Abravanel’s Jewish-Arab co-governance proposal

Abravanel’s Jewish-Arab co-governance proposal is Shaltiel Abravanel’s attempt to reconcile Jewish aspirations for a home in the land with the rights and presence of its Arab inhabitants. Rather than accept an exclusively Jewish state or the partition of the country, he advocated a shared home and political arrangement for both peoples. The proposal’s significance lies in its collision with the nationalist course that prevailed: Abravanel’s effort to avert war was treated as disloyalty, and the political isolation that followed became part of the story of his family and of the word “traitor.”

The proposal and its historical setting

Shaltiel Abravanel had served for nearly nine years in the leadership of the Jewish Agency and the Zionist Executive. A lawyer and Arabist, he was familiar with Arabic from childhood and maintained friendships with both Muslim and Christian Arabs. His political position did not amount to rejecting a Jewish home in the land. He continued to believe Jewish aspirations were legitimate, but concluded that the home had to be shared with the Arabs who also lived there.

His doubts developed against the prospect of collision between the two peoples. He had once believed, as many Jews did, that a Jewish home could be built without displacing anyone or committing injustice. By the 1920s he had begun to question that belief; by the 1930s he thought the peoples were moving toward a bloody conflict in which one would ultimately be unable to remain. He continued for years to observe institutional discipline, occasionally urging dialogue and criticizing violent methods, but his appeals attracted little interest.

From dissent to removal

Abravanel’s position became explicit in the 1940s, when he voiced dissent in meetings of the Jewish Agency leadership and the Zionist Executive. In 1947 he opposed the United Nations partition plan and Israel’s independence, arguing for a historical compromise between the peoples instead. His colleagues gave him two hours to choose between resignation and expulsion; he resigned. A contemporary report in Davar stated that he believed the chosen course would lead to a bloody war whose victor was uncertain, with the lives of the 600,000 Jews in the land at stake. It also recorded his view that a compromise remained possible.

In a later account, Gershom Wald explained the practical shape of the proposal: as the British departed, Jews and Arabs might still reach an agreement to establish a condominium if the Jewish side relinquished the idea of a Jewish state. Wald admitted that he had sided with David Ben-Gurion’s hard-headed realism rather than Abravanel’s ideas. Shmuel Ash, by contrast, condemned Ben-Gurion’s later leadership as nationalist and sanctimonious, and warned that without peace the Arabs would eventually defeat the Jews. The disagreement is presented not as a dispute over whether conflict was serious, but over whether statehood and force could secure a future that accommodation might preserve.

The cost of dissent

The proposal brought Abravanel into conflict with the institutions in which he had served and with the prevailing national consensus. Some called him a traitor or thought he had lost his reason. After resigning, he said nothing publicly; he withdrew into resentment, convinced that he had no interlocutor and that, on the eve of statehood and during the war, no one would listen to his ideas. His Arab friends were later beyond the new borders or expelled from their homes in Katamon, Abu Tor, and Baka, while he had no remaining Jewish friends willing to stand by him as anything other than a traitor.

His political isolation deepened after the death of his grandson Mija in the 1948 war. Atalia recalled that Abravanel had urged the young people of both sides to put down their weapons and had continued visiting Arab friends even after violence and road blockades began. He had opposed the call to treat the war as sacred, yet Mija went to fight after having been raised amid the same national rhetoric of sacrifice. In the household afterward, Abravanel, Wald, and Atalia lived together in silence; Wald and Abravanel no longer argued. Abravanel died alone in the house two years later, his death recounted as the end of a man already cut off from public and political company.

Political meaning and the label of traitor

The novel sets Abravanel’s proposal against the conviction, voiced by Wald, that the Arabs would not willingly share territory or power and that Jewish survival depended on obtaining by their own efforts what would not be freely granted. Wald admired Ben-Gurion’s foresight, while also remembering Abravanel’s warning that oppressed people may dream of becoming oppressors themselves. The opposed positions give the proposal its unresolved stakes: whether security can be built through force and sovereignty, or whether those means reproduce the domination and violence they promise to escape.

The name “traitor” therefore marks a political judgment rather than a simple account of betrayal. Shmuel argues that people who change course are often branded traitors by those afraid of change, and cites Abravanel’s dream as the reason he was so named. Wald likewise connects the word to the Christian tradition surrounding Judas and to the suspicion directed at Jews as a group. Abravanel’s case links these meanings: his attempt to imagine a shared political future made him an outcast among his own, while the failure of that proposal leaves the possibility of coexistence present in the narrative as a serious alternative, not an achieved settlement.