Israel’s policy of non-alignment

Israel’s policy of non-alignment is presented as an alternative to the Western alignment Shmuel Ash condemns in his political arguments with Gershom Wald. Their debate turns on a distinction between military force as a means of immediate survival and political alignment as a strategy for securing Israel’s future: force may prevent destruction, Shmuel argues, but neither force nor a foreign alliance can resolve the hostility between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

The dispute over alignment

Shmuel objects to the consequences of Operation Kadesh, arguing that Ben-Gurion had attached Israel to France and Britain, two colonial powers he regarded as declining. In Shmuel’s view, the alignment deepened Arab hatred of Israel and confirmed the perception that the country was an instrument of world imperialism. His criticism is not simply that the allies were weak; he sees the relationship itself as politically damaging because it made Israel appear dependent on outside powers.

He develops that criticism by pointing to France’s crisis in Algeria and Britain’s retreat from its empire. As news reports describe French soldiers refusing to fire on French citizens and Britain withdrawing the remaining parts of its imperial holdings, Shmuel characterizes Israel’s partners as powers already in decline. He describes the alliance as a commitment to sinking ships and says Ben-Gurion had abandoned non-alignment in favor of subservience to the West. The argument makes the policy question immediate: in Shmuel’s account, Israel has not merely chosen questionable allies; it has bound its security to states whose imperial position is collapsing.

Arab hostility and the question of land

Wald challenges the implication that Israel’s relations with the Arabs would have been favorable before the operation. Shmuel answers by rejecting the premise that Arab hostility needs to be explained as irrational or inexplicable. He asks why Arabs would welcome newcomers who, in his account, arrived in large numbers and took their land, fields, villages, cities, ancestral graves, and their children’s inheritance. Jewish explanations of settlement as reconstruction and the recovery of ancestral heritage do not, he argues, erase what that arrival meant to the people already living there.

Shmuel extends the point from the local consequences of immigration to the political claim used to justify it: he challenges the expectation that any people would welcome hundreds of thousands, and later millions, of foreigners arriving from distant places on the basis of sacred books that promised the land to them alone. His account connects Israel’s foreign alignment to a wider conflict over how the state is understood in the region. In this framing, association with France and Britain compounds an existing grievance by making Israel appear not only as a newcomer claiming the land, but also as an instrument of outside imperial power.

Non-alignment, force, and survival

The disagreement does not mean that Shmuel rejects military power. He distinguishes its immediate defensive use from its capacity to produce political reconciliation. Force can prevent an enemy from destroying Israel, he says, but it cannot make that enemy an ally; nor can it turn a fanatic into a moderate or a person seeking vengeance into a friend. He treats military strength as necessary to avert catastrophe in the present, while warning that it cannot repair the conditions that keep the conflict alive.

That distinction gives non-alignment its significance in the debate. Shmuel’s objection is both strategic and political: an alliance with declining Western powers can intensify Arab suspicion, while military superiority cannot remove the hostility that such suspicions feed. Wald offers a different emphasis. Although he disputes Shmuel’s indictment of Ben-Gurion and stresses the dangers Israel faced, his account also recognizes the limits of relying on force alone. The policy remains contested rather than settled: the two men agree that Israel faces danger, but differ over what kind of realism can address it.

Ben-Gurion and the competing visions of realism

Wald’s defense of Ben-Gurion helps explain why the argument cannot be reduced to a simple opposition between a realist and an idealist. He considers Ben-Gurion exceptionally far-sighted, believing that the Arabs would not willingly accept Jewish presence or share territory and power, and that no outside force would come to Israel’s defense if the Arabs tried to drive it out. Wald links this judgment to Ben-Gurion’s earlier conversations with Arab leaders and to the conviction that what Jews did not secure for themselves would not be given to them freely.

Shmuel, by contrast, sees Ben-Gurion’s leadership as having changed: the former workers’ leader has become the head of a nationalist state that invokes biblical language about restoration and prophecy. His criticism of Western alignment belongs to this broader disagreement about statehood and political rhetoric. Where Wald stresses the dangers of vulnerability and the necessity of self-defense, Shmuel warns that dependence on Western powers and reliance on force cannot establish peace. Non-alignment therefore stands in the novel as a disputed alternative, not a policy shown to have been adopted or to have resolved the conflict.