Et Ratzon

Et Ratzon is a political party headed by Meir Alon, a would-be prime minister and polemical writer whose campaign against Chaim Lerner turns the party into a vehicle for a fierce dispute over Israeli power and the meaning of Holocaust memory. The novel offers little about the party’s internal structure or broader membership; its political character emerges primarily through Alon’s public ambition and his attacks on Lerner.

Leadership and Public Profile

Alon leads Et Ratzon and hopes to become prime minister. He is also a writer, though Charlie describes his work as polemic and propaganda. His articles and books make him more than a private critic: they place his interpretation of Lerner’s ideas into public circulation and give him an influential political platform. Charlie reports that Alon was writing about Lerner weeks before Lerner’s death and continued to publish about him afterward.

The novel does not establish Et Ratzon’s policies through a platform document, nor does it describe its organization beyond Alon’s leadership. Its positions are therefore best understood through the arguments Alon makes, rather than treated as a fully specified program formally adopted by every party member.

Opposition to Chaim Lerner

Alon presents Lerner’s call for Israel to relinquish power as a profound betrayal. He objects to Lerner’s proposals to withdraw from Lebanon and from Hebron, Bethlehem, and Shechem, arguing that Jewish power and military capacity are necessary for self-defense. In Alon’s account, Lerner’s warning that Jews might become like the Nazis if they wield power against their enemies is an insult to Israeli soldiers and commanders: it casts them, he says, as sadistic killers and amounts to a blood libel.

Alon grounds this objection in Holocaust history. He invokes the memory of Jews being driven to gas chambers and mass graves without the weapons to defend themselves, and rejects the idea that this history should lead Israel to surrender its arms or remain weak. The conflict is thus not simply over policy. Lerner’s moral warning treats power as a danger that can corrupt its holders; Alon treats the renunciation of power as a danger that leaves Jews vulnerable to annihilation. The same historical trauma is made to support opposing political conclusions.

Campaign Against Lerner

Alon’s attacks began before Lerner’s death. He called Lerner a traitor to other Holocaust survivors and wrote that he needed to be dealt with. After the death, he described Lerner as the epitome of leftist self-hatred, claiming that Lerner had hated his Jewishness, his country, his comrades, and God. Alon also asserted that Lerner’s self-hatred explained why he had leaped from a roof. These claims present Lerner’s death as confirmation of Alon’s political diagnosis rather than as an occasion for uncertainty.

Charlie says the police conducted almost no interviews after the death was treated as suicide, and that Alon’s government influence meant the police would have needed more evidence than hostile articles to question him. This does not establish that Et Ratzon directed or obstructed the investigation. It does show how Alon’s political prominence surrounds the unresolved death: his public accusations remain consequential, while the novel leaves their relation to the investigation unproven.

Political and Thematic Significance

Et Ratzon embodies one pole of the novel’s argument about Holocaust memory, national security, and moral responsibility. Alon resists any account in which Jewish survival imposes a duty to limit state power; he regards that conclusion as both historically dangerous and an affront to those who defend Israel. Lerner’s competing argument makes the exercise of power itself subject to moral scrutiny. The party’s significance lies less in a documented institutional history than in the force with which Alon makes that disagreement political, turning a theological and ethical dispute into a contest over territory, weapons, and the legitimacy of Israeli self-defense.