmare cast him as a Nazi colonel in the Israeli army, hunting Arab children. The dream, Yoav says, seemed to pass from father to son, making his own act feel like its terrible realization.

Yoav therefore interprets Chaim’s death not simply as the consequence of a battlefield mistake, but as the result of his father’s inability to live with what his son had done. That explanation is Yoav’s retrospective account, shaped by guilt and by the belief that he had doomed his father; it does not erase the difference between the order he says he heard, the threat he says he perceived, and the children who were killed. Set beside Michal’s account of resisting Chaim’s assault, the episode also shows how the phrase self-defense cannot by itself settle what happened or what follows. A claim of necessary force may explain an action, while the injured or dead, the witnesses, and those who later tell the story continue to determine its moral meaning.

Competing Stories of Necessity

The novel places Yoav Lerner’s defense beside other explanations for violence, making clear that danger, motive, and retrospective justification are not the same thing. Before the account of the shooting became known, the circulating version was that Yoav had suffered a breakdown and fired at two ten-year-old children in Southern Lebanon for no reason; some people added that he later claimed not to remember the incident. His own later narration is markedly different: he says he heard an order to return fire, believed the targets were armed, and understood his action as a response to an immediate threat. The gap between these versions matters. It does not independently establish which details are true, but it shows how a label such as breakdown can obscure the claimed battlefield circumstances, just as a soldier’s account of those circumstances cannot undo the deaths.

Kamal’s explanation of his planned attack offers a sharper contrast. In an interview, he described choosing a restaurant in Hod HaSharon to avenge his grandfather, who had been expelled from an Arab village during the Nakba and subsequently lost the chance to attend medical school in Cairo. Kamal presented his intended suicide bombing as retaliation for that inherited dispossession, not as an immediate act to escape an assault. The juxtaposition distinguishes a claim of self-defense, which depends on the circumstances and immediacy of a threat, from revenge narrated as a response to historical injury. Across the novel’s competing accounts, invoking danger or past suffering may explain how violence is made intelligible to its actor; it does not, on its own, settle whether the act was necessary or what responsibility remains.