Palestinian dispossession and refugeehood

Palestinian dispossession and refugeehood are a central moral and political challenge to the novel’s competing accounts of Israel’s foundation. Shmuel Ash insists that Arab resistance must be understood in light of the land and homes taken from its inhabitants; Gershom Wald and Shaltiel Abravanel, from different positions, expose the conflict between national self-preservation, historical claims, and the consequences of statehood.

The material meaning of dispossession

In conversation with Gershom Wald, Shmuel asks why Arabs should welcome people who arrived from elsewhere and took their land, fields, villages, cities, ancestral graves, and children’s inheritance. He rejects the assumption that Jewish intentions to rebuild the country or reclaim an ancestral inheritance would make the arrival acceptable to those already living there. His argument turns the abstract language of national restoration toward concrete losses: property, community, burial places, and the inheritance of a succeeding generation.

Shmuel also challenges the claim that sacred books could establish an exclusive right to the whole land. He asks Wald to consider whether any people would welcome the sudden arrival of hundreds of thousands of outsiders, later numbering in the millions, who asserted that religious texts promised the territory to them alone. The question makes the refugees’ predicament inseparable from the political justification for immigration and state-building: a narrative of return for one population can be experienced as invasion and dispossession by another.

Competing accounts of responsibility

Wald does not dismiss the history of Arab opposition, but he speaks from a position of hard political realism. He recalls that before the Sinai campaign Arabs had little reason to feel affection for Israel, and he recognizes the force of Shmuel’s question about why they should. Yet Wald believes that David Ben-Gurion understood that the Arabs would not willingly accept Jewish presence or share territory and power, and that Jewish security could not depend on outside protection. In Wald’s account, what the Jewish community did not secure for itself would not be given freely.

Shmuel condemns the cost and moral language of that realism. He describes Ben-Gurion’s later leadership as nationalist and sanctimonious, sustained by biblical rhetoric about restoration and prophecy. He warns that without peace the Arabs may eventually defeat Israel, and says they will not forget either the humiliating defeat of 1948 or Israel’s later dealings with Britain and France. His warning makes dispossession an ongoing political condition, not a grievance closed by military victory.

Wald’s remembered account of Shaltiel Abravanel gives the conflict an alternative political history. In 1948, Abravanel tried to persuade Ben-Gurion that Arabs and Jews might still reach an agreement as the British departed, through a condominium, if the idea of a Jewish state were relinquished. The attempt failed, and Abravanel was expelled from the Zionist Executive and the Jewish Agency’s leadership. His proposal marks a possible path toward shared political authority that was rejected as the state was being established.

Refugees, memory, and the novel’s argument

The refugee question remains present in the ordinary news Shmuel reads in Davar. A report attributes to opposition leader Menachem Begin the claim that the refugee problem has no solution within Israel’s borders but could have a positive and realistic solution in a Greater Israel, once the whole country was reunified. Set beside Shmuel’s account of lost land and inherited homes, the report shows how political programs can speak of resolving refugees’ circumstances while tying that resolution to territorial expansion.

The novel does not reduce the dispute to a simple opposition between compassion and indifference. Wald respects Ben-Gurion as a leader who recognized the limits of persuasion and the danger to Jewish survival, while Shmuel insists that such calculations cannot erase the Arab population’s grounds for resistance. Abravanel’s proposed condominium supplies a third position: an effort to preserve Jewish and Arab political presence without establishing a Jewish state. The unresolved contrast among these positions makes Palestinian dispossession and refugeehood a measure of the human and political cost concealed by narratives of national redemption.