Betrayal and Traitor

Betrayal in the novel is not a stable moral category but a contested name: it can mean collaboration, disloyalty to family, or dissent from a national project, yet it can also become an honorific for someone willing to change. The image of a traitor running along the edge of a field frames that ambiguity, while the novel’s interwoven histories of Judas and Shaltiel Abravanel show how communities turn political disagreement into personal and collective stigma.

The traitor as a contested figure

The epigraph from Natan Alterman’s “The Traitor,” in which the dead rather than the living throws the stone, introduces betrayal as a judgment that may persist beyond the judged person’s life. The image is not confined to a single character: the novel repeatedly asks who is entitled to condemn a supposed traitor, what loyalties are being defended, and what histories the accusation conceals.

One remembered case makes the instability of the label especially plain. Shmuel Ash’s grandfather had served in the British Mandate police, ostensibly to pass information to the resistance. He was in effect a double agent, spying for the very resistance that ultimately killed him after deciding he was a traitor. Gershom Wald calls the episode a grave error, turning the accusation back on those who acted in its name. The grandfather’s case separates the label from a settled account of allegiance: he served within an institution to aid its opponents, yet the group he sought to help judged him by the visible uniform and the suspicion attached to it.

The novel also stages the accusation in Shmuel’s dream. At a remote observation post above the Monastery of the Dormition on Mount Zion, he tries to explain to Stalin why the Jews rejected Jesus; the Western Wall lies beyond the border in Jordanian-held Jerusalem. Stalin laughs, calls Shmuel Judas, and becomes more suspicious as Shmuel struggles to explain himself. Nesher Shereshevski appears briefly, bringing a crying puppy in a metal box. The dream joins political division, religious argument, and the Judas label in a scene where explanation does not clear suspicion but seems to deepen it.

Judas and the limits of religious polemic

Shmuel’s research into Jewish writing about Jesus leads him to notice an omission as well as an argument. In his notes, he observes that writers who contest supernatural stories about Jesus’s birth, life, and death often avoid engaging with the spiritual and moral force of his message. More pointedly, he finds that none of the writings he has examined mentions Judas Iscariot. Without Judas, he reasons, there might have been no crucifixion and, without the crucifixion, no Christianity. Betrayal here is not only a moral charge: Judas’s role is also a neglected hinge in the religious history Shmuel is trying to understand.

Wald broadens that inquiry by recalling how Judas’s name has become synonymous with traitor and, in the eyes of many Christians, how that association has extended to Jews as a people. He recounts an encounter from his student years: on a train, a young nun reproached him after learning that he was Jewish, asking how Jews could have treated Jesus as they did. Wald’s story makes the inherited accusation visible in an ordinary encounter, where Shmuel’s historical subject becomes a present-day stereotype. He urges Shmuel to complete his research and imagines separate books on Judas and on Jesus in Jewish eyes, with Judas in Jewish eyes as a further subject. The inquiry into betrayal thus opens onto the history of how a religious accusation can be generalized into a collective stigma.

Shaltiel Abravanel’s political dissent

The most sustained modern instance of the label is Shaltiel Abravanel, Atalia’s father. A lawyer and Arabist, he had spent nearly nine years in the leadership of the Zionist Executive and the Jewish Agency. He argued that Jews and Arabs should share the home being built in the land, and sought compromise rather than partition and a separate Jewish state. As his views diverged from those of his colleagues, he increasingly spoke against violence and for dialogue with the neighboring people. Some called him the friend of the Arabs, the muezzin, or the devout Muslim; others called him a traitor. He nevertheless continued to identify as a Zionist, regarding himself as one of the few not intoxicated by nationalism.

A newspaper discovery gives the conflict a precise institutional form. In a December 21, 1947, issue of Davar, Shmuel finds a brief report that Abravanel had been removed the day before from his posts in the Zionist Executive and the Jewish Agency because of disagreements with colleagues. Abravanel declined to explain his dismissal to the reporter. The account nevertheless states his warning: the path chosen by David Ben-Gurion and others would lead to a bloody war between the two peoples, with no clear victor, and would wager the lives of six hundred thousand Jews in the land. He believed a historical compromise remained possible. The small, low-placed notice records not only a political rupture but also the institution’s power to make dissent legible as expulsion.

