Atalia told Shumuel about the death of Mihai and the past of Abravanel

Atalia Abravanel’s account to Shmuel Ash turns a family conversation into a counter-history of war and statehood. She recalls Mija’s death on a Jerusalem convoy route, the intimate horror of learning how his body was found, and the years of silence that followed between her father, Shaltiel Abravanel, and Gershom Wald. Her testimony also makes clear that this history is not a clean argument settled by evidence: Mija’s final moments remain unknown, while her father’s political record survives partly in newspaper notices, guarded archives, and papers he destroyed himself.

The Conversation and Its Stakes

Atalia begins by telling Shmuel that he and Gershom Wald have been talking about Mija. Shmuel apologizes, believing that his questions about the face in a portrait may have caused Wald pain; Atalia says there is no need to apologize. Wald talks at length, she explains, but usually says little. If Shmuel has somehow helped him finally speak about his son, that is no injury.

Shmuel asks how old Mija was when he died. Atalia hesitates before answering that he was thirty-seven, then describes a life that had promised distinction. Mija was a mathematician whose papers appeared in journals on mathematical logic, and he was expected to become the youngest professor in the history of the Hebrew University. Instead, in Atalia’s account, he was swept up in the fervor of the period and ran eagerly toward the fighting with the rest of the crowd.

The exchange is also a confrontation between Shmuel’s position and Atalia’s grief. He is a socialist, emotionally responsive, and quick to feel the force of new ideas; he is also physically vulnerable, with asthma and an enlarged heart. When Atalia condemns the demand for a Jewish state and the sacrifices made to establish it, he is stunned and answers cautiously that he does not fully agree. Her accusation is not an abstract debate for him to win: it comes from a woman whose husband died in the war and whose family has borne its consequences.

Mija’s Body and the Unfinished Account of His Death

Atalia recalls that Mija had only one kidney. His left kidney was removed when he was nine, at Hadassah Hospital on Haneviim Street, and he was medically disabled, like his father. Nevertheless, he falsified his medical certificate and his father’s signature to enlist. Atalia describes a chain of deception in which Mija deceived the authorities, his family was glad to be deceived, and even those who did the deceiving were themselves deceived. Her image of a whole flock of the deceived undermines any simple division between willing participants and innocent onlookers.

She then tells Shmuel what happened on April 2, 1948. Mija was sent with a convoy heading toward Jerusalem along a winding road in a deep ravine, where Arab fighters fired on the vehicles from the mountains on both sides. As darkness approached, the convoy commanders feared being trapped on the narrow road. Some fighters climbed down from the armored trucks to clear a stone barricade; others, including Mija, ran uphill with homemade hand grenades to attack the snipers’ positions.

The assault was repulsed. At nightfall, the fighters withdrew, carrying the dead and wounded they could recover. Only as the convoy neared Jerusalem did someone realize that Mija was missing. At dawn the following day, a platoon went back to search the slopes. His friends, most of them ten or fifteen years younger than he was, spent the morning combing the area before finding him.

Atalia cannot say what happened during the intervening night. Mija may have lain alone, dying, calling for help or trying to drag himself down toward the road; alternatively, the attackers may have found him after the others withdrew. She recounts the mutilation of his body, but the precise order of the violence remains unknown. That unresolved question, she says, was left to her imagination, giving her something to think about night after night. She learned the details not from a direct account but by chance: about a year after Mija’s death, one of his comrades died in a workplace accident in Galilee, and Atalia received his diary. In fewer than ten words, it recorded how Mija had been found among the rocks.

The diary’s brief note does not close the wound. Atalia says she has continued to see the image of Mija’s mutilated body every day, every night, every morning, whether her eyes are open or shut. The repeated return of that image gives the account its shape: a sparse written record becomes an unending private scene, while the gaps in the record leave the worst question permanently unresolved.

The Argument Over Statehood and Violence

Shmuel asks whether the Jews in 1948 had really had no choice, whether they had been between the sword and the wall. Atalia rejects his formulation: they were the sword and the wall. Her reversal refuses the language of unavoidable self-defense as a complete account of what happened. Shmuel’s question and her answer expose their different understandings of agency, necessity, and responsibility without resolving their disagreement.

Atalia indicts the costs of statehood as she sees them: rivers of innocent blood, a sacrificed generation, hundreds of thousands of Arabs driven from their homes, and survivors of Hitler sent directly from ships at the dock to the battlefields. Shmuel’s physical response is part of the scene’s tension. He has difficulty breathing but holds back from reaching for his inhaler; tears fill his eyes when he admits he was not a combat soldier because of his asthma and enlarged heart. The body that cannot fight nevertheless registers the accusation.

She explains that Shaltiel Abravanel’s position did not emerge all at once. The Arab Revolt of 1936, Hitler, resistance, killings, reprisals by Jewish resistance groups, British gallows, and his many conversations with Arab friends led him to believe that both communities could live in the land without a state framework. He imagined a mixed community, or two communities living alongside or within one another, with neither threatening the other’s future. In Atalia’s retelling, this was not a rejection of Zionism so much as a conviction that political life need not take the form of competing national states.

