La fuerza solo puede evitar, no arreglar ni solucionar

The expression “force can only prevent, not repair or solve” crystallizes Gershom Wald’s sober account of military power: it may stave off disaster, but it cannot create reconciliation or settle the grievances that produce conflict. Set against Shmuel Ash’s arguments about Palestinian dispossession and Shaltiel Abravanel’s rejected alternative to a Jewish state, the phrase distinguishes survival by force from a lasting political resolution.

Meaning and Context

Wald makes the distinction while discussing the problems facing Israel. Even overwhelming power, he argues, could conquer territory or reduce an enemy to submission, but could not make that enemy an ally. Nor could force turn a fanatic into a tolerant person or someone consumed by vengeance into a friend. The limits are not abstract: they concern the transformation of relationships and political attitudes, outcomes military superiority cannot command.

The expression does not amount to a rejection of military power. Wald insists that Israel needs it, because its armed strength protects the country from immediate destruction. The qualification is temporal and precise: force can prevent catastrophe for a time, but cannot repair the conflict or resolve its causes. Its defensive usefulness and its political insufficiency are inseparable parts of the claim.

The Debate over Israel and the Arabs

Shmuel gives the conflict a historical and material basis. He asks why Arabs should welcome newcomers who took their land, fields, villages, cities, ancestral graves, and the inheritance of their children. He challenges the language of Jewish restoration by pointing to the experience of the people already living there, and questions whether any people would willingly accept a sudden arrival of hundreds of thousands of foreigners, followed by millions, claiming the whole land through sacred books.

Wald connects this argument to Abravanel’s attempt in 1948 to secure an agreement with the Arabs as the British departed. Abravanel proposed a Jewish-Arab condominium in place of a Jewish state; for that position, he was expelled from the Zionist Executive and the leadership of the Jewish Agency. Wald admits that he sided with Ben-Gurion’s uncompromising realism rather than Abravanel’s proposals. Shmuel, in turn, criticizes Ben-Gurion’s nationalist state-building and warns that the Arabs would not forget either their defeat in 1948 or the later collusion with Britain and France. The dispute gives Wald’s aphorism its political force: military power may forestall defeat without removing the grievances that sustain opposition.

Abravanel’s Alternative and Wald’s Warning

Abravanel’s proposed course, as Wald recounts it, was gradual rather than coercive. He believed that the dissolving British Mandate should give way to an international mandate or a provisional government under American supervision. A single permitted wave of immigration might bring the Jewish population to roughly three-quarters of a million, including 100,000 Holocaust survivors displaced in European transit camps. Then, he argued, a pause in overt demands for a Hebrew state could give the Arabs ten or twenty years to absorb the Jewish presence and allow calm to return.

Abravanel understood Arab opposition not simply as hostility to the existing Zionist communities, which he described as small towns and dozens of coastal villages, but as fear of Jewish power accumulating over time. In his view, Arabs feared Jewish advantages in education, technology, ingenuity, and motivation, and the prospect that these might lead to expansion and control of Arab territory. He warned that proclaiming an independent Jewish state after the Mandate would trigger a bloody war with the Arab world, perhaps the Muslim world more broadly. Even repeated Jewish military victories, he predicted, would deepen Arab fear and make the conflict one lasting generations. His prediction and Wald’s expression converge on the same limit: winning battles cannot by itself make the defeated willing partners in a shared political future.

A Principle Tested by Loss

The argument is sharpened by Wald’s personal loss. His only son, Mija Wald, died in the Jerusalem mountains on the night of April 2. Wald recalls that he had helped cultivate the national and martial convictions that drew Mija into the war, while Abravanel had urged young people on both sides to lay down their arms. After Mija’s death, Wald imagined Abravanel silently asking whether the sacrifice had been worth it; the question helped end their conversations, leaving the two men in silence except for occasional exchanges about household repairs and purchases.

Wald’s own positions remain divided. He calls Ben-Gurion the greatest Jewish leader and a far-sighted statesman who understood that the Arabs would not willingly share territory or power, and that no outside force could be relied upon to defend the Jews. Yet he also preserves Abravanel’s warnings about nationalism, war, and the transformation of the oppressed into oppressors. The expression holds those convictions together without pretending to resolve their tension: force can protect a population from immediate destruction, but neither military success nor the sacrifice it demands can, on its own, repair the political relationship or bring the conflict to an end.