Nationality states like zoo cages

The image of nation-states as zoo cages condenses Shaltiel Abravanel’s opposition to treating the nation-state as the necessary form of political life. As Atalia recalls his view, separate states divide peoples into enclosures; in the conflict between Jews and Arabs, that division is not a refuge from violence but a route toward catastrophe.

The Image and Its Political Meaning

Abravanel was unimpressed by states anywhere, Atalia says, and saw a world divided into hundreds of national states as row after row of separate cages in a zoo. The comparison makes political separation look less like a natural or liberating order than an imposed arrangement that confines communities apart. To him, states were childish and outdated; his dismissal reached beyond the question of a Jewish state to the nation-state system as a whole.

Atalia adds a linguistic irony to her account: although her father did not know Yiddish, he described all the states of the world with the Yiddish phrase “Goyim naches,” a gentile pleasure. The phrase sharpens the distance between his multilingual, cross-community life and a political map organized into bounded national units.

A Different Future for Jews and Arabs

The cage image belongs to Abravanel’s alternative to partition and exclusive statehood. After the Arab revolt of 1936, Hitler’s rise, resistance and killings, British executions, Jewish reprisals, and his many conversations with Arab friends, he came to believe there was enough room for both communities. He favored their living side by side or within one another, as a mixed community or as two communities joined in a way that would not threaten either one’s future.

This vision did not mean that the surrounding history was peaceful. Atalia recounts it against a sequence of revolt, violence, executions, and reprisals. Abravanel’s proposed coexistence was a response to that history: rather than make separation the foundation of safety, he imagined a shared political life without a state framework.

The Cage as a Contested Metaphor

The image becomes pointedly contentious when Atalia argues with Shmuel. She rejects the idea that Jews had been caught between a sword and a wall, insisting instead that they themselves had been both. Shmuel considers answering that where people behave like predatory animals, separate cages might be necessary. He holds back, remembering that Atalia is a war widow and wanting closeness rather than victory in the argument.

The exchange exposes the metaphor’s unresolved tension. For Atalia, the cages represent the danger of a state system that hardens division and perpetuates hostility; for Shmuel, the image raises the possibility that separation might restrain violence. The conversation does not settle that conflict. It places Abravanel’s rejection of states beside the fear and historical experience that make the appeal of protective boundaries difficult to dismiss.

Dream, Catastrophe, and Retrospect

Atalia refuses to call her father the dreamer. In her account, Ben-Gurion and his followers were the dreamers, heading toward slaughter, massacre, deportation, and enduring hatred between the two communities. Her description turns the cage image into a warning about what state-building may produce when national separation is treated as the only practical future.

Yet Atalia’s recollection remains self-questioning: she allows that perhaps her father was naive, and wonders whether his critics were right. That uncertainty keeps the image from becoming a simple political answer. The cages give visible form to Abravanel’s opposition to national division, while the argument around them shows the pressure of violence, fear, and consequences that his alternative could not make disappear.