Lebanon War

The Lebanon War is a continuing moral and political presence in the novel, not merely a military episode. Its violence enters family life through the deaths of civilians and children, shapes Chaim Lerner’s judgment of his country and his son, and later becomes entangled with efforts to expose the truth and secure peace.

Invasion, Massacre, and Witness

The invasion of Southern Lebanon began nearly three years into Charlie’s military service. His unit spent its first week after the incursion training with new weapons in the Negev and the next patrolling Ramallah and Nablus; he never faced combat, and his service ended the following week. About a month after his discharge, Charlie and Judah first got drunk together, the night after the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. Their conversation about the killing of Palestinian civilians by Christian Lebanese soldiers, allies of Israel, establishes the war’s central question of responsibility: violence committed by an ally is also a burden borne by those who stood nearby.

Yoav’s Account and the Burden of Responsibility

The war’s most intimate cost emerges in Yoav Lerner’s account of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. His unit was stationed only a few kilometers south of the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut. From his post, he heard gunshots, Arabic commands amplified over loudspeakers, and screams that sounded like children. The soldiers assumed children were being executed; the next day, they learned that hundreds of civilians had been murdered, including dozens of children, mothers, and babies.

Yoav remained in his tent monitoring radio transmissions. As the screams and shots repeated, he touched his rifle, ready for orders, but none came. He describes ten thousand Israeli soldiers standing by while their allies killed civilians. When the killing abruptly stopped, the troops waited through five minutes of silence before receiving orders to enter Chatila. Yoav rode at the rear of a force of perhaps 250 soldiers, a position that would matter in the later account of his own shooting.

In another Lebanese village, Yoav’s unit came under attack from children throwing stones, followed by live fire from hidden positions. His account stresses the soldiers’ dilemma: they were ordered to return fire at live rounds, but the apparent shooters were children. Yoav says that, crouched behind a shield and then inside a halftrack, he heard his commander order the unit to fire. His driver did not hear the order. Yoav nevertheless rose and fired two bursts at what he believed were two Hezbollah fighters carrying Kalashnikovs. He hit both targets, despite being known as a poor marksman who failed his firing exams; they were two unarmed ten-year-old boys.

Before Yoav entered the army, his parents had told him that if his life seemed threatened but he was not completely certain, he should shoot and they would face the consequences with him afterward. That family counsel of survival did not spare him from the consequences. The shooting became the wound through which Chaim Lerner experienced the Lebanon War: not as a strategic operation against a terrorist organization, but as a reversal of the Holocaust’s moral roles, with Israel powerful and Yoav killing Arab children. Chaim’s recurring nightmare had been that he became a Nazi officer in the Israeli army and hunted Arab children; after Yoav’s act, Chaim believed the nightmare had entered reality through his son. Yoav’s account identifies that belief as the reason Chaim killed himself, binding the war’s violence to the family’s grief and to Chaim’s judgment of his country.

Political Condemnation and the Search for Peace

After a new medication formula stopped Chaim Lerner’s nighttime insults, his trauma took a political form. He wrote op-eds condemning Israel as a criminal state, an occupier, and guilty of genocide, though Zehava Lerner persuaded him not to publish most of them. His opposition to the invasion of Lebanon was different: he told her he would speak publicly against it. Zehava could accept his radicalism as one voice in a boisterous democracy, but the war sharpened the divide between them. She had left family life in Kansas City for the Zionist project and Israeli politics; Chaim’s denunciations struck at the commitments around which she had built her life.

Years later, the war’s political meaning became entangled with Judah Loeb’s investigation into Chaim’s death. Charlie admitted that the theories he had fed Judah about Chaim being targeted for his theology or his opposition to the Lebanon War were fabricated. The supposed ideological conspiracy was meant to divert scrutiny from Zehava, not identify the real circumstances of Chaim’s death. When Judah learned that Zehava had killed Chaim while defending herself, she argued that publishing the truth could damage the peace effort she was pursuing and place a historic opportunity at risk. Her appeal made the war’s legacy part of a present-day bargain: whether disclosure and accountability should yield to the prospect of peace.

That prospect proved more limited than Zehava’s appeal suggested. She and her team held one round of secret meetings with Palestinian negotiators in London, where Charlie arranged for Judah to observe on condition that he delay reporting until a final agreement and use no direct quotations. The sides exchanged maps: Israel offered roughly 95 percent of the West Bank, while the Palestinians sought the whole territory with minor border changes to accommodate most Jewish settlers. Pisgat David appeared on the Palestinian side of both maps Judah glimpsed. The parties were not far apart on territory, but later meetings foundered over Jerusalem, refugee return, recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, a connection between Gaza and the West Bank, and Hamas. The London talks collapsed a week after the meetings; when Judah was eventually allowed to report, the story received little attention. The war’s aftermath remained active instead: Hamas missiles and sometimes flammable kites from Gaza were followed by Israeli bombs, tanks, and new settlements, while terrorist violence persisted in Israel and the West Bank. A bomb outside the Russian Compound later killed Charlie, linking the unresolved conflict to the loss of the man who had tried to manage both its political consequences and the truth about Chaim.

The War as a Lived Landscape

In retrospect, Judah remembered the Lebanon War not only through massacres and political arguments but as the atmosphere of his first time abroad. Although the invasion was over, flare-ups in South Lebanon seemed to happen almost daily. Armed soldiers rode buses and walked downtown; in Judah’s dorm room, too, the presence of weapons made the conflict intimate. Once, a soldier younger than Judah fell asleep beside him on a bus, his gun resting against Judah’s knee and pointing toward his crotch. Judah was afraid to touch it in case it went off. The episode gives the war a mundane, unnerving scale: danger was not confined to a distant battlefield but traveled into ordinary journeys and shared rooms.

That recollection also altered how Judah understood his attachment to Israel. His junior year had seemed to center on Michal, but he later recognized the Lerners as part of what had drawn him in: Chaim represented the Holocaust, Zehava the Zionist rebirth of the Jewish people, and Yoav the next generation carrying the burden of his parents’ trauma. The war therefore reached Judah first as a lived environment and later as a family inheritance, shaping both his memories of his youth and the meanings he attached to the people he had loved.