Kekkai no senbun

The limits of force are the distinction between military power’s capacity to prevent immediate destruction and its incapacity to create reconciliation. In A Tale of Love and Darkness, Shmuel Ash develops this argument with Gershom Wald through the image of a hypothetical eleventh soldier: however formidable Israel’s defenses, force cannot guarantee safety against every future escalation, much less transform the hostility those defenses are meant to contain. The argument is sharpened by Wald’s loss of his only son and by Shaltiel Abravanel’s rejected alternative to Jewish statehood, leaving deterrence necessary, peace imaginable, and neither a complete answer to the other.

The security question

The discussion begins with the origins of Arab hostility, not with an abstract contrast between pacifism and militarism. Shmuel interrupts Wald to ask why Arabs should love Israel. He describes their experience as that of people confronted by newcomers who took their land, fields, villages, cities, ancestral graves, and the inheritance of their children. Against the Jewish account of return and reconstruction, he sets the question of whether any people would welcome a sudden arrival of hundreds of thousands of foreigners, later millions, who claim the land on the authority of their sacred books. His challenge makes the conflict intelligible as a dispute over land, belonging, and competing historical claims, rather than simply an inexplicable refusal of Jewish intentions.

Wald acknowledges that Shaltiel Abravanel had tried in 1948 to persuade David Ben-Gurion that an agreement with the Arabs might still be reached as the British departed. Abravanel proposed a condominium for Arabs and Jews, provided the Jewish side gave up the idea of a Jewish state. He failed, and was expelled from the Zionist Executive and the leadership of the Jewish Agency, which Wald describes as the unofficial Jewish government in the final period of the British Mandate. Wald also admits that he himself supported Ben-Gurion’s uncompromising realism rather than Abravanel’s ideas. The scene thus places the argument about force inside a consequential political choice: coexistence and compromise were proposed, but statehood and the leadership’s assessment of political reality prevailed.

Shmuel’s account of the hypothetical eleventh soldier gives the danger a numerical shape. Recalling an article about Finland’s war with the Soviet Union, he recounts how Field Marshal Von Mannerheim reassured President Kallio that each Finnish soldier was worth ten Soviet soldiers. Kallio’s question was what would happen if Stalin sent an eleventh. Shmuel applies that unanswered question to Israel: in the 1948 war, fewer than 80,000 soldiers from five Arab armies fought against 120,000 Jewish men and women mobilized from a total Jewish population of 600,000. Arab declarations of annihilation, he argues, have not yet been matched by the full deployment of Arab strength. The unresolved danger is what might happen if the numbers changed—if a half-million, a million, or two million soldiers were sent against Israel.

That prospect is especially alarming to Shmuel because he sees Israel as intoxicated by victory, strength, and biblical rhetoric. He criticizes Ben-Gurion’s abandonment of non-alignment and Israel’s dependence on Western powers, particularly France and Britain, which he characterizes as declining. The conversation touches the Algerian conflict and Britain’s retreat from its empire as evidence of the weakness of the powers with which Israel has aligned itself. Shmuel’s warning is therefore not that Israel can simply choose peace instead of defense: he recognizes the immediate danger of military weakness while questioning a strategy that treats force and powerful alliances as durable solutions.

What force can and cannot do

When Wald asks whether Shmuel is proposing that Israel turn the other cheek, Shmuel rejects the implication that he is making a simple case against military power. He describes Jews as a people long acquainted with the power of books, prayer, commandments, study, memorization, religious fervor, commerce, and mediation, but familiar with physical force chiefly through being beaten. The sudden possession of tanks, cannons, and jet aircraft, he argues, can produce intoxication: a people newly armed may begin to believe that force can accomplish whatever it desires. The weapons matter, but so does the political imagination they encourage.

Shmuel draws a strict boundary around that power. Force can make an enemy a slave, but not an ally; it cannot make a fanatic tolerant or turn someone thirsting for vengeance into a friend. Those are precisely the transformations he says Israel needs. Even the combined force of the United States, the Soviet Union, France, and Britain could conquer an immense territory, Wald answers, but the ability to conquer is not the ability to secure willing allegiance. Shmuel’s distinction is not between power and powerlessness; it is between preventing an immediate catastrophe and resolving the political relationships that make catastrophe recurrent.

He states the distinction most plainly when he concedes that Israel’s military strength separates its people from death at every moment, including the moment of their conversation. Military power is necessary because it can prevent annihilation for a time. But it can only prevent; it cannot repair or resolve. The qualification matters: Shmuel neither dismisses the need for defense nor claims that a peaceful gesture will dissolve danger. He argues instead that survival through deterrence is temporary protection, not reconciliation, and that confusing the two risks making a provisional safeguard into a permanent political horizon.

