British Mandate for Palestine

The British Mandate for Palestine is more than a period of political administration in the novel: it is the contested interval in which Shaltiel Abravanel imagines a shared, borderless society, while the collapse of the Mandate and the fighting around its end expose how fragile ordinary Jewish-Arab ties have become. Its history reaches the reader through debate, recollection, and loss, rather than as a detached chronology.

Political conflict and Abravanel’s dissent

During 1947 and 1948, Abravanel maintained that founding a Jewish state was a tragic error. He argued that the departing British Mandate should be replaced by international rule or a provisional government under American supervision. A single wave of immigration might allow about one hundred thousand Holocaust survivors displaced in European camps to enter the country, raising the Jewish population from roughly 650,000 to three-quarters of a million; after that, he urged a pause, allowing Arab communities ten or twenty years to absorb the Jewish presence. In his view, Arab opposition arose not simply from the existing Zionist settlements but from fear that Jewish education, technology, ingenuity, and drive would eventually enable territorial expansion.

Abravanel’s alternative was not separation into rival states but a society of neighboring communities living among one another: Jews and Arabs, Christians and Muslims, Druze and Circassians, and different Christian denominations. He proposed that Jewish schoolchildren learn Arabic and Arab schoolchildren Hebrew, or that they attend joint schools. He believed such contact could gradually ease fears sharpened by the British policy of divide and rule and foster trust and personal friendship. He pointed to relationships that had already existed under the Mandate in Haifa, Jerusalem, Tiberias, Jaffa, and elsewhere, and grounded his appeal in the history of Jewish and Arab suffering under Christian Europe, including colonial oppression and antisemitic persecution.

He tried to circulate these ideas in small circles rather than through major institutions: he visited Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jaffa, Haifa, and Beirut at least twice a month, and took part in private gatherings in the homes of German-born intellectuals in Rehavia. An earlier attempt to present a minority position to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine had been rejected by the Jewish Agency and the Zionist Executive, which insisted on speaking with one voice. Abravanel considered appearing independently but ultimately complied with the majority’s discipline. His dissent thus remained marginal even as the political decisions he opposed gathered force.

Everyday contact and its rupture

Shmuel Ash’s recollections give the Mandate years a domestic and social texture before turning to their rupture. As a boy in Haifa, he saw Arab merchants visit his father’s mapping office in Hadar HaCarmel. His family was sometimes invited to the merchants’ homes on Allenby Street, where guests shared coffee, tea, nuts, sweets, and conversation. They could agree that politics brought misfortune and that life without it might be peaceful. These memories coexist with the conviction Shmuel absorbed as a thirteen-year-old in the youth movement: that the Jews were just and outnumbered, and that the Arab world meant to destroy or expel them.

That coexistence did not survive the escalation of violence. Attacks on Jewish buses were followed by retaliatory raids on nearby Arab villages; Arab workers at the refineries were murdered, and further reprisals followed. Jewish and Arab snipers took positions on rooftops behind sandbags, while fortified checkpoints divided the neighborhoods. The contrast between the earlier visits and the later barricades gives the Mandate’s ending its intimate as well as political scale: streets, workplaces, and neighboring homes became part of a conflict between populations.

In April 1948, about a month before the British withdrawal, tens of thousands of Arab residents of Haifa fled by boat and fishing craft to Lebanon. Jewish leaders issued appeals asking residents to stay, but panic had taken hold amid rumors that Jews intended to exterminate them, reinforced by news of the Deir Yassin massacre nearby. Shmuel also acknowledges that in Lod and elsewhere Arabs were not asked to remain but were killed and expelled. Haifa’s exodus therefore appears neither as an uncomplicated voluntary departure nor as an event explained by a single cause: fear, violence, and the differing actions of Jewish forces all belong to the account.

Memory, loss, and the Mandate’s aftermath

The recollections of the Mandate are bound to the personal cost of the war that followed its collapse. Abravanel had urged young people on both sides to lay down their arms and refused to stop visiting Arab friends even after roadblocks and sniper fire began. Neighbors called him the Arabs’ friend, the muezzin, or the Muslim devotee; some called him a traitor. Yet he continued to call himself a Zionist, distinguishing his position from nationalism he believed had intoxicated others. Gershom Wald remembers that Abravanel’s son-in-law, Mija, had been raised amid the opposite call to arms: Wald himself had taught his only son to answer the remembered voice of national duty. Mija was killed while serving in a convoy escort on the road to Jerusalem on April 2, 1948.

The ensuing loss narrowed the household around Wald, Abravanel, and Atalia. After Mija’s death, Wald and Abravanel no longer argued; grief silenced a debate that had once been constant. Abravanel’s Arab friends were now across the new borders or expelled from their homes in Katamon, Abu Tor, and Baka, while Jewish friends had deserted him as a traitor. He died alone two years later. Atalia’s account places these deaths alongside the disappearance of the social world that Abravanel had tried to sustain: his political isolation was not only the defeat of a proposal but the severing of friendships and the exhaustion of family life.

The Mandate also persists in the altered geography Shmuel describes. He sometimes walks through Haifa’s Arab neighborhoods, many now occupied by Jewish immigrants, while thousands of Arabs who stayed continue to live elsewhere in the city. He wonders whether what happened was inevitable, setting that question against his father’s view that a civil war between whole populations could not avoid displacing them. In Jerusalem, the abandoned Arab village of Sheikh Badr remains visible among the hills, with the skeletal, unfinished Festival Palace rising above its ruins. These places make the Mandate’s end present in the landscape: political transformation is registered not only in borders and institutions but also in emptied neighborhoods, abandoned villages, and unresolved memories.