Her account sets that hope against the aftermath she sees around her: Jews and Arabs alike as great refugee camps, Arabs living with the tragedy of defeat and Jews with fear of vengeance. Both peoples, she says, are consumed by hatred, poison, revenge, and their own sense of being in the right. The land is covered with cemeteries and strewn with the ruins of hundreds of poor villages erased from the map. Her father’s vision appears not as a peace that history tested and disproved, but as a possibility foreclosed amid displacement, bloodshed, and mutual fear.

The Three Survivors and the Silence Afterward

After Mija’s death, Atalia says, she, Shaltiel, and Gershom lived together for about two years, alone in the house, like people in a submarine. She calls the two men the grandfathers of the child she would never have. Wald contradicted Abravanel on everything, yet after Mija’s death the two men never argued again. The loss seemed to tie a knot in their throats. Wald, who liked and needed to talk, suffered from the silence; Abravanel was comfortable in it. Atalia cared for both men and worked for a few hours each day at a real-estate office on Straus Street.

The silence did not mean that grief had ended. It became the household’s new condition: the arguments stopped, but so did the ordinary exchange through which disagreement might have been spoken. In telling Shmuel what happened, Atalia supplies the story that had gone untold inside the house. Her description makes the act of narration consequential without presenting it as a cure; the memory still returns to her, and the losses remain.

Shaltiel died alone in the kitchen two years after Mija. Atalia describes the habitual scene: after the evening news, he would sit with coffee and a newspaper. One day his head fell forward onto the cup, knocking it over; the right lens of his glasses shattered, and coffee ran across the table, his chest and legs, and onto the floor. Atalia found him with his face against the floral oilcloth, his forehead and hair in a pool of coffee. The homely repetition of his daily ritual ends not in a political reckoning but in a solitary death that resembles an interrupted afternoon.

Atalia’s judgment of her father is not simply political reverence. She accepted some of his views and considered him honest, courageous, and original, but says she never truly loved him except perhaps when she was very young. He did not want to be a father and did not know how to be one; she says he was not really a husband either. When she was four, he forgot her in the Mahane Yehuda market while following a debate with a priest from the market to Jaffa Street and then to the Street of the Abyssinians. He once hid her mother’s three pairs of shoes to keep her from leaving the house, and on another occasion locked her in the attic after finding her laughing with one of his Greek friends. Atalia remembers him as solitary, withdrawn, jealous, and fanatical, a man ill suited to family life.

A Political Legacy Preserved by Absence

Atalia’s memories of Mija and her father belong to a wider investigation Shmuel has undertaken into Abravanel’s political history. In the National Library’s reading room at Givat Ram, he searches nine monthly volumes of Davar, from June 1947 through February 1948. A small notice reveals that on June 18, 1947, Abravanel asked to appear before the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine to present an individual minority view of the Jewish-Arab conflict and offer an original route to peace. The Jewish Agency’s leadership rejected the request, insisting that it and the Zionist Executive must speak with one voice. Abravanel considered defying the decision but ultimately observed the majority’s discipline, possibly because he had been warned that an independent appearance would cost him his standing in the community’s leading institutions.

A second notice, dated December 21, reports that Abravanel had been removed from his positions in the Zionist Executive and the Jewish Agency after disagreements with his colleagues. It says he refused to answer the newspaper’s questions about his dismissal, while conveying his warning that the course chosen by Ben-Gurion and others would lead to a bloody war between the two peoples. He believed that a historic compromise was still possible. Yet Shmuel finds no public record of Abravanel debating the issue or appealing to either community. When he seeks the confidential minutes of the Jewish Agency’s leadership, he is told they will remain sealed for another forty years. The archive can show the dispute’s outline while withholding the debates that might explain it.

Gershom later tells Shmuel that Abravanel was forced to choose within twenty-four hours between placing a resignation letter on Ben-Gurion’s desk and being formally expelled from both institutions. Abravanel wrote a reasoned letter, but no newspaper would publish it; when Atalia searched the Zionist archive for the letter or a copy, officials insisted it had never existed. The public record’s silence is therefore not merely a gap in Shmuel’s research. It forms part of the story of how Abravanel’s dissent was obscured, even as his daughter’s testimony restores its central claim: that a different political future had once been considered possible.

Atalia recalls that after the war Abravanel withdrew into voluntary house arrest. He did not leave the courtyard, and he refused to speak with her or Wald about the establishment of the state, victory, the expulsion of Arabs, the arrival of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries and Europe, or the bloodshed along the new borders. He lived by a repeated routine of reading the newspaper, walking in his room or garden, moving a chair to follow the shade beneath the courtyard fig tree, and spending the afternoon and evening reading and writing. Once, at the kitchen table, he predicted that the new order would last only a few years, or at most two or three generations.

After his death, Atalia found no notes, articles, or manuscripts. Abravanel had not burned his private papers; he had torn them into tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet over many days. The destruction included valuable letters exchanged with prominent Arabs in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Beirut, Cairo, and Damascus. The only document that remained was his will, which left Atalia the house, plots in Talpiot, and his savings, and firmly asked that Gershom be allowed to remain there for the rest of his life. In the account she gives Shmuel, the destroyed archive and the surviving will stand against one another: political arguments and correspondence vanish, while a practical act of care survives. Her testimony restores the lost history only partially, but it makes the losses—and the silences imposed by war, institutions, and Abravanel himself—legible.