Israeli War of Independence

The Israeli War of Independence is presented as both a war for Jewish survival and a human catastrophe whose consequences outlast its battles. Recalled through the arguments and bereavements of Gershom Wald, Atalia, and Shmuel Ash, it exposes the collision between Shaltiel Abravanel’s proposed Jewish-Arab coexistence and the conviction, associated with David Ben-Gurion, that Jews could rely only on their own strength. The war brings that political conflict into the home: Mija dies on a Jerusalem hillside, Abravanel’s family falls silent, and Haifa’s Arab population flees amid fear and violence.

Background and Competing Visions

Before the fighting, Abravanel argued that the end of the British Mandate need not lead to a separate Jewish state. He proposed a Jewish-Arab condominium or shared political arrangement, and later favored an international mandate or a provisional government under American tutelage. His plan allowed for the immigration of about 100,000 Holocaust survivors, after which Jewish immigration would pause so that Arabs might gradually come to terms with the Jewish presence. In his analysis, Arab opposition arose not simply from the existing Zionist settlements but from fear that Jewish advantages in education, technology, ingenuity, and motivation would eventually enable control of the whole territory.

Abravanel warned that declaring an independent Jewish state would trigger a bloody war against the Arab world, perhaps the wider Muslim world. Even if the Jews won one or several rounds, he predicted, each victory would intensify Arab fear and prolong the conflict across generations. In his view, statehood risked turning Jewish self-determination into a recurring struggle against the people already living in the land. Wald remembers that Abravanel delivered these warnings in the house’s library, often standing before a landscape painting that included Galilean hills, Jerusalem, desert, Arab villages, and Jewish agricultural settlements. The breadth of the landscape embodied his hope that Jewish and Arab life could belong within one shared political horizon.

That vision made Abravanel an increasingly isolated dissenter. In 1947, when he opposed the United Nations partition plan and Jewish independence, the leadership gave him two hours to choose between resignation and expulsion. He resigned, then kept silent rather than appeal to the public. Earlier, he had requested permission to present a minority position to the United Nations committee investigating Palestine’s future; the Jewish Agency rejected the request, insisting that the movement speak with one voice. Abravanel considered defying the decision but ultimately accepted its discipline. His private proposal thus lacked not only political support but a public platform.

The War Enters the Household

Wald’s recollection connects the political dispute to the decision of his only son, Mija, to fight. Mija had lost a kidney to illness at the age of nine. In late 1947 he deceived the recruiting committee and enlisted despite Atalia’s pleas that he stay away from the fighting and Abravanel’s demand that he promise not to fight. Abravanel believed young people on both sides should lay down their arms. He continued visiting Arab friends at least twice a week even after roadblocks, sniper fire, and bloodshed began. Neighbors called him the Arab’s friend, the Muezzin, the Muslim devotee, and, by some, a traitor.

Wald acknowledges that he had argued against Abravanel with conviction. He had taught Mija to admire earlier Jewish defenders and had helped form the patriotic voice that called young people to fight. In retrospect, he fears that his own exhortations helped send his son to war. Mija trained with a weapon in the woods of Tel Arza, while Wald, like many people around him, understood the conflict as a sacred war and believed that the Jews had no alternative but to defend themselves. He later recognizes the terrible difference between knowing that a war may be necessary and imagining that one’s own son might die in it.

The family’s loss silenced the political argument. Wald says that he and Abravanel never again debated as they had before Mija’s death. The tragedy seemed to knot their throats and extinguish every argument; Wald, who needs to talk, suffered from the silence, while Abravanel could inhabit it. Their disagreement did not resolve into agreement. Rather, grief made the dispute impossible to continue, leaving the household with both positions and no living conversation between them.

Mija’s Death and Its Aftermath

Mija was thirty-seven when he was sent to escort a convoy heading toward Jerusalem. On April 2, 1948, the convoy entered a winding road in a deep ravine where Arab fighters fired from the surrounding heights. As darkness approached, some members of the convoy left their armored vehicles to clear a stone barrier, while others—including Mija—climbed the hills to attack sniper positions with homemade grenades. The assault failed. The fighters withdrew at night carrying dead and wounded men, but Mija was missing when the convoy neared Jerusalem.

At dawn, a platoon searched the slopes. Mija’s friends, most of them ten or fifteen years younger, found him among the rocks. Atalia recounts the brutality of the discovery: he had been killed, partly stripped, and mutilated. The precise sequence of the injuries remained unknown, a question she says was left permanently to her imagination. The account had reached her not directly from the military but through a diary delivered about a year later, after one of Mija’s companions died in a workplace accident in Galilee. She learned of the circumstances in fewer than ten words. The scant record could not settle what had happened; instead, it gave her a recurring image that returned day and night.