Abravanel’s alternative and its costs

Abravanel’s opposition to a Jewish state gives the debate a political alternative, but not an uncomplicated one. In Wald’s recollection, Abravanel proposed that after the British Mandate ended, international trusteeship or a provisional government under American supervision might replace it. He thought 100,000 Holocaust survivors in displaced-persons camps across Europe might be permitted to immigrate to the Land of Israel in a single wave, raising the Jewish population from 650,000 to three-quarters of a million. Then, he proposed, immigration and demands for a Hebrew state should pause, allowing Arab residents to become accustomed to the Jewish presence over ten or twenty years.

Abravanel’s reasoning, as Wald reports it, took Arab fears seriously as fears of accumulation and future expansion. The Arabs’ principal opposition, Abravanel argued, was not simply directed at the existing Zionist enterprise, which he characterized as a handful of small cities and several dozen villages along the coastal plain. It was directed at what they imagined that enterprise might become: a power superior in education, technology, ingenuity, and motivation, ultimately capable of controlling the Arab lands around it. The image Wald relays is of a hidden predatory giant inside a small Zionist embryo. Shmuel objects that the Jews are only a drop in the sea around them; the disagreement exposes the gap between a community’s actual size and the threat another community believes it may represent.

Abravanel’s warnings also make plain that he did not expect goodwill to emerge automatically from postponing statehood. He predicted that proclaiming an independent Jewish state after the Mandate would set off a bloody war with the Arab world and perhaps the Muslim world. Even if the Jews won one or several rounds, he feared that Muslim predominance would eventually prevail, turning the conflict into a war lasting generations. In his analysis, each Jewish victory might deepen Arab terror of Jewish potential and perceived expansionist ambitions rather than settle the conflict. His alternative rests on restraint and time, but its premise is also a grim forecast: military victory, even when real, can intensify the fear that sustains future violence.

The proposal is inseparable from what happened to its advocate. Abravanel was called a traitor for his friendships with Arabs, his visits to Arab neighborhoods and towns, and his hospitality toward Arab journalists, politicians, union leaders, and professors at his home. He continued to argue in 1947 and 1948, even as the War of Independence was being fought, that founding a Jewish state was a tragic mistake. Wald’s account presents that label not as proof of treachery but as the price of dissenting from a national course that had become bound up with war and statehood. His rejected proposal establishes that the limits of force were not merely a private moral objection: they were the basis of a political vision that lost the argument over what security required.

Loss and the unresolved argument

For Wald, the question of whether force merely delays disaster is not theoretical. After Shmuel explains its limits, Wald asks whether he lost his only son merely to postpone a catastrophe that, according to Shmuel, cannot be prevented forever. His question brings the debate to the human cost that strategic abstractions cannot settle. Shmuel wants to move toward him and offer comfort, but recognizes that no consolation is available; he keeps silent rather than add to Wald’s pain. The loss does not refute Shmuel’s distinction, but it makes its consequences unbearable to state as if they were simply a political proposition.

Wald identifies the date of his son’s death as the night of April 2, when Mija died in the Jerusalem hills. He recalls hearing Abravanel’s warnings before that loss, often while Abravanel stood by the window with his back to the darkness, looking instead toward a landscape painting by Reuven Rubin. The remembered landscape held Galilee, Jerusalem, the desert, Arab villages, kibbutz meadows, and Jewish agricultural settlements together without contradiction. The image complicates any easy division between attachment to the land and willingness to share it: Abravanel’s affection for its varied communities and landscapes coexisted with his opposition to the state that was being established.

After Wald’s question, Shmuel does not try to win the argument. He feeds the colored fish in the aquarium and goes to the kitchen; Wald eats potato salad with mayonnaise and vegetables in silence. Later, Wald writes on a piece of paper, crumples it angrily, throws it into the wastebasket, and begins writing again. The small actions do not resolve whether the sacrifice was necessary or whether the disaster Shmuel fears can ultimately be avoided. Instead, they leave the political debate suspended in a household shaped by bereavement: defense remains indispensable, while the power to defend cannot restore the dead or make an enemy into a friend.

Significance

The limit of force is at once strategic, political, and moral. The eleventh soldier names the uncertainty that superiority in one battle cannot remove; the enemy whom force can subdue but cannot convert names the difference between military control and peace. The narrative does not turn this distinction into a simple rejection of defense: Shmuel explicitly says that military strength prevents immediate annihilation. Nor does it vindicate Abravanel by presenting his alternative as a guaranteed path to harmony. His warnings are voiced through Wald’s retrospective account, and the historical choice he opposed has already been made.

The debate’s unresolved force comes from keeping those claims in tension. Shmuel’s reasoning makes the dispossession and fear underlying Arab hostility central to the question of security, while Wald’s dead son makes the cost of vulnerability impossible to abstract away. Abravanel’s proposed pause and shared political framework show that alternatives were conceived, but his exclusion and the war that followed mark their defeat. Military power can keep a community alive for the moment; the article’s governing concept insists that survival, however necessary, is not the same as a settlement. That distinction neither supplies an easy remedy nor permits victory to stand as proof that the conflict has been resolved.