Postwar displacement of Arab residents

Postwar displacement of Arab residents is one of the novel’s defining consequences of the 1948 war: hundreds of thousands of Arabs are described as having been driven from their homes, while Arab friends and neighbors of Shaltiel Abravanel are left beyond new borders or displaced from Jerusalem neighborhoods. The losses expose the human cost of state-building and give force to Abravanel’s rejected effort to imagine a shared Jewish-Arab community. In the novel, displacement is not a concluded episode but part of the continuing landscape of defeat, exile, resentment, and political estrangement.

War and the rejected alternative

Abravanel’s opposition to partition and to establishing an independent Jewish state grows from his conviction that the land could accommodate both communities. He envisioned Jews and Arabs living alongside or within one another, without a state framework that made one community’s future a threat to the other. By 1947, he publicly opposed the United Nations partition plan and Israel’s independence; his colleagues gave him two hours to resign or be expelled from the Zionist institutions in which he had served. In the newspaper account Shmuel later finds, Abravanel warns that the chosen course risks a bloody war between the two peoples and argues that a historical compromise remains possible.

The competing national project is described through its promised emblems—independence, flags, uniforms, currency, and public ceremony—and its human cost. Atalia charges that the pursuit of a Jewish state brought rivers of innocent blood, sacrificed a generation, and expelled hundreds of thousands of Arabs from their homes. Her indictment makes displacement inseparable from the political achievement celebrated by others: independence is not narrated as an uncomplicated resolution, but as a victory accompanied by dispossession.

Homes lost and communities divided

Atalia describes the postwar country as containing two vast refugee communities: Jews and Arabs alike. She sets the Arabs’ day-to-day experience of defeat against the Jews’ continuing fear of revenge, showing how displacement persists in the form of mutual hostility rather than ending with the fighting. The land bears the consequences in ruined villages, hundreds of poor settlements erased from the map, and cemeteries spread across the country.

The personal history of Abravanel’s household gives that division a local shape. His Arab friends are on the far side of the new borders or have been expelled from their homes in Katamon, Abu Tor, and Baka. His political commitment to coexistence thus survives as a memory of relationships severed by war and borders. The former associates who might have sustained his proposal have become inaccessible, while Jewish friends have also abandoned him, treating him as a traitor.

Aftermath and political meaning

The novel links displacement to the hardening of national identities and to the aftermath of violence. Atalia recalls that Abravanel increasingly believed the two peoples were heading toward a collision in which only one would survive and the defeated would be unable to remain. Even as he continued to believe that Jews had a legitimate aspiration to build a home in the land, he concluded that it must be shared with Arabs. His position was increasingly ignored, then condemned when he opposed partition and statehood.

That history complicates the charge of treachery. Abravanel is labeled a traitor for objecting to the prevailing national course, although his opposition arises from a proposal for shared life rather than indifference to Jewish safety. The novel places that stigma beside the consequences he anticipated: war, displacement, and the destruction of the possibility of a common political home. Displacement therefore serves as both a material consequence of the conflict and a measure of the failure to make room for the alternative Abravanel defended.