The National Library of Israel is the setting for Shmuel Ash’s painstaking search through 1947 newspapers for evidence about Shaltiel Abravanel, the Zionist official whose opposition to the political course leading toward war has been obscured. In its reading room, two small notices in Davar yield a chronology of Abravanel’s attempted dissent and removal from office, while the absence of public debate and the continued secrecy of institutional records expose how much the archive cannot tell him.

Setting and Search

On a Tuesday morning, after rain briefly lets up, Shmuel takes a bus from Keren Kayemet Street to the library’s newspaper reading room at Givat Ram. He has left behind the fox-headed cane that usually accompanies him. A small librarian directs him to the periodicals room, where he requests nine monthly volumes of Davar, covering June 1947 through February 1948. With papers spread on the table and a pen borrowed from Gershom Wald’s desk, he works through the issues patiently, page by page.

The room is nearly empty. The only other reader at first is an older, sharp-featured man with a goatee and gold-rimmed pince-nez, taking frantic notes from an old foreign weekly. The stranger’s silent presence gives the solitary research a faintly watchful quality, but Shmuel remains absorbed in his task.

Abravanel in the Public Record

After about half an hour, Shmuel finds a brief notice about Abravanel, then a member of both the Zionist Executive and the leadership of the Jewish Agency. Dated June 18, 1947, it reports that Abravanel had asked to appear before the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine to present an individual minority position on the conflict between Jews and Arabs and offer an original path to peace. The Jewish Agency leadership rejected the request, insisting that its representatives speak with one voice rather than offer contradictory positions. Abravanel considered appearing anyway but ultimately obeyed the majority’s discipline, perhaps because he had been warned that defying it would cost him his place in the community’s leading institutions.

Shmuel copies the notice onto a sheet, folds it, and puts it in his shirt pocket. He continues through the September and October issues, reading about the committee’s work on partition, but finds no report of a public debate or of Abravanel appealing to either the Jewish or Arab community. The first notice establishes that he sought a hearing; the silence around what followed leaves the substance and reach of his proposed alternative largely beyond the public record.

Partition and Expulsion

On a later morning, Shmuel returns to the reading room and finds the November 30, 1947, issue of Davar. Its large headline announces that a Hebrew state will soon be established following the United Nations vote. The accompanying report describes a partition into independent Jewish and Arab states, with economic relations and a common currency, and international control for Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Reading the account, Shmuel is overcome with emotion and tears, as though the events recorded in the newspaper were happening in front of him. The older reader watches him, then looks down when their eyes meet.

After lunch, Shmuel resumes his research in the December 1947 and January and February 1948 volumes. In a small item low on page three of the December 21 issue, beneath a notice about the Haganah’s call for truck owners to register, he finds that Abravanel was removed from his positions the previous day because of disagreements with colleagues. The report says Abravanel declined to explain his dismissal to the journalist. It nevertheless conveys his view that the course chosen by Ben-Gurion and others led toward a bloody war between the two peoples, with the lives of 600,000 Jews in the land at stake, while some possibility of historical compromise remained. The paper identifies Abravanel as a lawyer and Arabist who had spent nearly nine years at the head of the two institutions.

The Archive’s Limits

The notices offer Shmuel documentary footholds, but not a complete account. When he seeks the Zionist Executive’s records, a library official explains that its documents are held in the Zionist archive and consist of transcripts of public meetings. The secret minutes of the Jewish Agency leadership, by contrast, remain classified and are to stay so for another forty years. The official’s invitation to return then makes the delay tangible: the institutional record that might illuminate private deliberations is inaccessible within the span of Shmuel’s inquiry.

The library’s newspaper collection therefore gives evidence and withholds resolution at once. Davar preserves the requests, dismissal, and reported warning of war, yet offers no public debate about Abravanel’s proposal; the secret protocols remain closed. Shmuel’s search makes the gap itself legible: public history can record the outline of dissent while leaving its fuller argument and the pressures surrounding it in silence.