«Los estados nacionales son jaulas en el zoológico»

The comparison of national states to rows of cages in a zoo expresses Shaltiel Abravanel’s conviction that statehood divides human communities rather than securing their coexistence. Recalled by Atalia in a dispute with Shmuel, the image turns his political ideal into a bitter measure of the devastation that followed its rejection.

The image and its political meaning

Atalia says that states did not impress her father: he saw a world partitioned into hundreds of national states as “hileras e hileras de jaulas separadas en el zoológico.” The comparison makes borders resemble barriers separating creatures confined within an artificial order. For Abravanel, states were not a natural or mature answer to conflict, but an outdated, childish idea. His skepticism extended to every state, not only the proposed Jewish state.

The phrase is especially pointed because Abravanel himself spoke several languages, including Hebrew and Arabic, as well as Ladino, English, French, Turkish, and Greek. Though he did not know Yiddish, Atalia recalls that he used the Yiddish expression “Goyim naches” for the pleasure Gentiles took in states. The linguistic contrast underscores his distance from state-centered political assumptions while connecting the metaphor to a wider critique of a world organized into national enclosures.

An alternative to partition

Atalia traces her father’s thinking to the Arab revolt of 1936, Hitler, resistance, assassinations, reprisals by Jewish resistance groups, British hangings, and his many conversations with Arab friends. Those experiences led him to believe there was enough room for both communities and that they could live alongside one another, or within one another, without a state framework. He imagined a mixed community, or an arrangement of two communities in which neither threatened the other’s future.

This position did not mean that Abravanel lacked political involvement. He had been a Zionist and had served for several years in the Zionist Executive and the leadership of the Jewish Agency. Atalia’s account presents his anti-statism as a conclusion reached through conflict and encounter, rather than as a simple refusal to engage with political life.

The metaphor in the argument

The image enters a tense exchange about whether peaceful methods could have secured Jewish survival and whether the Arabs could have been persuaded to accept partition. Atalia condemns the national leadership around Ben-Gurion as dreamers who led their followers toward slaughter, massacre, deportation, and lasting hatred. Shmuel finds her words alarming, and the cage comparison prompts him to consider the opposing argument: where people behave like predators, perhaps separate cages are necessary. He holds back, remembering that Atalia is a war widow.

Atalia’s recollection complicates that exchange. She admits that Abravanel may have been naive, but asks whether the outcome of the policy pursued instead can be called preferable. In her account, Jews and Arabs alike have become vast refugee populations; Arabs live with the tragedy of defeat, while Jews live with fear of vengeance. The land bears cemeteries and the ruins of hundreds of villages erased from the map. Against this aftermath, the zoo-cage image is not merely a dismissal of states: it is a challenge to the claim that national separation resolved the danger between the communities.