Wald later supplies the argument behind that rupture. After a meeting with Ben-Gurion and David Remez, Abravanel reportedly described Ben-Gurion as a false messiah who would bring a seemingly endless bloodshed upon Jews and Arabs. His deeper warning concerned the way liberation can reproduce domination: the oppressed, he argued, may dream of becoming the oppressors of those who oppressed them. Wald, by contrast, praises Ben-Gurion as a clear-sighted leader who understood that the Arabs would not willingly accept Jewish presence or share territory and power, and that Jews could not depend on outside protection. The disagreement is not presented as a simple division between courage and cowardice. It pits Abravanel’s attempt to imagine shared political life against Wald’s conviction that survival requires self-reliance and force.

Wald’s own position is further complicated by the aftermath. He admits that in the earlier debate he sided with Ben-Gurion’s hard realism rather than Abravanel’s ideas. After Mija’s death, however, the two men ceased arguing. Wald remembers the question Abravanel never asked him—whether it had been worth it—as a continuing source of pain. His later defense of Ben-Gurion’s political judgment coexists with the silence left by the cost of that judgment; the novel lets neither political certainty nor belated regret erase the other.

Family loss, isolation, and the burden of silence

Shaltiel’s dissent acquires its most intimate cost in the story of his grandson Mija. Gershom Wald explains that Mija had a kidney removed at nine, then deceived the recruitment committee in 1947 and went to fight despite warnings from Atalia and Shaltiel. Wald recognizes his own part in the decision: he had taught his son to honor earlier Jewish fighters and had helped give voice to the national call to arms. Mija was killed in the Jerusalem mountains on April 2. Wald’s account makes the language of sacrifice personal, showing how the convictions that make a war seem necessary can also help send a particular child into it.

After Mija’s death, Shaltiel’s political isolation becomes a domestic condition. Abravanel, Wald, and Atalia lived together for roughly two years, described as being alone together like occupants of a submarine. Wald and Abravanel had once disputed everything, but the loss silenced them. Atalia recalls that Shaltiel died two years later, alone in the other room, despised and defamed. His Arab friends had been separated from him by new borders or driven from their homes in Katamon, Abu Tor, and Baka; he had no Jewish friends left because he was regarded as a traitor. The political label therefore names more than disagreement: it accompanies severed friendships, displacement, and the loss of an audience.

After the war, Abravanel withdrew from public life, stopped answering letters and the telephone, and spoke at home of his disappointment in a state he considered militaristic and consumed by triumphal nationalism. His earlier silence after resigning had already expressed his belief that he had no interlocutor. The novel links that silence to political defeat without reducing it to mere stubbornness: the ideas he had voiced about a shared home and alternatives to violence had little place in the wartime consensus, while the people and relationships that might have sustained them were disappearing.

Reclaiming the word

Shmuel eventually argues that being called a traitor can mark the person who is prepared to change, while those who fear change treat departure from the accepted line as betrayal. He draws on a series of historical examples: figures condemned for challenging prevailing loyalties, including Jeremiah, Elisha Ben Abuyah, Abraham Lincoln, and political actors accused of treason for breaking with their former side. He also notes that even Ben-Gurion had been called a traitor by some after accepting the division of the land into Jewish and Arab states. The examples do not make all accusations equivalent; they show instead that the name can be applied to opposing positions as political circumstances shift.

That argument returns the novel to Abravanel. Shmuel recognizes that the man’s dream of a shared home was the reason some called him a traitor. In this reframing, the word does not prove that the accused has betrayed a community; it can reveal the community’s limits, and the fear with which it guards them. Yet the novel does not make dissent costless or automatically correct. Abravanel’s isolation, Mija’s death, Wald’s complicity and grief, and the grandfather killed by the resistance remain distinct consequences, not interchangeable illustrations. Together, they make betrayal a question about the competing claims of family, religion, political survival, and moral responsibility—and about who is left to speak when a community has decided that its dissenter is beyond the pale.