Establishment of the State of Israel

The establishment of the State of Israel is the turning point around which the novel’s dispute over Zionism, Arab-Jewish coexistence, and political realism converges. Shaltiel Abravanel opposed Jewish statehood, first pressing for an Arab-Jewish condominium and later rejecting states altogether; David Ben-Gurion’s leadership prevailed, and Abravanel was driven out of the Zionist institutions. The event is recalled not as a settled triumph but as the beginning of war, loss, and an enduring argument over who had the right to belong in the land and what political future could have prevented bloodshed.

Background and Competing Visions

In a conversation with Gershom Wald, Shmuel Ash challenges the assumption that Arabs should have welcomed Israel. He describes Jewish immigration as the sudden arrival of hundreds of thousands, then millions, of outsiders who took land, fields, villages, cities, ancestral graves, and the inheritance of future generations. Against the self-description of Zionism as a project of rebuilding and recovering an ancestral home, Shmuel asks what people would welcome such an arrival, especially when newcomers claimed the land on the authority of their sacred books. His intervention makes dispossession central to the event’s moral context rather than an incidental consequence.

Abravanel’s alternative was not simply opposition to Jewish refuge or to a Jewish presence in the land. As Wald recounts, Abravanel believed that Jews had a legitimate aspiration to build a home there, but that the home should be shared with Arabs. In 1948 he tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade Ben-Gurion that an agreement with the Arabs remained possible as the British departed: the two peoples could establish a condominium if the Zionist leadership gave up the idea of a Jewish state. Ben-Gurion and Wald, by contrast, represented the hard political realism that accepted statehood as the necessary course. Wald admits that he sided with Ben-Gurion, regarding Abravanel’s proposals as unfounded.

The Break with the Zionist Leadership

Abravanel’s dissent grew sharper as independence became an immediate political prospect. He had long urged dialogue with the neighboring people and criticized violent methods, but his appeals attracted little attention. In the 1940s he began voicing disagreement within the leadership of the Jewish Agency and the Zionist Executive. In 1947, when he opposed the United Nations partition plan and Israel’s independence, some colleagues called him a traitor and thought he had lost his reason. He was given two hours to choose between resigning and being expelled; he resigned. The institution’s ultimatum made dissent a matter of forced departure rather than continued debate.

Abravanel’s opposition also reached beyond a proposal for a binational state. As Wald explains, he believed the world’s division into separate states—with borders, barbed wire, passports, flags, armies, and distinct currencies—was archaic and destructive. He imagined instead communities of people speaking different languages and living alongside and among one another, without sovereignty, armies, borders, or weapons. In his view, founding another small state through war would perpetuate the very system that humanity ought to outgrow. This borderless vision distinguished him even from advocates of a shared Arab-Jewish state.

Forecast of War and Its Stakes

Abravanel warned that declaring an independent Jewish state after the end of the British Mandate would bring a bloody war with the Arab world, perhaps the Muslim world as a whole. He anticipated an immense imbalance between roughly half a million Jews and hundreds of millions of Muslims, and argued that even Jewish victories in successive rounds could not end the conflict. Each victory, he feared, would deepen Arab fear of Jewish power and expansion, turning the struggle into a war across generations. The novel places this warning beside Shmuel’s opposing explanation: in his view, Arabs were tempted not only by fear of future Jewish power but by Jewish weakness in the present. The disagreement preserves the gap between Abravanel’s analysis and the more immediate calculations of those who supported statehood.

Wald remembers Abravanel describing these possibilities in the house’s library, often standing by a window with his back to the darkness and speaking toward a painting by Reuven Rubin. Its landscapes included Galilean mountains, Jerusalem, desert, Arab villages, kibbutz meadows, and Jewish agricultural settlements. Wald stresses that Abravanel could value all these places without contradiction. The remembered setting gives physical form to a vision that sought to hold the land’s different peoples and landscapes together, even as the political movement moved toward partition and sovereignty.

Aftermath: Isolation, War, and Grief

After resigning, Abravanel said nothing publicly. He understood that he had no interlocutor, and that in the days before the state’s proclamation and during the ensuing war no one would take the time to hear his ideas. His silence followed a political defeat, not a reconciliation with the outcome. Years later, when Shmuel asks about the historic Abravanel, he recalls the dissenter expelled from the leadership and wonders whether he has confused him with someone else; Atalia does not answer immediately, and the question opens onto the family’s buried history.

The war made the debate intimate and irreversible. Wald recalls that his only son, Mija, was killed in the Jerusalem mountains on the night of April 2. He describes the loss as recurring night after night and links it to the family’s retreat into the house. During the Jordanian siege of Jerusalem, its thick stone walls protected them from bullets and shells; Atalia was the one who went out to queue for kerosene, ice, and rationed food. After the war, Abravanel remained withdrawn, cut off contact with the outside world, and expressed to Wald and his daughter his disappointment in a new state he regarded as militaristic, triumph-drunk, and consumed by empty nationalist exaltation. The creation of Israel thus stands in the novel beside the death of Wald’s son, the family’s confinement, and Abravanel’s political isolation.

Significance in the Novel

The event is staged through competing memories and arguments rather than narrated as a single public ceremony. Shmuel’s confrontation with Wald brings the consequences for Arabs into the discussion, while Wald’s recollection gives Abravanel’s opposition a personal history and reveals the cost of losing Mija. Their disagreement over whether Arab fear or Jewish vulnerability chiefly shaped the conflict prevents either man’s account from closing the question. Likewise, Abravanel’s proposals are presented as both ethically compelling and politically vulnerable: Shmuel calls them beautiful and suggestive, but also naive and optimistic.

The novel’s framing makes statehood at once an achievement of political power and the start of an unresolved conflict. Abravanel’s warning about generations of war is set against the immediate conviction that defeat would mean annihilation; his hope for shared life and a world without borders confronts the leadership’s decision to establish a state. The later memory of his dissent cannot undo that decision, but it recovers a silenced alternative and forces the founding to be considered alongside displacement, war, and grief.