Is death in war in vain

The question of whether deaths in war are futile becomes an intimate and political dispute: the language that gives national sacrifice meaning is set against the grief of those who cannot accept that meaning. Gershom Wald’s son Mija died at Bab al-Wad in 1948, while Shaltiel Abravanel argued that all deaths—not only those in war—were entirely in vain. Their incompatible accounts turn remembrance into a struggle over what the living are entitled to say about the dead.

Grief and the death of Mija

Gershom’s account begins with the family loss behind his argument. Mija was an orphan who grew up in the Wald household without a mother, who died when he was six. Gershom raised him alone and, in his own words, led him to sacrifice. The date and place remain fixed in his telling: April 2, 1948, in the fighting at Bab al-Wad, on the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road.

Mija had lost a kidney to illness at nine. In late 1947, he deceived the recruitment committee and enlisted despite Atalia’s urging that he stay away from the fighting. Shaltiel, too, had made him promise not to fight. The prohibition failed against the force of the period’s expectations—and against the martial ideals Gershom himself had helped instill. He had taught Mija to remember earlier Jewish defenders and fighters; the young people around them repeated the words, “A voice called me and I went.” Gershom recognizes that he had been part of that call. His grief therefore carries not only the pain of losing his only son, but the burden of having helped send him toward the war.

The claim that the dead did not die in vain

Gershom recalls the familiar public reassurance that those killed in the 1948 war had not died in vain. He had repeated it himself, as others did, and invokes Natan Alterman’s line that perhaps, once in a thousand years, death might have meaning. Yet the words have become increasingly difficult for him to repeat: Shaltiel’s spirit, he says, catches in his throat.

Shaltiel’s opposing claim is wider and more disturbing than a denial of patriotic consolation. In his view, everyone who dies has died entirely in vain: the war dead, those killed in accidents or by illness, and those who die of old age, from the first dead to the last. The reach of the claim refuses to reserve meaning for deaths made useful by a national cause. It also denies Gershom an easy distinction between sacrifice and ordinary mortality.

The dispute is not presented as a calm philosophical exchange. Gershom is physically devastated by the recollection, his face tightening with pain as he looks at Shmuel. He admits that he has begun to feel affection for the young man, and Shmuel responds by staying close and trying to bear some portion of a grief he knows cannot simply be diverted. The scene makes the argument inseparable from the acts of remembering and listening through which it is passed on.

A political history of competing futures

Shaltiel’s refusal of consoling national history is rooted in his political opposition to a state organized around Jewish-Arab separation. According to Atalia, his views formed over time, under the pressure of the Arab revolt, Hitler, resistance and reprisals, British executions, and conversations with Arab friends. He concluded that there was room for both communities and that they might live alongside or within one another without a state framework that made one community a threat to the other.

That vision collided with the political course taken in 1947. Shaltiel opposed both the partition plan and Israel’s independence; after being given a choice between resignation and expulsion, he resigned. He then withdrew into silence. His isolation matters to the question of futile death because his warning was not simply that war kills, but that the political arrangements pursued in its name might make the promised meaning of sacrifice impossible to sustain.

Atalia gives that warning its bitter historical setting: Jews and Arabs alike have become, in her account, great refugee camps, while the Arabs live with defeat and the Jews with fear of vengeance. She points to the hatred and claims of righteousness on both sides, to cemeteries across the land, and to the ruins of hundreds of villages erased from the map. The public language of necessary sacrifice thus confronts consequences that cannot be contained within a single national narrative.

Memory against inevitability

Shmuel’s recollection of Haifa complicates any account in which the war’s outcome appears inevitable. As a child, he had absorbed the conviction that Jews were righteous and outnumbered, while Arabs intended to destroy or expel them. He also remembers a different, earlier texture of contact: Arab merchants visiting his father’s cartography office, family hospitality, and conversations in which politics seemed an avoidable source of calamity. That coexistence gave way to attacks, reprisals, killings, armed positions between neighborhoods, and the mass flight of Arab residents from Haifa in April 1948. Jewish leaders appealed to the population to remain, but panic and rumors of a massacre like Deir Yassin had already taken hold; most of Haifa’s Arab population left for Lebanon.

Shmuel still walks through Haifa’s Arab neighborhoods and wonders whether what happened had to happen. Gershom answers that the war was total, a struggle between populations in which one side’s defeat seemed to mean annihilation; he compares the displacement to other population transfers. Shmuel also remembers his mother blaming the British, who had promised the land twice and set one people against another. These explanations compete rather than settle the memory. Shmuel says that conversations with Gershom have taught him to notice the cracks in received accounts, leaving him, in his own description, a café revolutionary rather than a true revolutionary.

For Gershom, the loss never becomes a completed past. He says that for more than ten years he has not slept through the nights: night after night, Mija is slaughtered again among the rocks on the slope of the pine forest. The repeated date and place of death, the repeated public assurances, and Shaltiel’s unyielding counterclaim keep the question open. The novel offers no replacement slogan that resolves the contradiction; instead, it shows how grief, political memory, and the histories of both communities make any confident declaration that the dead died meaningfully difficult to maintain.