Ayi Dual-National Co-Governance Concept

The Arab-Jewish condominium proposal is Shaltiel Abravanel’s effort to replace the creation of a Jewish state with an agreement for Arabs and Jews to share power and territory as the British withdrew. Rejected by the Zionist leadership, it remains in the novel as both a political alternative and a point of painful disagreement over whether coexistence could have prevented war.

Proposal and Historical Setting

In Shmuel’s tentative recollection, Shaltiel Abravanel had been a Jerusalem figure in the 1940s, associated with the leadership of the Jewish Agency and remembered as a lone dissenter. Shmuel is unsure whether Abravanel opposed the establishment of the state itself or Ben-Gurion’s line, but his questions identify the proposal’s central political setting: the contest over what should follow the end of the British Mandate.

Gershom Wald gives the position a more definite outline. In 1948, Abravanel tried to persuade Ben-Gurion that an agreement with the Arabs was still possible as the British left, provided the Jewish side gave up the idea of a Jewish state and accepted an Arab-Jewish condominium. The proposal was therefore not merely an appeal for better relations; it called for shared political arrangements in place of separate Jewish statehood.

Rejection and Political Opposition

Wald says Abravanel’s argument failed. He was expelled from the Zionist Executive Committee and the leadership of the Jewish Agency, which Wald describes as the unofficial Jewish government in the closing period of the Mandate. The proposal’s defeat thus entailed the removal of its advocate from the institutions where the political future was being decided.

Wald recalls that he himself sided with Ben-Gurion’s uncompromising realism rather than Abravanel’s ideas, which he judged unfounded. His later account of their political estrangement gives that choice a personal consequence: after Mija’s death, Wald imagined Abravanel asking whether the sacrifice had been worth it, though Abravanel never actually asked. The unspoken question remained between them, and they fell into silence, speaking only occasionally about household matters.

The Competing Case for Statehood

The novel sets Abravanel’s proposal against Ben-Gurion’s belief that the Arabs would not willingly accept Jewish presence or share territory and power. Wald presents Ben-Gurion as having concluded, after discussions with Arab leaders in the 1930s, that Jews would have to secure for themselves what would not be freely granted. On that reasoning, reliance on agreement alone could not guarantee safety; Mija’s nighttime weapons practice in the Tel Arza woods embodies the preparations that Wald says followed from this view.

Shmuel challenges the premises and consequences of that realism. He argues that Arabs had reason to resist newcomers who took their land, villages, cities, ancestral graves, and inheritance, and warns that without peace they would eventually defeat the Jews. He also criticizes Ben-Gurion’s biblical language of restoration and prophecy as empty rhetoric for a nationalist state. These competing arguments make the condominium proposal a focus for the novel’s examination of how security claims, national aspirations, and the dispossession of others shape political choices.

Abravanel’s Wider Vision

Abravanel’s preference for shared rule belongs to a broader rejection of state power as the necessary endpoint of national revival. In Wald’s recollection, Abravanel called the state, any state, a predatory dinosaur and imagined a group of communities instead. He feared that Ben-Gurion’s leadership would lead to enduring bloodshed among Jews, Arabs, and the wider world, and warned that the oppressed might reproduce oppression once they gained power.

Wald’s own changing judgments prevent the proposal from becoming a simple, retrospectively vindicated solution. He once rejected it in favor of Ben-Gurion’s realism, yet the imagined question about Mija’s death exposes the cost and uncertainty of that choice. The condominium remains an unrealized alternative: neither its feasibility nor the outcome it might have produced is established, but its presence keeps the possibility of shared political life in tension with the state and conflict that actually emerged.