Israeli–Arab conflict

The Israeli–Arab conflict is the novel’s defining political fracture and an intimate inheritance: it divides communities over land and statehood, but also divides friends, families, and generations over whether another course was possible. Through Shaltiel Abravanel’s proposal for shared Jewish-Arab life, Gershom Wald’s recollections, and Shmuel Ash’s changing understanding, the conflict appears both as a contest over immediate survival and as a structure of fear and dispossession that military victory cannot resolve.

Land, Sovereignty, and Competing Fears

Shmuel gives the conflict a blunt material starting point. When Wald invokes the period after the Sinai campaign, Shmuel asks why Arabs should love Israel and describes the arrival of hundreds of thousands, then millions, of outsiders who took land, fields, villages, cities, ancestral graves, and the inheritance of their children. The Zionist account of returning to rebuild the land and recover an ancestral inheritance cannot, in his view, erase how that arrival looked to the people already living there. His argument refuses the comforting notion that the Arab response was inexplicable hostility: it places dispossession and the scale of immigration at the heart of the confrontation.

Abravanel’s analysis, as Wald recounts it, begins with a different but related question: what did Arab neighbors fear Jewish power would become? Their anxiety, he believed, was directed less at the small existing Zionist settlement than at the potential for Jewish economic, educational, and technological strength to accumulate and eventually dominate the region. He understood Arab fears to include imagined Jewish designs on the mosques of the Temple Mount and on an empire stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates. These fears could be exaggerated or fantastical, but Abravanel regarded them as politically consequential rather than dismissible. Patience, sustained dialogue, a shared workers’ union, and access for Arabs to Jewish settlements, schools, and the university were among his proposed ways to reduce them.

Abravanel’s objection was not to a Jewish home in the land, but to a separate Jewish state with its own army, government, and exclusive sovereign authority. He argued that ending the British Mandate by declaring independence would trigger a bloody war with the Arab world and perhaps the wider Muslim world. Even if Jewish forces won several rounds, he feared that such victories would deepen Arab terror and produce a conflict lasting generations. His forecast gives the debate its tragic pressure: the dispute is not simply between idealism and realism, but between different assessments of what will secure Jewish survival and what will make coexistence impossible.

The Political Choice and Its Exclusion

In 1948, Abravanel tried to persuade David Ben-Gurion that Jews and Arabs could reach an agreement as the British withdrew, provided the Zionist leadership relinquished the aim of establishing a Jewish state. He was removed from the Zionist Executive and the leadership of the Jewish Agency after opposing the chosen course. A report in Davar, dated December 21, 1947, recorded that he had been deposed the previous day for disagreements with his colleagues; it also reported his warning that their path led toward a bloody war whose outcome was uncertain and placed the lives of 600,000 Jews in Eretz Israel at stake. He declined to explain his dismissal to the newspaper. The report nonetheless preserved his claim that there remained an opening for historical compromise.

Wald’s account supplies the longer political context. Abravanel had spent years within Zionist institutions, occasionally urging dialogue with the neighboring people and objecting to violent methods, while his interventions drew indifference or boredom. By 1947, his opposition to partition and to Israeli independence made his dissent unmistakable. His colleagues gave him two hours to choose between resignation and expulsion; after resigning, he maintained complete silence in public. The conflict thus shaped not only relations between Jews and Arabs but the boundaries of acceptable debate within the Zionist leadership. The label of traitor attached to an advocate of shared political life, while his proposal lost institutional standing before the war had run its course.

Abravanel’s alternative also rested on a concrete proposal for the immediate refugee crisis. Wald recalls that Abravanel expected roughly 100,000 Holocaust survivors displaced in European transit camps to be admitted to Eretz Israel, raising the Jewish population there from about 650,000 to three-quarters of a million. After that one immigration wave, he proposed pausing further demands and allowing Arab society ten or twenty years to absorb the Jewish presence, while the two peoples worked toward calm. He believed the fear of future expansion, not only the existing Zionist project, drove Arab opposition. Shmuel acknowledges that Abravanel’s ideas have an appeal to the heart, but judges them too sweetened: he suspects that Arabs were tempted not only by the prospect of future Jewish power but by present Jewish weakness. The disagreement reveals the security dilemma at the center of the conflict: a policy intended to reassure one side may look to the other like a gamble with its survival.

