Israeli–Arab conflict and lasting hostility

The Israeli–Arab conflict and lasting hostility are presented not as a quarrel caused by insufficient understanding but as a struggle between peoples who understand one another’s attachment to the same land all too well. The novel places Shaltiel Abravanel’s proposals for shared life against the establishment of a Jewish state and the military realism that prevailed, while showing how war’s consequences persist in bereavement, displacement, fear, and reciprocal claims of justice. Its bleakest distinction is also its most searching: force can postpone catastrophe, but it cannot by itself make an enemy a friend.

Two Peoples, One Land

Gershom Wald rejects the comforting idea that Jewish-Arab hostility rests on a failure to understand one another. Arabs, he says, hold fast to the land because it is their only land; Jews hold fast for the same reason. Each side knows the other will not relinquish its claim. The conflict therefore cannot be resolved simply by more conversation or by treating political antagonism as a misunderstanding between individuals.

Wald sets this structural conflict against the appeal of easy reconciliation. His imagined scene of enemies meeting over coffee, discovering common feeling, and embracing belongs to the consolations of a novel, not to the political reality he describes. Two peoples claiming one land cannot drink their way out of their opposing attachments. Yet he does not dismiss dreamers outright: they may not save either people, but without them the curse hanging over both would be heavier still. His argument holds realism and hope in an uneasy balance, refusing both the promise that goodwill will end the conflict and the certainty that hope has no value.

Abravanel’s Alternative

Shaltiel Abravanel’s opposition to a Jewish state grows out of a different reading of the conflict, not indifference to Jewish safety or to Jewish life in the land. His daughter Atalia explains that the Arab revolt of 1936, Hitler, resistance, killings and reprisals, British executions, and his many conversations with Arab friends led him to believe there was room for both communities. They might live alongside one another, or within a mixed communal arrangement, without a state framework that made one community’s future a threat to the other.

Abravanel continued to call himself a Zionist, but rejected nationalism and statehood as the necessary form of Jewish collective life. During the 1947–48 fighting, he reportedly argued that the British Mandate should give way to an international mandate or a provisional government under American tutelage. He thought roughly 100,000 Holocaust survivors might be permitted to immigrate, bringing the Jewish population from about 650,000 to three-quarters of a million, after which immigration and political demands could be paused while Arab communities gradually adjusted to the Jewish presence. He believed Arab opposition was directed less at the existing Zionist settlement—a small group of towns and several dozen villages along the coastal plain—than at the fear that Jewish educational, technological, and organizational advantages would lead to expansion and control over Arab territory.

Abravanel’s warning was that declaring an independent Jewish state after the end of the British Mandate would bring bloody war with the Arab world and perhaps the Muslim world as a whole. Even repeated Jewish victories, he predicted, would not settle the matter: they would deepen Arab fear of Jewish power and ambition, turning the conflict into a war lasting generations. His view gives political form to a central distinction in the novel: one can acknowledge the immediate attraction of statehood and still question whether victory can produce lasting security.

Statehood, War, and Responsibility

Shmuel Ash articulates the Arab grievance in terms of dispossession. He asks why Arabs should welcome strangers who arrived in large numbers and took their land, fields, villages, cities, ancestral graves, and children’s inheritance. Jewish hopes of rebuilding the land and redeeming an ancestral inheritance do not, in his argument, erase what those who already lived there experienced as an invasion and a loss. His challenge shifts the discussion from national aspiration alone to the consequences of realizing that aspiration for another people.

Atalia gives that indictment its bitterest inventory. Jews wanted a state, independence, flags, uniforms, currency, and national ceremony; in return, she says, they shed innocent blood, sacrificed a generation, expelled hundreds of thousands of Arabs, and sent Holocaust survivors from ships at the quayside to battlefields. Her speech rejects the idea that statehood can be judged apart from the human costs of its creation. Shmuel is stunned and does not fully agree, but the confrontation makes it impossible for him to treat those costs as an abstract accusation.

Wald, by contrast, recalls how he himself supported the hard realism of David Ben-Gurion against Abravanel’s proposals. He had argued that the war was unavoidable, a holy war in which even a bridegroom should go out to fight. He later recognizes his part in the culture that sent his only son, Mija, to war. Mija had a kidney removed at nine, and Atalia and Abravanel both urged him not to enlist; nevertheless, the young man joined the fighting and died in the Jerusalem mountains. Wald remembers a whole society giving the summons to fight: teachers, parents, boys, and girls, all repeating the language of a voice that called and was obeyed. His bereavement turns the political argument inward: those who celebrated military duty cannot separate their convictions from the deaths that followed.

The Limits of Force and the Aftermath

Wald does not claim that military power is unnecessary. He tells Shmuel that Israel’s force is what separates it from death at each moment. But he draws a firm limit around what force can accomplish: it can make an enemy a slave, not an ally; it cannot make a fanatic tolerant or turn someone thirsting for revenge into a friend. Military power may prevent annihilation for a time, but it cannot repair or resolve the conflict. This is not a simple rejection of defense; it is a warning against confusing survival with reconciliation.

The aftermath is neither a clean victory nor a shared recovery. Atalia describes Jews as living in a great refugee camp and Arabs as living in one too. Arabs endure the daily tragedy of defeat, while Jews live through the nightly terror of revenge. Both peoples are filled with hatred, poison, and a sense of justified grievance; the land is covered with cemeteries and strewn with the ruins of hundreds of villages erased from the map. The stark symmetry does not make their histories or losses identical. It shows instead how opposing claims of right can coexist with ruin on both sides, each feeding the fear and retaliation that Abravanel had anticipated.

The novel leaves the conflict unresolved, but not conceptually simple. Wald’s argument denies that friendliness alone can dissolve competing claims; Abravanel’s alternative insists that the state and its military victories are not the only imaginable political arrangement; Atalia’s indictment forces the costs of statehood into view; and Mija’s death makes those costs familial and irreversible. Between the demand for protection and the desire to avoid another generation of war, the characters inhabit a conflict in which force can hold disaster back but cannot supply the political friendship it cannot create.