A silence fell between them. They watched the running lights of a fishing boat steaming slowly toward Tiberias.

“There’s something I need to ask you,” Gabriel said.

“You want to talk to me about Tochnit Dalet,” Shamron said. “About Beit Sayeed and Sumayriyya.”

“How did you know?”

“You’ve been wandering in the wilderness of Palestinian pain for a long time now. It’s only natural.”

He asked Shamron the same question he’d put to Eli Lavon a week earlier at Megiddo. Did we drive them out?

“Of course we did,” Shamron said, then hastily he added: “In a few places, under specific circumstances. And if you ask me, we should have driven more out. That was where we went wrong.”

“You can’t be serious, Ari.”

“Let me explain,” he said. “History dealt us a losing hand. In 1947, the United Nations decided to give us a scrap of land to found our new state. Remember, four-fifths of Mandatory Palestine had already been cut away to create the state of Transjordan. Eighty percent! Of the final twenty percent, the United Nations gave us half—ten percent of Mandatory Palestine, the Coastal Plain and the Negev. And still the Arabs said no. Imagine if they’d said yes. Imagine if they’d said yes in 1937, when the Peel Commission recommended partition. How many millions might we have saved? Your grandparents would still be alive. My parents and my sisters might still be alive. But what did the Arabs do? They said no, and they aligned themselves with Hitler and cheered our extermination.”

“Does that justify expelling them?”

“No, and that’s not the reason why we did it. They were expelled as a consequence of war, a war they initiated. The land the UN gave us contained five hundred thousand Jews and four hundred thousand Arabs. Those Arabs were a hostile force, committed to our destruction. We knew that the minute we declared our independence we were going to be the target of a pan-Arab military invasion. We had to prepare the battlefield. We couldn’t fight two wars at the same time. We couldn’t fight the Egyptians and the Jordanians with one hand while battling the Arabs of Beit Sayeed and Sumayriyya with the other. They had to go.”

Shamron could see that Gabriel remained unconvinced.

“Tell me something, Gabriel. Do you think that if the Arabs had won the war that there would be any Jewish refugees? Look at what happened in Hebron. They brought the Jews to the center of town and cut them down. They attacked a convoy of doctors and nurses heading up Mount Scopus and butchered them all. To make certain no one survived, they doused the vehicles with gasoline and set them alight. This was the nature of our enemy. Their goal was to kill us all, so we would never come back. And that remains their goal today. They want to kill us all.”