El traidor corre por el borde del campo

“El traidor corre por el borde del campo” is a line from Natan Alterman’s poem “El traidor,” cited at the novel’s opening and returned to through its debates about political dissent. Its image of the traitor running along the field’s edge gives a shape to the position of Shaltiel Abravanel: a man cast out by his political companions for opposing partition and statehood, whose rejected hope of a shared Jewish-Arab home survives in the novel as a challenge to the meanings of loyalty and betrayal.

The epigraph and its image

The phrase appears among the novel’s epigraphs, attributed to Natan Alterman’s “El traidor,” from Alegría de los pobres. The surrounding lines make the image harsher: the living do not cast the stone; the dead do. The traitor is thus placed at the margins, pursued not only by those who are present but by the authority of the dead and their inherited judgments. This opening frame prepares the reader for a story in which the word “traitor” is both an accusation and a contested interpretation.

A political label

Shaltiel Abravanel’s case gives the phrase its immediate political force. A report in Davar, dated December 21, 1947, says that Abravanel had been removed the previous day from his posts in the Zionist Executive and the Jewish Agency leadership because of disagreements with colleagues. He declined to explain his dismissal to the reporter. The newspaper nevertheless reported his view that the course chosen by David Ben-Gurion and others would lead inexorably to a bloody war between the two peoples, with the lives of 600,000 Jews in the Land of Israel at stake, and that a historic compromise remained possible.

Atalia later recounts how Abravanel’s convictions developed. He continued to believe Jews had a rightful aspiration to build a home in the Land of Israel, but came to believe that it must be shared with Arabs. He had called for dialogue and opposed violent methods while serving in Zionist institutions; by the 1940s, he sometimes voiced open dissent. In 1947 he opposed both the United Nations partition plan and Israel’s independence. His colleagues gave him two hours to choose between resigning and being expelled. After resigning, he said nothing publicly, withdrawing into resentment and silence. The political name “traitor” followed a concrete break with the institutions whose aims he had once served.

The word in the house

The accusation does not remain a newspaper label. In a conversation with Shmuel, a man cuts off his own explanation with the blunt judgment that Abravanel was a traitor. Atalia describes the cost behind that judgment: Abravanel’s Arab friends were left across the new borders or expelled from their homes in Katamon, Abu Tor, and Baka; he had no Jewish friends left. After Mija’s death, Atalia, Gershom Wald, and Abravanel lived together in isolation. Wald continued to oppose Abravanel’s arguments, but the two men never argued again; grief had silenced them. The political dispute is therefore bound to a private world narrowed by bereavement, estrangement, and the loss of companionship.

Abravanel’s death completes this image of isolation. Two years after Mija’s death, he died alone in the house. Atalia found him in the kitchen after he had sat down, as he did each evening, with coffee and a newspaper. His head had fallen onto the cup; the broken right lens of his glasses and spilled coffee lay across the table and floor. The scene does not resolve the political dispute. Instead, it makes the consequences of being condemned and cut off tangible in the ordinary objects of his final routine.

Reclaiming the name

Gershom Wald connects the accusation against Abravanel to a longer history of people called traitors for departing from accepted loyalties. In Shmuel’s presence, Wald recalls Shmuel’s argument that the label can become an honorific: those who dare to change are branded traitors by people who fear change. Shmuel invokes figures condemned for dissent or unconventional proposals, including Jeremiah, Elisha ben Abuyah, Abraham Lincoln, the German officers who tried to kill Hitler, and Theodor Herzl. He also notes that David Ben-Gurion himself had once been called a traitor by those who opposed his acceptance of partition. Abravanel, Shmuel concludes, had a beautiful dream and was called a traitor because of it.

Wald extends the word’s reach beyond Zionist politics. He observes that Judas’s name has become synonymous with traitor and, for millions of Christians, with Jew; he then recounts an encounter on a train in which a young nun reproached him for being Jewish after he said he was going to Jerusalem. The episode exposes how the accusation can attach not to an individual act but to an entire people. Wald urges Shmuel to finish his research and write about Judas and Jesus as seen by Jews, bringing the novel’s political argument about Abravanel into conversation with the religious history of betrayal.

The phrase’s continuing force

The poem’s marginal runner becomes a figure for dissenters whose position outside the accepted course allows them to question where that course leads. Abravanel’s warning of war and his hope for a shared home did not prevent the events he feared; the narrative presents his isolation and the deaths and displacement around him as the human setting in which his warning was dismissed. Yet it does not simply declare him vindicated: his convictions, the accusations against him, and the silence that followed remain part of a painful conflict between political allegiance and moral judgment.

By setting Alterman’s line at the threshold and returning to the label in conversation, memory, and history, the novel makes “traitor” a disputed name rather than a settled verdict. The phrase holds together the public expulsion of Abravanel, his private loneliness, Shmuel’s defense of change, and Wald’s account of anti-Jewish blame. Its force lies in the uncertainty it preserves: the person condemned as betrayer may be the one who sees the danger in the loyalties everyone else accepts.