The loss reshaped the lives of those left behind. Atalia stayed in the house with Wald and Abravanel, caring for both men while working several hours a day at a real-estate office on Straus Street. Wald describes himself as already dead, a man who continued to speak after losing his only son. During his account, his body is seized by a coughing fit so severe that he beats his head against the wall. His physical distress gives the remembered war a present-tense force: the battle is over, but grief continues to injure the living.

Abravanel died two years after Mija, alone in the house. Atalia found him in the kitchen after his head had fallen onto his coffee cup, spilling coffee over the table, his clothes, and the floor; the glass in his spectacles had broken. His Arab friends had been separated from him by new borders or driven from their homes, while his Jewish friends regarded him as a traitor. For roughly two years after Mija’s death, Atalia, Wald, and Abravanel lived together in what she compares to a submarine, cut off from others. Mija’s death had already ended their arguments; Abravanel’s death left the household’s political and personal losses bound together.

Displacement and Contested Responsibility

Shmuel’s account of Haifa recalls an earlier intimacy between Jewish and Arab neighbors that gave way to escalating violence. As a child, he saw Arab land traders visit his father’s cartography office in Hadar HaCarmel, where they talked at length with his father and his partner. Their families exchanged hospitality, food, coffee, and conversation; the visitors spoke of the sea breeze and olive harvests, and of how politics brought misfortune. That memory does not erase the later conflict. It makes the transformation from ordinary social relations to communal fear more stark.

In Haifa, attacks on Jewish buses were followed by bloody Jewish reprisals in nearby villages. Arab workers at the refineries were massacred; Jewish and Arab snipers took positions on rooftops behind sandbags, and fortified checkpoints divided neighborhoods. In April 1948, about a month before the British withdrawal, tens of thousands of Arabs boarded ships and fishing boats and fled to Lebanon. Jewish leaders issued appeals asking the remaining Arab population to stay, but panic had already taken hold. Rumors that Jews intended to exterminate the Arabs, reinforced by news of the massacre at Deir Yassin across the hill from the house, helped make the city seem perilous. Much of Haifa’s Arab population was gone almost overnight.

The novel does not present the flight from Haifa as the whole story of displacement. Shmuel states that in Lod and elsewhere Arabs were not asked to stay but were killed and expelled. Wald, in contrast, describes the war as a total struggle between populations and invokes the displacement of populations in other civil wars as a recurring feature of such conflicts. He also recalls the argument that the Arabs would not have accepted Jewish presence even if Jews had relinquished statehood. These claims do not make the accounts identical: the narrative places fear, expulsion, and competing explanations beside one another rather than allowing one general account of wartime necessity to cover every case.

Wald still walks through Haifa’s Arab neighborhoods, where Jewish immigrants now live, and through lanes where thousands of Arabs who remained continue to reside. He wonders whether events had to unfold as they did. His father insists there was no escape from a war of life and death; Wald’s mother blames the British for making conflicting promises and encouraging one people against another. Shmuel says that his conversations with Wald have taught him to notice cracks in the accounts he once accepted. The question of the war’s necessity remains unresolved, but the possibility of doubt marks a change in how he understands inherited political certainty.

Memory, Survival, and Political Judgment

The war leaves the household divided between two interpretations of Jewish survival. Wald continues to regard Ben-Gurion as a great leader who understood that Arab acceptance could not be won through goodwill alone and that no outside power would defend the Jews when they were attacked. He says that Ben-Gurion had reached this judgment after conversations with Arab leaders, including friends of Abravanel. For Wald, the struggle confirmed the need for self-reliance: Mija practiced with a weapon because, in Wald’s retrospective account, they all knew that what the Jews did not secure for themselves would not be given to them.

Yet Wald’s admiration cannot undo the private cost of that conviction. After Mija’s death, he imagines Abravanel silently asking whether the sacrifice had been worthwhile. Abravanel never asked him the question, but Wald says it wounded him as if a knife were repeatedly driven into his throat. They ceased speaking about the argument and limited their exchanges to household matters. The war therefore remains present not only in memorialized battles or political doctrine, but in an unasked question that neither man could answer without reopening their grief.

For Abravanel, the establishment of a Jewish state appeared to confirm the danger he had foreseen. He believed the new state had become militaristic, intoxicated by victory, and consumed by empty nationalist exaltation; he regarded Ben-Gurion as a messianic figure and his former colleagues as timid followers. After resigning, he withdrew from public life, stopped answering letters and telephone calls, and wrote in private without leaving any papers behind. His isolation was both political and domestic: the war separated him from his Arab friends, while the deaths and silences within the house foreclosed the debate through which his opposition might once have been heard.

The novel’s account keeps the political and personal scales in tension. Abravanel’s warnings about a generational conflict, the loss of Arab homes, Ben-Gurion’s argument for Jewish self-defense, and Mija’s death are not interchangeable claims; together, they show how the war turned political predictions into lived consequences without removing the disagreement over responsibility or necessity. Its ending in the remembered household is not reconciliation but persistence: survivors continue to care for one another, revisit the same choices, and carry a war whose battles ended while its arguments and grief remained.