Mount Scopus, also called Har Hatzofim, is the location of the Hebrew University campus whose wartime isolation gives the novel a concrete counterpart to its debates about national ambition and political choice. The university’s displacement during the war and the obstruction of a convoy to the besieged campus recur alongside arguments about the conflict’s consequences and the death of Mija Wald.

Setting and wartime isolation

During the war, the Hebrew University had to leave its Mount Scopus seat. In a later conversation, Shmuel and Gershom Wald discuss the Jordanian authorities in East Jerusalem preventing an Israeli convoy from reaching the university on the besieged mountain. The campus’s separation from the rest of the city makes access itself a wartime issue: an institution associated with study and ordinary civic life is caught within the same division and insecurity as Jerusalem around it.

The conflict’s human stakes

Mount Scopus is also part of the landscape through which the novel recalls Mija’s death. Gershom tells Shmuel that his only son was killed in the Jerusalem mountains on the night of April 2. Mija’s fate gives the broader discussion of war a private and lasting cost, particularly for Gershom, who returns to the loss while caring for and speaking with Shmuel.

Political arguments attached to the place

The conversations around the university and the mountain frame disagreement about how the Jewish community should respond to the surrounding conflict. Shmuel criticizes David Ben-Gurion’s leadership and warns that, without peace, the Arabs may eventually defeat Israel; he also refers to the humiliation of 1948 and later political actions involving Britain and France. Gershom, by contrast, defends Ben-Gurion’s assessment that the Jewish community could not rely on Arab acceptance or outside protection and would have to secure for itself what it could not expect to receive freely. Mount Scopus thus belongs not only to the geography of a besieged city but to the novel’s contest between competing judgments about security, force, and the possibility of coexistence.