Nakba

The Nakba enters the novel through a specific rupture in Haifa: in April 1948, as British withdrawal approached and communal violence intensified, tens of thousands of Arab residents fled by boat to Lebanon, leaving most of the city’s Arab population gone. The episode is recalled not as an uncontested military necessity but as a human and political catastrophe whose causes, alternatives, and consequences remain disputed.

Escalation and Flight

Shmuel Ash recalls a deterioration from earlier social contact into open violence. As a child in Haifa, he had known Arab customers visiting his father’s cartography office and family hospitality exchanged across communities. That memory gives way to attacks on Jewish buses, Jewish reprisals against nearby villages, the killing of Jewish refinery workers by an Arab crowd, and Jewish and Arab snipers taking positions on rooftops. Fortified checkpoints appeared between Arab and Jewish neighborhoods. The sequence turns familiar streets and neighboring districts into opposing fronts.

In April 1948, about a month before the British withdrawal, tens of thousands of Arabs from Haifa boarded fishing boats and other vessels and escaped to Lebanon. On the final day, Jewish leaders in Haifa issued appeals asking the population to stay, but the appeals did not stop the exodus. Shmuel’s account emphasizes the terror that had taken hold: rumors circulated that Jews intended to exterminate the Arabs, as they had, according to the rumor, at Deir Yassin, a village near the house where the conversation is recalled. By the time the flight was over, most of Haifa’s Arab population had left.

Responsibility and Competing Accounts

Shmuel does not present the departure as a simple consequence of Arab hostility. He describes Arabs as having lost land, fields, villages, cities, ancestral graves, and their children’s inheritance to the arrival of hundreds of thousands of newcomers, followed by millions. His account directly challenges the claim that the newcomers’ intention to rebuild the land could have made their arrival welcome to the people already living there.

The novel also sets the exodus within the broader violence of the 1948 war. Shmuel acknowledges that in Lod and elsewhere Arabs were killed and expelled, while in Haifa Jewish leaders called on residents to remain. The distinction does not erase the city’s fear or the wider pattern of dispossession; instead, it places both flight and expulsion within a conflict fought between populations as well as armies.

The Disputed Alternatives

Shaltiel Abravanel had argued against declaring an independent Jewish state and sought an arrangement that would allow Arabs and Jews to share power. He believed that the state’s establishment would provoke a bloody war with the Arab world, and possibly the Muslim world, that Jewish military victories could not settle. His proposals included international or American-supervised interim government, a limited wave of immigration for Holocaust survivors, and time for Arab communities to become accustomed to the Jewish presence. He had concluded, from conversations with Arab friends, that Arab fears centered on the prospect of Jewish expansion and dominance, not only on the existing Zionist settlements.

Those proposals were rejected. Shmuel’s account of the flight sits alongside Gershom Wald’s defense of David Ben-Gurion’s realism: Ben-Gurion believed Arabs would not willingly accept shared territory or power, and that Jewish security could not depend on outside protection. Wald nevertheless argues that force can keep an enemy from destroying Israel but cannot turn that enemy into an ally, a fanatic into a tolerant person, or a seeker of revenge into a friend. The arguments do not resolve the question of whether the war and displacement were avoidable; they make that question central to the novel’s retrospective account.

Memory and Aftermath

Years later, Shmuel still walks through Haifa’s Arab neighborhoods, including areas now occupied by Jewish immigrants and streets where thousands of Arabs remained. He wonders whether what happened had to happen. His father, by contrast, maintains that the war was unavoidable: a total conflict between two populations, in which whole communities were displaced, as in other wars. Shmuel also recalls his mother’s belief that British promises to both peoples helped bring about the disaster. These explanations coexist without becoming a settled verdict.

The memory of the exodus therefore unsettles the novel’s accounts of national survival. It preserves the scale of the departure, the fear surrounding it, and the people who remained, while refusing to reduce those facts to either a story of inevitable victory or a single explanation of blame. Through Shmuel’s later doubts and Abravanel’s defeated alternative, the Nakba becomes part of an enduring argument about whether political force can secure coexistence or merely postpone another catastrophe.