The Algerian War appears not as a battlefield episode but as news heard in Gershom Wald’s Jerusalem home, where it becomes a measure of political miscalculation and a mirror for arguments over Israel’s future. Reports of French military disarray sharpen Wald’s criticism of Israel’s dependence on Western powers, while the wider narrative places that debate alongside Shaltiel Abravanel’s dissent from the course toward war.

News from Algeria

While Shmuel Ash warms the porridge prepared for Wald by their neighbor Sara de Toledo, the two listen to the evening news. The report concerns General Jacques Massu, the French paratrooper commander in Algeria, who has been ordered back to Paris. Rumors suggest that General de Gaulle is about to make a major statement on Algeria’s future. At the airport, Massu tells reporters that the army may have erred by trusting de Gaulle after the right-wing coup in Algeria two years earlier.

The distant crisis arrives amid an intimate routine of care: Shmuel stirs the porridge, tastes it, adds sugar and cinnamon, and waits as Wald eats without appetite. The juxtaposition gives political news a domestic setting, where decisions made by generals and governments are heard by men whose own lives have been shaped by war and its consequences.

Wald’s Political Reading

Wald treats the French events as evidence of foreseeable failure. He argues that anyone with eyes could have known how matters in Algeria would end, and his proverb about like producing like casts the crisis as the consequence of a political choice rather than an unforeseeable accident.

His criticism extends directly to Israel. Wald says David Ben-Gurion was wrong to abandon non-alignment and leave Israel in a dependent relationship with Western powers, especially France and Britain, which he considers declining. He points to reports of dozens killed and wounded in Algiers and to the French army’s refusal to fire on rebellious French citizens. France, he says, is rushing toward civil war, while Britain is withdrawing what remains of its empire. Israel, in his metaphor, has been embarked on an alliance with sinking ships. He punctuates the argument with offers of tea, cognac, and the porridge Shmuel has prepared, bringing geopolitical alarm back to the room’s ordinary acts of hospitality.

Relation to the Palestinian Conflict

The Algerian reports echo the political dispute surrounding Abravanel, whose own dissent had been constrained before the war in Palestine. Shmuel discovers that on June 18, 1947, Abravanel asked to address the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine with an individual proposal for peace between Jews and Arabs. The Jewish Agency rejected the request, insisting that it and the Zionist Executive speak with one voice. Abravanel considered appearing independently but ultimately complied with majority discipline, apparently under threat of exclusion from the leading institutions of Jewish society. Shmuel finds no evidence that Abravanel later brought his position to public debate or appealed to either community.

Wald’s recollection of the years before the 1948 war gives that suppressed alternative a human and familial cost. Abravanel opposed the war and urged young people on both sides to lay down their arms; he continued visiting Arab friends even after violence and road blockades began. Yet Wald acknowledges his own part in the contrary call to fight: he had taught his only son, Mija, to regard war as sacred and to heed the remembered call to go. Mija was killed while escorting a convoy toward Jerusalem on April 2, 1948. The Algerian news therefore sits within a wider pattern in which political leaders’ choices, dissenting warnings, and the language used to summon the young to battle are weighed against the losses that follow.

Narrative Significance

The novel does not equate the Algerian conflict with the war in Palestine; instead, Wald uses the French crisis to argue by comparison. His claim that Israel has tied itself to powers in decline links foreign policy to the danger of misjudgment, while Abravanel’s unsuccessful effort to offer another path shows how dissent can be contained before its consequences become visible.

The news report is brief, but its placement among food, medication, and recollection gives it a double function. It records a contemporary political crisis and exposes the assumptions through which Wald interprets it: that wars and alliances have foreseeable costs, and that warnings may be ignored until the damage is irreversible.