Pisgat David Settlement is a West Bank settlement just beyond the 1967 border, roughly a twenty-minute drive from Jerusalem. It first appears as an ordinary, comfortable suburb, but Chaim Lerner’s tumultuous lecture there reveals how settlement life is bound to the arguments over occupation, Jewish power, and a possible peace. Later, the settlement appears on the Palestinian side of both maps exchanged in secret negotiations, turning its residential streets into a precise measure of the distance between political proposals and the people already living on the land.

Setting and First Impressions

The narrator travels to Pisgat David with Chaim two weeks after the publication of Our Imperfect God, accompanying him to a lecture on his book tour. Chaim has chosen to speak not first in Tel Aviv or in the United States, where the book’s principal readership is, but to audiences he expects to oppose him: Haredim and religious settlers in the West Bank. As the taxi approaches the settlement, Chaim describes the audience as people he hates and who hate him, framing the visit as a deliberate encounter with ideological antagonists rather than a routine promotional stop.

The narrator expects a militarized outpost: tents, soldiers, guard towers, prefabricated buildings, and barbed wire. Instead, the settlement’s entrance is marked by a colorful bilingual welcome sign, and its main street passes large two-story houses with red roofs, driveways, garages, and green lawns. Children toss an American football in the street. The familiar suburban appearance unsettles the narrator’s assumptions, formed largely in Jerusalem and the bar scenes of Tel Aviv and Haifa, that Israelis mostly live in apartments and that houses with yards are an American luxury. Pisgat David looks more like Shaker Heights, Ohio, than either city. Its ordinary domestic landscape complicates the image of a settlement as only a military frontier: the political boundary is also a place of homes, lawns, and children at play.

Chaim Lerner’s Lecture and the Dispute over Occupation

Chaim speaks in a large movie theater with an estimated one thousand dark red velvet seats, all occupied. The narrator cannot follow most of the Hebrew lecture, but can read the audience’s changing response. Chaim begins with jokes and Holocaust stories, drawing loud laughter and then attentive silence; when he speaks quietly, listeners lean forward, and several are moved to tears. The mood breaks after a short sentence. Murmuring spreads through the hall, two older men in suits and knit yarmulkes call out, and the exchange escalates into a sustained argument between speaker and audience. Chaim tries to raise his voice, then bangs his cane ten times against the stage to quiet the room. The lecture ends amid continuing protest; only the narrator and the two men who first challenged Chaim applaud.

Afterward, Chaim explains that he came to say what he believed: that the settlers’ actions were dooming Israel to perpetual war and corrupting Jewish culture and memory by creating a permanent occupation. He also drew a parallel between the settlers’ aims in the territories and Hitler’s ambitions. He acknowledges that he may have gone too far, but treats the uproar as evidence that he has provoked the dialogue he sought. The confrontation makes the settlement more than a backdrop for his book’s reception. It is the place where his theological and political argument meets people who experience his condemnation as an attack on their purposes, their security, and the legitimacy of Jewish power.

Competing Claims to Land and Power

The dispute around Pisgat David belongs to a wider conflict over whether Israel should retain or relinquish power in territories including Hebron, Bethlehem, and Shechem. In a later conversation, Meir Alon condemns Chaim’s position that Jews should withdraw from places where they assert power over enemies who pledge to destroy them. Alon sees that argument as an intolerable demand for Jewish weakness, and objects in particular to its implication that Israeli soldiers have become like Nazi killers. His response exposes the moral divide beneath the settlement’s political geography: Chaim presents continued occupation as a source of permanent war and moral corruption, while Alon understands territorial power as necessary protection against renewed vulnerability.

Zehava’s later peace initiative gives that conflict a concrete map. In London, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators exchange proposals: Israel offers roughly 95 percent of the West Bank, while the Palestinians seek the whole territory with limited border adjustments to accommodate most Jewish settlers. The narrator is not permitted to study the maps, but glimpses enough to see that Pisgat David falls on the Palestinian side in both versions. The settlement is therefore not merely one contested point among many; its placement shows that even proposals described as close on territory would require a different political future for the place and its residents.

Narrative Significance

Pisgat David is introduced through a contrast between appearance and political meaning. Its lawns and family homes do not erase its location beyond the 1967 border, just as its position on the proposed maps does not erase the fact that it is already inhabited. The narrative moves from the narrator’s surprise at the suburb’s familiar domestic details, through the anger in the packed theater, to the later cartographic glimpse. Across those scenes, the settlement becomes a meeting point between lived space and abstract claims: the place Chaim visits to challenge occupation is also a place the negotiators must locate, boundary by boundary, in imagining peace.