Suez Crisis

The Suez Crisis enters the novel through a sustained argument between Shmuel Ash and Gershom Wald, rather than through a battlefield account. For Shmuel, Israel’s participation alongside France and Britain deepened Arab hostility and made Israel appear to be an instrument of Western imperialism; Wald counters that antagonism toward Israel predated the crisis. Their disagreement exposes a larger divide over national survival: whether security requires hard-headed force and strategic alliances, or whether such choices entrench the very conflict they are meant to contain.

The Crisis as a Political Dispute

Shmuel argues that the Sinai campaign tied Israel to two colonial powers he considers already in decline. In his view, this alignment did not make Israel safer or more accepted in the region. Instead, it reinforced the Arab perception that Israel was a foreign body acting for global imperial interests. Wald challenges the implied chronology: the Arabs, he says, had not been especially well disposed toward Israel even before the crisis. The exchange leaves no easy resolution, but makes clear that the crisis sharpened an older conflict rather than creating it.

Shmuel’s criticism is inseparable from his account of Arab dispossession. He asks why Arabs should welcome newcomers who took land, fields, villages, cities, ancestral graves, and the inheritance of their children. The Jewish account of return and reconstruction, he insists, cannot erase how immigration and state-building appeared to those already living there. His argument refuses to treat Arab opposition as a mere product of propaganda or foreign manipulation; it grounds that opposition in a history of loss.

Ben-Gurion and the Choice of Alignment

The argument turns on Ben-Gurion’s judgment. Shmuel says that the leader who may once have been a workers’ tribune now heads a nationalist state, invoking biblical language about restoration and fulfilled prophecy. He warns that without peace the Arabs may eventually defeat Israel, and that they will not forget either the defeat of 1948 or Israel’s later dealings with Britain and France. In this account, military success cannot settle the political consequences of the crisis.

Wald’s own judgments of Ben-Gurion are divided. He can praise him as an unmatched Jewish leader with unusually broad vision, particularly for understanding the dangers of being counted among the nations, while also condemning his abandonment of non-alignment. Wald considers Israel’s dependence on France and Britain a mistake: France, he observes, is moving toward civil war, while Britain is withdrawing the remnants of its empire. His image of Israel embarked with sinking ships makes the alliance seem not merely morally compromising but strategically precarious.

Shaltiel Abravanel’s Alternative

The crisis and its aftermath recall the earlier dispute between Ben-Gurion and Shaltiel Abravanel, Atalia’s father. Wald says that in 1948 Abravanel tried to persuade Ben-Gurion that an agreement with the Arabs remained possible as the British departed, including a joint Arab-Jewish condominium, if the Zionist leadership gave up the idea of a Jewish state. For this opposition, Abravanel was expelled from the Zionist Executive and the leadership of the Jewish Agency, which Wald describes as the unofficial Jewish government at the end of the Mandate period.

Wald admits that he took Ben-Gurion’s side in that debate, preferring what he calls his uncompromising realism to Abravanel’s supposedly unfounded ideas. Yet Abravanel’s alternative persists in the argument over the Suez Crisis: it represents a possible political accommodation against the logic of state power and military alignment. The crisis thus revives, rather than resolves, the question of whether realism means accepting permanent confrontation or recognizing the costs of refusing compromise.

War, Security, and the Limits of Force

Wald’s defense of Ben-Gurion rests on the conviction that the Arabs would not willingly accept Jewish presence or share territory and power, and that no outside force would come to Israel’s defense if the Arabs tried to drive it out. He connects this conclusion to Ben-Gurion’s conversations with Arab leaders in the 1930s and to the belief that what Jews could not secure for themselves would not be given freely. From this perspective, self-reliance and military readiness are necessities, not simply expressions of nationalism.

But the novel places that reasoning beside its human cost. In recalling his son Mija’s death in the Jerusalem mountains on the night of April 2, Wald confesses that he helped cultivate the voice that called young people to war. He had argued that the war was sacred, and taught Mija to honor earlier Jewish fighters; the wider society, too, taught the young to answer that call. Mija went to fight, while Wald remained, burdened by the knowledge that his own convictions formed part of the pressure behind his son’s decision. The contrast lends the political argument its grief: military realism may explain why leaders choose force, but it cannot make the losses that follow feel settled or justified.

The Crisis in the Novel’s Political Vision

The Suez Crisis is presented less as a self-contained episode than as a test of competing ideas about power, belonging, and political rescue. Shmuel sees Israel’s alignment with France and Britain as a deepening of Arab hostility; Wald sees the alliance as a strategic error, while retaining his belief that Ben-Gurion correctly understood the danger of relying on others. Their disagreement does not collapse into a simple opposition between realism and idealism: Wald’s admiration for Ben-Gurion coexists with his criticism of the alliance, and his regret over Mija coexists with his conviction that Israel faced an existential threat.

The debate also complicates the promise that a state or movement can redeem its people. Elsewhere in their conversations, Wald rejects the idea that political or religious movements can save the world without spilling blood. Against that skepticism, the competing claims about security and coexistence remain unresolved. The crisis gives those claims a concrete historical focus: an alliance intended to serve national interests may instead intensify regional estrangement, while the pursuit of survival can bind private grief to public policy.