The 1948 Arab–Israeli War is both the defining public conflict in the novel and the private catastrophe around which its household is organized. Its memory returns through arguments about Jewish security, Arab dispossession, the possibilities Shaltiel Abravanel believed were lost, and the death of Mija Wald on April 2, 1948. The war’s significance lies not in a settled verdict but in the collision of accounts that survive it: a necessary fight for some, a disastrous choice for others, and a source of grief that no political explanation can resolve.

Background and Competing Political Visions

The war emerges from the end of the British Mandate and disagreement over whether Jewish independence should be established as a state. Shaltiel Abravanel, who had served in Zionist institutions, opposed the partition plan and warned against declaring an independent Jewish state. He argued instead for a shared political future for Jews and Arabs, and sought an agreement with Arab leaders as British rule ended. For this position he was treated as a traitor by some of his colleagues and given a choice between resigning and being expelled; he resigned.

Abravanel’s alternative was not a call for the Jewish community to disappear. He proposed that the departing British Mandate be replaced by an international mandate or a provisional government under American supervision. He thought that a limited immigration of Holocaust survivors could address the immediate plight of displaced Jews while allowing Arab communities time to adjust to the Jewish presence. In his account, Arab opposition arose less from the existing, relatively small Zionist settlement than from fear that Jewish education, technology, and organization would enable future expansion and control. The state’s declaration, he predicted, would turn that fear into a bloody conflict with the Arab world and perhaps the wider Muslim world, one that Jewish military victories could not finally settle.

That forecast confronts a sharply different view represented by David Ben-Gurion and, for a time, Gershom Wald. Wald regarded Ben-Gurion as a far-sighted leader who understood that the Arabs would not willingly accept Jewish presence or share territory and power, and that no outside force could be relied upon to defend the Jews. In this view, security required taking by one’s own efforts what would not be freely granted. Yet Wald’s later reflections also give weight to Abravanel’s warning: military power could stave off destruction, he argued, but it could not turn an enemy into an ally or a desire for revenge into friendship. The political dispute therefore persists as a disagreement not simply about courage, but about what force can achieve.

The War’s Human Consequences

Shmuel Ash recalls how the conflict transformed ordinary coexistence in Haifa into escalating communal violence. His childhood memories include Arab clients visiting his father’s cartography office and families sharing hospitality. That earlier familiarity did not prevent attacks on Jewish buses, Jewish retaliatory raids on nearby Arab villages, and the killing of Jewish refinery workers by an Arab crowd. Snipers took positions on rooftops, and fortified checkpoints divided Arab and Jewish neighborhoods. The progression makes the war’s approach legible as a collapse of everyday contact into armed separation.

In April 1948, shortly before the British withdrawal, tens of thousands of Arabs left Haifa by boats and fishing craft for Lebanon. Jewish leaders in the city issued appeals asking the population to stay, but the appeals did not halt the exodus. Shmuel recalls that fear of a possible massacre, intensified by rumors about the killing of residents of Deir Yassin, weighed on Arab residents as they fled. He also acknowledges that in Lod and elsewhere Arabs were killed and expelled, a fact that complicates any account in which the population’s departure is described only as voluntary flight. Much of Haifa’s Arab population was gone by the end of the exodus.

The novel leaves the meaning of that displacement contested. Shmuel wonders whether the events had to happen, while his father insists that there was no escape from a war of life and death. His father describes it as a civil war fought not only by armies but by populations, street against street and neighborhood against neighborhood, and compares mass displacement to other population transfers. Shmuel also recalls his mother’s view that British policy helped bring about the catastrophe by making competing promises. These explanations coexist without cancelling the losses they try to account for.

Mija Wald’s Death and the Family’s Grief

The war’s most intimate consequence for the household is the death of Mija, Gershom Wald’s only son and Atalia Abravanel’s husband. Atalia tells Shmuel that she was married to Mija for a year and a half before he died in the war; she and her former father-in-law were left alone by his death. Wald identifies the date and location as the night of April 2, 1948, near Sha’ar HaGai on the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road. The precise date recurs in his accounts, fixing a public war in the family’s memory as a single, repeatedly revisited loss.

Wald’s retrospective account complicates the language of sacrifice. Mija had lost a kidney as a child and was urged not to fight by both Atalia and Shaltiel. Shaltiel believed the war was madness on both sides and argued that young people should refuse to take up arms; he continued meeting Arab friends even as violence and road blockages spread. Wald, by contrast, had taught his son through heroic national stories and the exhortations of the period. He recognizes that he was among those who made the call to fight audible, and says that Mija may not have gone had his father not described the war as sacred. The memory turns bereavement into an accusation directed inward as well as outward.

Wald once repeated the public consolation that those killed in the 1948 war had not died in vain. Over time he finds that claim increasingly difficult to sustain. Shaltiel’s conviction that all deaths are in vain—whether in war, accident, illness, or old age—has become impossible for Wald to set aside. His grief also shapes his relation to the new state: after Mija’s death and the war, he and Shaltiel ceased speaking, and Wald describes himself as having been diminished by the loss. The argument over historical necessity cannot give back the son or make the inherited language of sacrifice convincing again.

Memory, Security, and the Limits of Force

The novel sets private recollection beside the public language used to explain and justify the war. In their conversations, Wald and Shmuel debate whether Jewish forces in 1948 faced a choice between fighting and destruction. Wald challenges Shmuel’s criticism of the war by asking whether the Jews could have survived through peaceful methods or persuaded the Arabs to accept partition. Shmuel, in turn, recalls the imbalance of population and the possibility that a future Arab army might overwhelm Israel. The debate does not reduce the conflict to either an assured military triumph or a simple failure of diplomacy; it exposes how fear of annihilation and fear of dispossession shape opposing accounts.

That fear is sharpened by the imagined arrival of an “eleventh soldier”: a story Shmuel recounts about a Finnish commander’s assurance that each Finnish soldier could defeat ten Soviet soldiers, followed by the question of what would happen if the enemy sent eleven. Applied to Israel, the parable challenges confidence founded on relative military strength. Shmuel points to the much smaller Arab forces that fought in 1948 against the mobilized Jewish population, then asks what might happen if Arab states committed far greater numbers. Wald’s answer does not dismiss defense: military power can prevent immediate destruction. Its limit is that it cannot repair the relationship or remove the grievances that make another conflict possible.

The war thus remains an event both completed and active in the novel’s present. Its signs persist in Jerusalem’s buildings, its unresolved consequences in the departure and displacement of Arab residents, and its most personal aftermath in Wald’s repeated return to the night Mija died. Through distinct memories rather than a single authoritative account, the narrative holds together Jewish vulnerability, Palestinian loss, political alternatives rejected, and the human cost of national security. No one interpretation closes the history; the continuing disagreement is itself part of the war’s legacy.