Israel and the Arabs’ relationship

Israel and the Arabs’ relationship is portrayed as a struggle in which security and grievance reinforce one another: Israel’s military strength may stave off defeat, but it cannot by itself produce peace or reconcile those who see themselves as dispossessed. In conversation with Gershom Wald, Shmuel Ash challenges the comfort of military superiority, recognizes the scale of Arab loss, and sets the debate against the unchosen alternative proposed by Shaltiel Abravanel: an Arab-Jewish condominium in place of a Jewish state.

The argument over Israel’s place in the region

Shmuel connects Israel’s regional isolation to the Sinai campaign. In his view, David Ben-Gurion’s decision to align Israel with France and Britain tied it to two colonial powers already in decline. Rather than strengthening Israel’s standing, the operation deepened Arab hostility and confirmed the impression that Israel was an alien body in the region, serving world imperialism. Wald counters that Arab hostility did not begin with the operation, but Shmuel refuses to treat that history as an answer to the question of why the Arabs oppose Israel.

His reply begins with what he says the opposing account leaves out. Arabs, he argues, have reason to resist newcomers who arrived in large numbers and took their land, fields, villages, cities, ancestral graves, and inheritance intended for their children. The Jewish account of coming to rebuild the land and recover ancestral inheritance does not erase the experience of those already living there. Shmuel presses the point beyond this particular conflict: no people, he argues, would readily welcome a sudden arrival of hundreds of thousands of foreigners, followed by millions, claiming the whole country on the authority of sacred books. His argument does not simply assert competing attachments; it exposes the asymmetry between a national story of return and the loss experienced by those displaced.

The rejected alternative of shared government

The dispute reaches back to 1948, when Shaltiel Abravanel, Atalia’s father, tried to persuade Ben-Gurion that an agreement with the Arabs might still be possible as the British departed. His proposed arrangement was a condominium for Arabs and Jews, on condition that the Zionist leadership give up the idea of establishing a Jewish state. The leadership rejected his position; Abravanel was removed from the Zionist Executive and the leadership of the Jewish Agency, which Wald describes as the unofficial Jewish government at the end of the British Mandate period.

The novel presents this political defeat through accounts that differ in status and detail. Shmuel finds a June 1947 newspaper report that Abravanel had asked to present an individual minority view to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. The Jewish Agency refused, insisting that it must speak with one voice; Abravanel considered defying the decision but ultimately complied. A December report records his removal after disagreements, and says that he believed a bloody war might follow Ben-Gurion’s chosen course while a historical compromise remained possible. Later, Wald says Abravanel was forced to choose between submitting a resignation letter and being formally expelled, that the letter was suppressed, and that an archive denied it had ever existed. The inaccessible records and Wald’s recollections do not offer a single, complete account; together they show how the debate over coexistence was pushed out of public view.

Wald admits that he himself sided with Ben-Gurion’s hard realism rather than Abravanel’s ideas, which he then calls unfounded. Shmuel, in turn, condemns the national leadership’s self-righteous biblical language of restoration and fulfilled prophecy. The argument is therefore not only between two peoples but also within Jewish political thought: whether the future should be secured through a sovereign state and military readiness, or pursued through a shared political order that would require relinquishing that statehood project.

The soldier who might come next

Shmuel frames the danger of relying on superior strength through the story of the “eleventh soldier.” He recalls an article about the Soviet invasion of Finland: a Finnish commander assured President Kallio that each Finnish soldier was worth ten Soviet soldiers. Kallio’s reported response turned the boast into a strategic question: what if Stalin sent eleven? Shmuel applies the parable to Israel. In the War of Independence, he notes, fewer than 80,000 soldiers from five Arab armies fought against 120,000 Jewish men and women mobilized from a population of 600,000. He asks what would happen if the Arab side one day committed half a million, a million, or two million soldiers. He also points to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s access to Soviet arms and his open talk of another confrontation.

The argument does not deny the immediate necessity of defense. Wald says that if the eleventh soldier appears on the battlefield, Israel will have to repel him; otherwise, it cannot remain there. Shmuel agrees that military power separates Israel from death in the present. His qualification is the debate’s central distinction: force can prevent annihilation for a time, but it cannot repair or resolve the conflict. It cannot make an enemy into an ally, turn a fanatic into a tolerant person, or transform a person thirsting for revenge into a friend. Military power may prevent catastrophe; it cannot supply the political and human conditions for peace.

Security, grief, and unresolved hostility

Wald’s answer carries the weight of personal loss. After Shmuel argues that force may only delay a disaster that cannot be avoided, Wald asks whether his only son died merely to postpone it. The question makes abstract strategic calculations answer to bereavement: even if military defense can buy time rather than settle the conflict, the lives spent defending Israel are not an abstraction to those left behind. Wald’s grief does not refute Shmuel’s distinction between prevention and resolution, but it gives the need to resist an attack an intimate and immediate force.

Their exchange leaves neither side with a comprehensive solution. Shmuel recognizes the strength of the Arab grievance and the limits of Israel’s arms, yet does not argue that Israel can dispense with military power. Wald accepts the possibility that superiority will not create friendship, yet insists that survival requires resistance. Against both positions stands Abravanel’s defeated attempt at shared government, preserved in fragments of public reporting and recollection rather than in an accessible archive. The relationship between Israel and the Arabs thus appears not as a misunderstanding that strength can correct, but as a political conflict in which security measures may avert immediate destruction while leaving the underlying claims, losses, and hostility in place.