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Summary
Chapter Ten
A tired Barak heads home after securing a clandestine arms shipment. In Naples, he comes up with a ruse to stop a ship full of weapons for the Syrian army. Israelis get on board the ship and pirate the weapons.
Chapter Eleven
Avidan asks Ari to report to the Tel Aviv headquarters of the Israeli army. He asks Ari to get rid of Kawukji and then take Abu Yesha because it has become a base for Arab forces. Ari knows Avidan is right, but he is saddened because the people of Abu Yesha are friends. Following orders, Ari takes Fort Esther and two villages. He then sends a truce team to warn Abu Yesha. A small band of people led by Taha stay to fight. David takes over for Ari so he doesn’t have to kill Taha. The fighting has changed now that the Israelis are armed. After hours, the last eight Arab men are killed, including Taha.
Chapter Twelve
David has volunteered for a mission in his home city of Jerusalem. Jordana is worried for him, but she keeps her feelings hidden. In Jerusalem, the Higher Arab Committee has called for a strike that would destroy the Israeli commercial center and block convoys between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. People in Jerusalem are beginning to starve.
When he arrives in Jerusalem, David tells the chief of operations his plan to unearth and rebuild an ancient road between the two cities. David’s superiors are skeptical, and then they get word that Jerusalem has surrendered. There is no Jewish nation without Jerusalem, so David is given the go-ahead to build his road.
Jordana moves in with Karen and Kitty during the reconstruction of Gan Dafna. Jordana misses David terribly. They get word that David went on a suicide mission to take Jerusalem and died. Like Ari, Jordana is never seen to shed a tear. She fasts for four days and four nights and returns to her work.
David’s road is finished a month after his death, and the siege of Jerusalem ends. This is the event that essentially ends the Israelis’ War of Liberation in victory.
Chapter Thirteen
Months of bloody fighting still follow. There is tension between the Maccabees and the Israeli army when a cargo plane full of arms purchased by America is landed by the Maccabees. The Provisional Government had informed the Maccabees that it would handle the arms. The failure to work with the government even in a free Israel is a blight on the Maccabees.
In the wake of broken truces, the Israelis win more victories against the Egyptians, Iraqis, Syrians, and Saudi Arabians, and the myth of unity between Arab countries is shattered as they all point fingers at one another. Barak is asked by the Israeli government to investigate the problem of Arab refuges. His findings fill hundreds of pages. In a summary, he explains how the Palestinian Arabs were coerced and confused by their leaders. They never truly wanted to fight for their homeland. Barak writes the Arab leaders are responsible for the refugee problem.
Analysis
During the raid on Abu Yesha, Ari stands on a mountainside watching from a distance the event that he had hoped to avoid. He is watching the destruction of a village he loves, but more than that, of a collective friendship between Jewish and Arab people that has endured great violence and turmoil and lasted a generation. The battle is particularly tragic because neither side wants to be fighting. Taha had wished to remain neutral but was pressed into reluctant acquiescence by Kassi, and later becomes bitter when Ari reacts violently to his request for Jordana. When Ari hears that everyone in the village is dead, including Taha, he is dazed and out of sorts. This is not just any village, and he does not exude his usual hardened confidence. Ari knows that the village must be completely destroyed so that the villagers will have no reason to return and insists on giving the official order to destroy the village as a way of taking responsibility for his failure to save Taha.
Like so many of her peers, Jordana will also know the pain of an acute loss during this war for Israeli freedom. Throughout the novel David has been zealous and idealistic. He is more sensitive than the rest of the hardened Palmach soldiers, and he often preaches to Ari about all the great miracles that took place in battle in the Old Testament. David’s philosophizing may seem superfluous to the Jewish cause, but the story of the Burma Road shows that could be further from the truth. David uses his knowledge of the land and of Jewish history to unearth the ancient road that will liberate the Jews’ most sacred city. This action is powerfully symbolic of the Jews’ secret to survival over the millennia. By preserving their history and their traditions, Jews have a wealth of knowledge to draw upon. It helps them survive in the ghettos. It inspires them to fight like their forebears. And it keeps the dream of Israel alive in their hearts through the millennia. David is the living embodiment of the Jewish people’s ability to survive and go on surviving for millennia to come.
Jordana is worried for David and her behavior suggests she foresees tragedy, foreshadow that David will not return safely from Jerusalem. However, Jordana is too disciplined to beg David not to go or even to tell him that she will miss him. As he carries out his mission, David cannot stand seeing the walls of the Old City, knowing it is now claimed by the enemy. He is taken over by an ancient hope that he will be part of a miracle and organizes an unauthorized suicide mission. Jordana’s intuition proves accurate when the young and idealistic David dies trying to save his beloved Jerusalem. Jordana handles this loss in the same way that Ari dealt with Dafna’s death. She isolates herself until she can return as if nothing has occurred.
When the cargo plane full of arms, ironically named Akiva, is landed by the Maccabees, it creates permanent bitterness. The rogue group is not disciplined enough to fall in line with the Israeli army, and their defiance leads to a lasting division between them and the rest of the national forces. This is the kind of division that Akiva created when he founded the Maccabees to begin with. The Maccabee ranks are full of people who do not want to be told what to do, revealing that Akiva was not unique in his stubbornness. Instead, many of his fellow Israelis, even in the younger generation, have been pushed to the point where they will not yield to any authority but their commander. The group began because Akiva’s pain and anger radicalized him, and the ranks are still full of people who hold the same anger after a lifetime of fighting for their freedom. In this scene, Akiva figuratively remains defiant and angry and is still pitting Jewish people against each other.
In his last project as a diplomat, Barak writes a summary about the Arab refugee problem following the War of Liberation. Throughout the novel, Uris has presented the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinian Arab people from the Jewish perspective. In keeping with this tone, Barak does not mince words about the refugee problem. He places the blame squarely on the Arab leaders themselves who ignored requests for peace and friendship and instead sought to destroy the Jewish people and the State of Israel. Barak references the massacre at the hands of the Maccabees at Neve Sadij, an event that no doubt has never stopped weighing on him, but he argues that it pales in comparison with the bloodshed perpetrated by the Arab people. Barak suggests that the refugees resettle in other areas of the Arab world, which has a sting of irony. Barak is essentially suggesting that the Arab people now be displaced from where they have lived for thousands of years, just as other countries have tried to relocate Jews throughout their history. Even though he berates Arab leaders, Barak shows great compassion for the refugees themselves. He believes they need an era of peace and rest and leaders who want this for them. Barak believes that a mutual friendship with a free Israel, that he personally toiled so long and hard to achieve, will bring the Arab people this needed peace.
