David Ben-Gurion

David Ben-Gurion is a contested political figure whose leadership gives the novel’s debate over Jewish statehood its sharpest focus. Gershom Wald admires his strategic realism and breadth of vision; Shmuel Ash and Shaltiel Abravanel associate his national project with biblical rhetoric, the rejection of Arab-Jewish power-sharing, and a war whose consequences remain unresolved.

Leadership and political realism

Wald praises Ben-Gurion as a leader of exceptional breadth, arguing that he understood the danger of Jewish life being set apart from other nations. In their conversations, Wald presents him as someone who recognized that neither conciliatory language nor outside protection could secure the Jewish community’s future. He recalls that Ben-Gurion reached this conclusion after extended discussions with Arab leaders, including friends of Abravanel: what the Jews did not obtain for themselves, Wald says, would not be given freely.

That confidence in self-reliance is tied to Wald’s account of Ben-Gurion’s assessment of Arab opposition. Wald believes Ben-Gurion understood long before his colleagues that the Arabs would not willingly accept Jewish presence or share territory and power. He connects this hard calculation to the conviction that the community would have to defend itself. Even Mija, Wald recalls, practiced with a weapon at night in the forest at Tel Arza because he too understood the danger. Wald’s admiration is therefore inseparable from grief: he believed in the reasoning behind the national struggle, but had not wanted to imagine that his own son would be lost to it.

Abravanel’s opposition and the dispute over partition

Shaltiel Abravanel offered a fundamentally different response to the conflict. In 1948, as the British were leaving, he tried to persuade Ben-Gurion that an agreement with the Arabs and a joint Arab-Jewish condominium were still possible if the Jewish side gave up establishing a Jewish state. Wald admits that he sided with Ben-Gurion’s uncompromising realism, not Abravanel’s proposals. Abravanel was subsequently expelled from the Zionist Executive and the leadership of the Jewish Agency.

Shmuel, by contrast, criticizes the political direction Ben-Gurion took. He describes him as a former workers’ leader who had become the head of a nationalist, self-righteous state, and objects to the biblical language of restoration and fulfilled prophecy used to legitimate its project. His criticism grows more urgent when he warns that, without peace, the Arabs may eventually defeat the Jews, and that they will not forget either the defeat of 1948 or the later intrigues involving Britain and France.

A disputed historical record

Shmuel’s investigation turns the political dispute into a question of what the historical record can show. In the National Library’s newspaper archive, he finds a report that on June 18, 1947, Abravanel asked to present an individual minority position to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. The Agency’s leadership rejected the request, insisting that it speak with one voice. The report says Abravanel considered appearing independently but ultimately obeyed the majority’s discipline.

A second report, dated December 21, 1947, records Abravanel’s removal from his posts over disagreements with his colleagues. It attributes to him the view that the course chosen by Ben-Gurion and others led toward a bloody war between the two peoples, with the fate of 600,000 Jews in the country at stake, although the report does not provide a full public account of the dispute. Shmuel later learns that the secret minutes of the Jewish Agency’s leadership meetings remain classified for another forty years. The surviving newspaper accounts establish the outline of Abravanel’s dissent, while the closed records and missing resignation letter leave its full circumstances inaccessible.

Political prophecy and legacy

Wald recalls Abravanel’s warning that Zionism’s founders had harnessed generations of religious and messianic energy for a secular, pragmatic movement, and that this energy might one day turn against its creators. Abravanel did not, in Wald’s account, cease to be a Zionist; he believed that Ben-Gurion’s followers had strayed from their path and become swept up in national and messianic fervor. After a meeting with Ben-Gurion and David Remez, he reportedly called Ben-Gurion a false messiah and feared a catastrophic bloodshed that would destroy Jews, Arabs, and more.

The novel does not resolve these opposed portraits into a single judgment. Wald can call Ben-Gurion one of the greatest Jewish leaders while acknowledging the private cost of the war; Shmuel can condemn the state’s nationalism while recognizing the force of the threat against which it was built. Ben-Gurion’s significance lies in this unresolved tension: political survival is presented as a compelling necessity, but also as a course that forecloses Abravanel’s proposed accommodation and makes the language of liberation perilously close to the language of domination.