1948 Israeli War of Independence
JudasThe 1948 Israeli War of Independence is a decisive military and political turning point in the novel, but its meaning remains contested long after the fighting ends. For Gershom Wald, the war took his only son, Mija; for Shaltiel Abravanel, it confirmed the danger of creating a Jewish state by rejecting coexistence with the Arabs; and for Shmuel Ash, its inherited stories become an opening through which the claims of survival, responsibility, and loss can be questioned.
Background and Competing Visions
The war emerges from a dispute over what should replace the departing British administration. Shaltiel Abravanel argued that Jews and Arabs could still reach an agreement if the Zionist leadership relinquished the demand for an independent Jewish state. He proposed a shared political arrangement, not a separate Jewish state, and was expelled from the Zionist Executive and the Jewish Agency leadership after making his case to David Ben-Gurion in 1948. Gershom Wald admits that he himself sided with Ben-Gurion’s hard realism rather than Abravanel’s proposals, a choice that would acquire a bitter personal consequence when Mija went to war and died.
Abravanel’s opposition was not founded on indifference to Jewish safety or on a rejection of a Jewish home in the land. He believed Jews had a right to build a home there, but that it should be shared with Arabs. He maintained that Arab opposition arose chiefly from fear that Jewish educational, technological, and organizational strengths would enable expansion and eventual control of the whole territory. In his account, the danger lay not simply in the small Zionist presence of the time but in the power Arabs believed could grow out of it. His proposed response was to halt demands for an overtly Jewish state, permit a limited immigration of Holocaust survivors, and give the Arab population years to adjust to Jewish presence while political calm might be restored.
Abravanel also warned that declaring an independent Jewish state after the Mandate would provoke a bloody conflict with the Arab world, perhaps with the Muslim world more broadly. Even if Jewish forces prevailed in several battles, he predicted a conflict lasting generations, with each victory deepening Arab fear of Jewish power. The novel does not present this forecast as a settled judgment; it places it beside the opposing conviction that no peaceful alternative offered a realistic chance of survival. Shmuel challenges the premise that Arabs should welcome newcomers who, from their perspective, arrived from far away and took land, fields, villages, cities, ancestral graves, and the inheritance of their children. The war’s background is therefore narrated through opposed experiences of danger and dispossession, not a single uncontested account.
The War and Mija’s Death
Mija, Wald’s only son, was thirty-seven, married to Atalia, and physically disabled like his father. He had lost a kidney to illness at nine. Despite his wife’s and father-in-law’s objections to the war and to his enlistment, he deceived the recruiting committee late in 1947 and joined the fighting. Wald recalls that he had helped shape the beliefs that sent him: he raised Mija on stories of earlier Jewish defenders and on the conviction that the approaching war was a sacred struggle. The call to go, he says, had been voiced not just by him but by teachers, classmates, and the country as a whole. He remembers himself as part of that collective summons.
On the night of April 2, 1948, Mija was killed in the Bab al-Wad fighting on the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road. In Shmuel’s later attempt to imagine the event, Mija climbs a hill with his comrades, who retreat in the darkness without realizing he has been left behind. The narrative cannot establish what followed: Shmuel wonders whether Mija was afraid to call out, lost consciousness, tried to crawl toward the convoy, or shouted from pain and was found by Arab fighters. The uncertainty makes the death recur as an unresolved scene rather than a complete account. Wald names the date and the road; Shmuel’s conjectures expose how little those facts can tell the living about the last moments of the dead.
The loss also changes the meaning of the language used to prepare young people for battle. Wald recalls that he had taught Mija to honor earlier defenders and had supported the idea that the country had no choice but to fight. After Mija’s death, he sees himself not as an observer of the national call but as one of its makers: he educated, trained, and encouraged his son to answer it. The war is thus linked to a father’s painful recognition that a public ideal can become an intimate command, and that the person who helped send the soldier may be left behind to live with the result.
Civilian Flight and the War’s Human Cost
Shmuel’s childhood memories give the conflict a civilian history that reaches beyond the battlefield. In Haifa, Arab clients once visited his father’s cartography office; merchants and the Ash family exchanged hospitality, food, and conversation. Shmuel remembers visits to Arab homes and evenings in which guests agreed that politics only brought calamity. That everyday familiarity gives way to attacks on Jewish buses, reprisals in nearby Arab villages, the killing of Jewish refinery workers by an Arab crowd, and Jewish and Arab snipers positioned behind rooftop sandbags. Fortified checkpoints arose between Arab and Jewish neighborhoods as the city’s streets became part of the conflict.
In April 1948, about a month before the British withdrawal, tens of thousands of Arab residents left Haifa by boat for Lebanon. Jewish leaders in the city issued appeals asking the population to remain, but panic had already spread. Rumors that Jews intended to exterminate the Arabs, associated in Shmuel’s account with the Deir Yassin massacre, contributed to the flight; much of Haifa’s Arab population disappeared within a short time. Shmuel also acknowledges that in Lod and elsewhere Arabs were not asked to stay but were killed and expelled. The distinction matters: the novel does not reduce all displacement to a single circumstance, even as it portrays fear, violence, and mass departure as part of the same war.
The aftermath remains visible in the city’s altered population. Shmuel says he sometimes walks through former Arab neighborhoods now filled with Jewish immigrants and through lanes where thousands of Arabs who remained still live. He wonders whether what happened had to happen. His father maintains that the war was a total, existential struggle between populations rather than merely armies, and compares its displacement of civilians to population transfers in other conflicts. Shmuel’s mother instead blames the British for having promised the land twice and encouraged one people against another. These family accounts coexist without settling the question; the war’s memory remains an argument about necessity, agency, and responsibility.
Memory, Grief, and the Limits of Force
Wald’s grief makes the war an ongoing condition rather than a concluded episode. He says that since Mija’s death he has gone more than ten years without sleeping through the night, repeatedly imagining his son being killed among the rocks on the wooded hillside. During the siege of Jerusalem, the family’s thick stone walls sheltered them from bullets and shells; afterward, Wald remained shut inside the house, cut off from the outside world. The physical refuge of the house becomes inseparable from the family’s confinement in mourning.
The conventional claim that the fallen did not die in vain becomes harder for Wald to repeat. He recalls that he once shared the public consolation that Mija’s death, like the deaths of others in the 1948 war, had meaning. But Abravanel’s insistence that all deaths are in vain now catches in his throat. Wald cannot simply replace the national justification with Abravanel’s bleak verdict: he speaks from the wound of having lost his only child, while also recognizing his own role in the beliefs that sent him to fight. The argument about whether the dead died in vain remains painfully unresolved because it joins a public account of sacrifice to a father’s private knowledge of loss.
The novel likewise distinguishes military power’s capacity to preserve life from its inability to make peace. Wald argues that force can keep Israel from immediate destruction, but cannot turn an enemy into an ally, a fanatic into a tolerant person, or someone thirsty for revenge into a friend. Military strength can avert disaster temporarily; it cannot repair or resolve the political antagonism that produces it. That distinction gives the war’s memory its continuing force: survival may be real and necessary, while the means of survival leave the central conflict unanswered. In Shmuel’s conversations with Wald, the inherited certainty that the war had no alternative begins to show cracks, even as neither the death of Mija nor the suffering of civilians can be undone.
