British Mandate period

The British Mandate period frames the novel’s central collision between the drive for a Jewish state and the possibility of a shared political future for Jews and Arabs. Its history reaches the reader through belated, conflicting recollections: Shaltiel Abravanel’s dissent from the Zionist leadership, the war that killed Mija Wald, and Shmuel Ash’s memories of violence and mass flight in Haifa. The Mandate’s end is thus both a political threshold and a private catastrophe whose meanings remain disputed long afterward.

Political choices at the Mandate’s end

In 1947, Shaltiel Abravanel sought to present an individual position to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, which had been sent to consider Palestine’s future. He wanted to offer a different solution to the conflict between Jews and Arabs. The Jewish Agency leadership rejected his request, insisting that it and the Zionist Executive must speak to the committee with one voice. Abravanel considered appearing independently but ultimately submitted to the majority’s discipline, apparently after being warned that defiance would cost him his place in Jewish public institutions. Shmuel later finds a brief notice about the request in Davar; he finds no record of a public debate or an appeal to either community.

Abravanel’s opposition became explicit as the British withdrawal approached. He argued that establishing an independent Jewish state would bring a bloody war with the Arab world, one that Jewish victories could not finally settle. He favored a shared home for Jews and Arabs rather than an exclusive Jewish state. His position put him at odds with David Ben-Gurion, whom Gershom Wald recalls Abravanel condemning as a false messiah leading the country toward disastrous bloodshed. The dispute was not merely theoretical: Abravanel was forced to choose between resigning and expulsion, and his dissent left him politically isolated.

From political rupture to war

The coming conflict was understood by many as a struggle for survival. Wald recalls that he himself had defended the war as a sacred duty, helping to shape the culture in which young people were called to fight. Mija, his only son, had one kidney removed after an illness at the age of nine. Despite this, he deceived the recruitment committee late in 1947 and went to war. Atalia and Abravanel had both urged him not to fight; Abravanel opposed the war and believed young people on both sides should lay down their arms. Wald, by contrast, acknowledges that his own convictions helped send his son into battle.

On April 2, 1948, Mija was sent with a convoy traveling toward Jerusalem along the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road. At Bab al-Wad, Arab fighters fired on the convoy from the surrounding hills. Mija joined an assault on sniper positions with homemade grenades. The attack failed; after dark, the fighters withdrew carrying some of the dead and wounded, not all. The convoy reached Jerusalem before anyone realized Mija was missing. A search party found him the next morning on the hillside. Atalia’s account leaves uncertain whether he died while waiting for help or was discovered by Arab fighters after his companions retreated. She describes the mutilation of his body but insists that the sequence of the killing and mutilation can never be known. That uncertainty becomes part of the lasting violence of the event.

Haifa and the flight of its Arab residents

Shmuel’s recollection complicates a simple division between communities before the war. As a child in Haifa, he saw Arab customers visit his father’s cartography office in Hadar HaCarmel. His family was sometimes invited to their homes on Allenby Street, where hosts and guests shared food and conversation and spoke of politics as an unnecessary source of misfortune. That remembered ease is broken by attacks on Jewish buses, retaliatory raids by Jewish fighters on villages around the bay, and the murder of Jewish refinery workers by an Arab crowd. Jewish and Arab snipers took positions on rooftops, while fortified checkpoints divided the neighborhoods.

In April 1948, about a month before the British withdrawal, tens of thousands of Arabs left Haifa by boat for Lebanon. Jewish leaders in the city issued appeals asking them to stay, but panic and fear had taken hold. Shmuel recalls rumors that the Jews intended to exterminate the Arab population, fueled by reports of the massacre at Deir Yassin. He also acknowledges that in Lod and elsewhere Arabs were killed and expelled rather than asked to remain. The contrast between Haifa’s appeals and the expulsions elsewhere does not resolve the broader question of responsibility; it shows how the same unfolding war produced different actions and outcomes, and how flight itself was shaped by terror.

The Mandate’s aftermath in memory

Years later, Shmuel still walks through Haifa’s Arab neighborhoods, now largely occupied by Jewish immigrants, and wonders whether what happened had to happen. His father insists there was no alternative: a total war between populations meant whole communities would be displaced. Shmuel’s mother blames the British for making competing promises and encouraging conflict. Atalia remembers her father as a man out of step with his time, whether because his ideas came too early or too late. Their explanations coexist without reconciling the losses.

For Abravanel, the approaching end of the Mandate and the establishment of Israel marked the defeat of the shared future he had advocated. After Mija’s death, the household’s political disagreement gave way to silence: Wald and Abravanel stopped arguing, while Atalia cared for both men. Abravanel died alone two years later, after losing his Arab friends to displacement and his Jewish associates to political estrangement. Wald, meanwhile, could no longer repeat the public reassurance that those killed in the 1948 war had not died in vain; Abravanel’s conviction that every death was in vain lodged in his memory. The period persists in the novel not as a closed historical chapter but as an unresolved argument carried by bereavement, recollection, and competing accounts of what could have been avoided.