Israel is at once the setting of a new Jewish political reality and the object of a profound dispute about what that reality should mean. The novel places arguments about statehood beside memories of war, family loss, and the land’s many communities. Its characters do not agree on whether a Jewish state offers security or entrenches conflict; their competing accounts make Israel a lived place and a contested historical project.

Land, state, and belonging

In Gershom Wald’s evening conversations with Shmuel Ash, Israel’s political future enters the room through radio bulletins and the newspaper Davar. Wald praises David Ben-Gurion as a leader of unusual breadth, especially for understanding the danger in imagining the Jewish people as separate from other nations. His admiration is nevertheless qualified by his awareness that Israel’s founding has not resolved the question of Jewish belonging or the tensions between national independence and life among other peoples.

Wald describes a contradiction in the idea of a Jewish state through the words he attributes to Hayim Weizmann: a state would cease to be Jewish, while a Jewish state would fail to be a state. He applies this unease not only to the country’s institutions but also to the people living there. The “new Jew” in Eretz Israel, he argues, is not the powerful and sinister figure of Christian antisemitic imagination, but a person marked by fear, suspicion, and vulnerability. The gap between hostile myth and actual human weakness makes Israel a place where inherited accusations and modern national identity collide.

Competing accounts of the conflict

The novel gives the dispute over Israel’s founding a pointed political form in the disagreement between Shmuel and Wald. Shmuel argues that the Sinai campaign tied Israel to France and Britain, colonial powers he considered to be in decline, and deepened Arab hostility by making Israel appear to be an instrument of imperialism. Wald answers that Arab hostility predated the campaign. Neither man allows the argument to end there: Shmuel presses the question of why Arabs would welcome newcomers who took their land, fields, villages, cities, ancestral graves, and children’s inheritance.

Shmuel’s account challenges a national narrative in which Jewish settlement is described only as rebuilding and reclaiming an ancestral inheritance. He asks the listener to consider the experience of the people already living in the country, confronted by a large arrival from distant places claiming the land on the authority of sacred books. The argument does not erase Jewish historical ties; it makes those ties answerable to the material consequences of settlement and political power. The conflict is thus presented not as an abstract clash of loyalties but as a dispute over land, memory, and whose account of belonging is heard.

Wald’s recollections of Shaltiel Abravanel supply an alternative political course. In 1947, Abravanel asked to appear before the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine to present an individual position on the Jewish-Arab conflict and propose a path to peace. The Jewish Agency leadership rejected his request, insisting that the Agency and the Zionist Executive speak with one voice. Abravanel considered defying the decision but ultimately accepted the majority’s discipline, possibly because he had been warned that independent testimony would cost him his place in Jewish institutions. Shmuel later finds the report buried low on an inside page of Davar; he copies it and searches further, but finds no record of a public debate or appeal to either community. The obscure newspaper notice gives a concrete shape to the political dissent that the official demand for unity had left largely unrecorded.

Abravanel’s alternative and its limits

Abravanel opposed establishing an independent Jewish state after the end of the British Mandate. As Wald recalls it, he warned that such a declaration would bring a bloody war between Jews and the Arab world, perhaps the wider Muslim world, and that even military victories would deepen fear and prolong conflict across generations. He imagined a group of communities rather than a sovereign state, and called any state a predatory dinosaur. His vision rested on an intimate knowledge of Arab society: he spoke Arabic, spent long hours with Arab friends in cafés in the Old City, and maintained relationships with both Muslim and Christian Arabs.

That position placed Abravanel within Zionism but against what he regarded as its intoxication with nationalism. He called himself a Zionist and a follower of Ahad Ha’am, while arguing for a political arrangement that would not require a Jewish state. His proposal was not merely a private ideal. He tried to persuade Ben-Gurion and David Remez, and he continued to speak with Arab friends even as violence and roadblocks spread in 1947. Neighbors gave him names that marked him as an outsider, including “friend of the Arabs” and “traitor,” although he persisted in seeing his position as an authentic form of Zionism.

The novel also shows the limits and human costs of that dissent. Wald admits that he sided with Ben-Gurion’s hard realism rather than Abravanel’s proposals. Abravanel’s friends among the Arabs were later on the other side of the new borders or displaced from their homes in Katamon, Abu Tor, and Baka; he was left without Jewish friends and was condemned as a traitor. His political isolation is therefore not treated as a simple vindication of his foresight. It is bound to a personal and national catastrophe in which the possibility of shared life recedes as communities are separated and displaced.

War, memory, and the people left behind

Israel’s founding and its conflict with the Arabs are carried into the novel through intimate testimony as well as political argument. Atalia recalls that Mija, her husband and Wald’s only son, had lost a kidney as a child. Despite her objections and Shaltiel’s promise that he would not fight, Mija evaded the recruitment committee and went to war. Atalia’s account connects his decision to a culture that trained the young for combat: Wald remembers that he himself had helped teach Mija to answer the call to fight, alongside teachers, peers, and the wider community. In retrospect, the rhetoric of duty implicates those who helped make the sacrifice seem necessary.

Mija died during a convoy operation on the road to Jerusalem on April 2, 1948. After an attack on the convoy, his companions withdrew without realizing he was missing; a search party found him the next morning. The facts that Atalia can establish sit beside uncertainties that have remained with her. She says she learned the circumstances from a dead companion’s diary about a year later, not from those who had been with Mija. The delayed disclosure turns the event into a fracture within the family as well as a loss within the war.

After Mija’s death, Atalia, Wald, and Abravanel lived together in the house for about two years. Wald and Abravanel, once political opponents who argued continually, stopped arguing; the loss left them without words for their disagreement. Atalia cared for them while working at a real-estate office on Straus Street. Abravanel died alone in the kitchen, after his head fell onto his coffee and overturned it; the newspaper, spilled coffee, and broken glasses marked the ordinary setting of his death. Atalia’s memory joins national choices to a household diminished by bereavement, isolation, and the absence of the future family she and Mija might have had.

Israel as an unresolved question

The novel refuses to make either national realism or opposition to statehood into an uncomplicated answer. Wald can admire Ben-Gurion’s political capacity and still entertain Abravanel’s warnings; Shmuel can criticize Israeli policy while directly confronting the dispossession experienced by Arabs. The arguments preserve disagreement rather than smoothing it into consensus, and the characters’ positions are tested against concrete consequences: borders, displaced friends, the death of a son, and the silence left among those who survive.

Israel consequently signifies more than a state or a territory. It is the place where Jewish vulnerability, national power, historical attachment, and Arab dispossession become inseparable questions. The political debate reaches the reader through partial records and retrospective voices: a neglected newspaper item, Wald’s recollections, and Atalia’s account of what she learned too late. That structure keeps the country’s history open to scrutiny, showing how official unity can obscure dissent and how the costs of a national decision continue within private lives.