1948: Violence, Flight, and Conflicting Testimony

Shmuel remembers being thirteen and accepting a stark moral map: Jews were the just minority, Arabs the evil majority, and the Arab world intended to destroy or expel the Jews. Yet his memories of Haifa complicate that childhood certainty. Before violence overtook the city, Arab land dealers visited his father’s cartography office in Hadar HaCarmel; Jewish and Arab families exchanged hospitality, food, and conversation, and their elders could imagine life without politics as peaceful. Those recollections do not cancel the later fighting, but they make the transition to it legible as a rupture in lived relationships rather than an eternal condition between two peoples.

The rupture comes through a sequence of escalating attacks and reprisals. Jewish buses were attacked; Jewish fighters carried out bloody retaliatory raids in villages around the bay; an Arab crowd killed Jewish refinery workers; and Jewish and Arab snipers took positions behind sandbag barricades on rooftops. Fortified checkpoints divided neighborhoods. In April 1948, about a month before the British withdrawal, tens of thousands of Arabs left Haifa aboard ships and fishing boats for Lebanon. Jewish leaders issued appeals asking the population to stay, but the appeals did not overcome the panic. Rumors that Jews intended to exterminate the Arabs, intensified by news of the killing at Deir Yassin, contributed to the terror that preceded the mass departure. Haifa was left almost empty of its Arab population.

Shmuel does not present that flight as the whole story of displacement. He acknowledges that in Lod and many other places Jews did not ask Arabs to remain, but killed and expelled them. In Haifa, he recalls, panic had already taken hold despite the appeals to stay. The distinction preserves the particular circumstances of the city without turning them into an exoneration of what happened elsewhere. It also exposes the danger of treating a population’s departure as a single, uncomplicated choice: terror, rumor, direct violence, and differing local conduct all belong to the account.

The survivors disagree about whether the catastrophe was inevitable. Shmuel’s father insists that there was no escape from a total war of life and death, fought not only by armies but street against street, neighborhood against neighborhood, and house against house. He compares the displacement of populations to that in Greece and Turkey, India and Pakistan, and elsewhere in Europe. Shmuel’s mother blames the British, who promised the land twice and encouraged one people against another. Atalia says her father was not of his time: perhaps he was late, perhaps early, but out of step with it. Shmuel, now more doubtful than he once was, says that conversations with Wald have taught him to notice the cracks in accounts that present events as inevitable. The conflict survives in these incompatible explanations as well as in its physical aftermath.

Force, Memory, and the Limits of Resolution

The novel does not equate recognizing the limits of force with rejecting military defense. Wald argues that military power is what separates Israel from death at any given moment; it can prevent destruction for a time. But it cannot convert an enemy into an ally, a fanatic into a tolerant person, or someone thirsting for vengeance into a friend. Force can avert disaster, he insists, but cannot repair or solve the conflict. This distinction makes deterrence a temporary protection rather than a political settlement: it preserves life in the present while leaving the sources of hostility intact.

Abravanel’s warnings and Wald’s hindsight meet in the loss that ended their arguments. Wald had disputed Abravanel vehemently until the night of April 2, when his only son, Mija, died in the Jerusalem mountains. Afterward, Wald says, tragedy extinguished their debate. He also concludes that Abravanel’s position had no remaining possibility in the country: even the most moderate observers had come to believe that Arabs would not tolerate Jewish presence there even without a Jewish state. The personal bereavement does not settle the political question. Instead, it shows how war can close down discussion by converting forecasts into grief and making compromise seem not merely unworkable but irrelevant.

Wald’s memories of Abravanel preserve a counterargument that the political outcome could not erase. Abravanel had loved landscapes on both sides of the social divide: Galilee, Jerusalem, desert, Arab villages, and Jewish agricultural settlements. His vision was not a refusal of Jewish attachment to the land, but an effort to imagine that attachment as shared. Shmuel’s account of dispossession, the departure from Haifa, and the subsequent arguments over responsibility place severe pressure on that hope; they also prevent the history from being reduced to a contest between innocent idealism and necessary force. The unresolved conflict lies in the space between the fear of being destroyed and the experience of having displaced others, between the protection force can offer and the reconciliation it cannot produce.