Jewish Agency for Israel

The Jewish Agency for Israel serves as the principal institutional setting for the novel’s dispute over whether Jewish statehood was the necessary answer to the conflict in Palestine. Described as the Jewish community’s unofficial government near the end of the British Mandate, it becomes the place where Shaltiel Abravanel’s opposition to partition and statehood meets the prevailing political course—and where his dissent carries the consequence of exclusion.

Institutional role

In Gershom Wald’s account, the Jewish Agency for Israel functioned as the unofficial Jewish government toward the end of the British Mandate. The description gives the institution more than an administrative role: it was a center of political authority at a moment when the future form of government and relations with the Arab population were being contested.

That authority appears in the recollection of a meeting at the Agency’s headquarters. Shaltiel Abravanel returned deeply unsettled after speaking there with David Ben-Gurion and David Remez. The Agency thus figures not only as a government-in-the-making but as the setting in which competing political visions confronted the leaders shaping the Jewish national project.

Abravanel’s opposition and expulsion

In 1948, Abravanel tried to persuade Ben-Gurion that an agreement with the Arabs remained possible as the British were leaving. His proposal was a condominium shared by Arabs and Jews, conditional on giving up the idea of a Jewish state. The Agency’s institutional leadership did not adopt that course: Abravanel was expelled from the Zionist Executive and from the leadership of the Jewish Agency for Israel.

The episode establishes a contrast between Abravanel’s proposed shared political arrangement and the state-centered direction associated with Ben-Gurion. Wald acknowledges that he himself sided in the debate with Ben-Gurion’s uncompromising realism rather than with what he regarded as Abravanel’s unfounded ideas. Shmuel, by contrast, criticizes Ben-Gurion’s later leadership as nationalist and sanctimonious. The Agency’s role in the account is therefore bound up with a political choice, as well as the institutional penalty imposed on a prominent dissenter.

Political conflict and retrospective judgment

The dispute over the Agency’s direction is recalled through arguments about what the Arab population had reason to oppose: the arrival of large numbers of outsiders and the loss of land, fields, villages, cities, ancestral graves, and inheritance. Shmuel frames these losses as grounds for Arab resistance, challenging accounts that describe Jewish settlement solely as reconstruction or the recovery of ancestral inheritance. The Agency’s history is set against this unresolved conflict over land and political power.

Wald’s recollection also makes the debate personal. Abravanel’s unsuccessful effort to change Ben-Gurion’s position was not merely an abstract disagreement over institutional policy; it preceded his expulsion from the organization’s leadership. In the novel’s presentation, the Jewish Agency for Israel marks both the practical authority exercised during the Mandate’s closing years and the narrowing space for a proposed Arab-Jewish political partnership.