Non-state Zionism of Charles A. Ablavaneur

Shaltiel Abravanel’s non-statist Zionism joins commitment to a Jewish future in the Land of Israel with rejection of the nation-state as its necessary form. He argued that Jews and Arabs could live together as a mixed community, or as two communities sharing the same land without a state framework that made one people’s future a threat to the other. His dissent brought him into conflict with the Zionist leadership, and the war he feared left the two peoples amid bereavement, displacement, and ruin—the consequences that make his alternative both politically marginal and central to the novel’s argument.

A Zionist against the state

Abravanel’s opposition to statehood did not mean that he had ceased to be a Zionist. He had served for nearly nine years in the leadership of the Zionist Executive and the Jewish Agency, and still understood himself as a Zionist. What he rejected was the assumption that Zionism had to culminate in a sovereign Jewish state established through confrontation with the Arabs. Gershom Wald later explains the difference between their positions in stark terms: Abravanel believed Zionism could not be realized through conflict with the Arabs; Wald had come to believe that it could not be realized without such conflict.

Abravanel’s political outlook took shape over time. Atalia says that the Arab revolt of 1936, Hitler, resistance, assassinations, retaliatory actions by Jewish resistance groups, British executions, and, above all, Abravanel’s many conversations with his Arab friends led him to believe there was enough room in the land for both communities. Rather than force them into a state structure that imperiled one side’s future, he imagined their living alongside or within one another: a mixed community, or a combination of two communities in which neither threatened the other.

His Zionism was therefore a dissent from the movement’s dominant political direction, not an embrace of political indifference. He continued to identify with the movement while arguing that its leadership had mistaken the means of national security for a viable future. In his view, a state founded through a contest with the Arabs could not deliver a durable peace; the very effort to secure one people’s future by political separation risked making the other people’s dispossession permanent.

Warning against partition and war

The newspapers Shmuel Ash searches in the library preserve the public traces of this dissent in two brief notices. A report in Davar says that on June 18, 1947, Abravanel asked to appear before the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine and present an individual minority view on the Jewish-Arab conflict. He wanted to offer an original solution for achieving peace. The Jewish Agency rejected his request, insisting that it and the Zionist Executive must address the committee with one voice rather than present contradictory positions.

Abravanel considered appearing before the committee despite that refusal, but eventually accepted the majority’s discipline. The report suggests that he may have been warned that an independent appearance would cost him his place in the leading institutions of Jewish society. Shmuel copies the notice and keeps it in his shirt pocket. Yet the archives of the newspaper offer no evidence that Abravanel subsequently opened a public debate or appealed to Jewish or Arab opinion. The dissent appears in the record as an initiative blocked before it could become a sustained public campaign.

A second Davar report, dated December 21, 1947, says that Abravanel had been removed the previous day from his positions in the Zionist Executive and the Jewish Agency because of disagreements with his colleagues. He refused to answer the reporter’s question about the reasons for his dismissal. The paper nevertheless reports his central warning: the course chosen by Ben-Gurion and his allies led inexorably toward a bloody war between the two peoples, with no certainty about who would prevail, while the lives of six hundred thousand Jews in the Land of Israel were at stake. Abravanel believed there was still an opening for a historic compromise between the peoples who lived there.

The article identifies him as a lawyer and Arabist as well as a senior institutional figure. His knowledge of Arabic and long-standing friendships with both Muslim and Christian Arabs gave his alternative a practical basis in sustained contact, not merely an abstract appeal to coexistence. Atalia recalls that he went to speak with Arab friends at least twice a week, continuing even after bloodshed began in the autumn of 1947, roads were blocked, and snipers fired. Neighbors called him the Arabs’ friend, the muezzin, and the devout Muslim; some called him a traitor because he partly justified Arab opposition to Zionism and maintained close relations with Arabs. He nevertheless insisted that he was a Zionist, and considered himself among the few authentic Zionists not intoxicated by nationalism.

Against the nation-state and its fervor

Abravanel’s critique extended beyond the immediate question of partition. Atalia recalls that states did not impress him, and that he regarded a world divided into hundreds of national states as rows of separate cages in a zoo. Although he did not know Yiddish, he used the Yiddish phrase “Goyim naches” to describe the pleasure gentiles took in states; to him, the state was an outdated, childish idea. The image of cages gives political separation a double edge: it may promise containment and security, but it also organizes human life through confinement and division.

He also feared that the Zionist movement had mobilized religious and messianic energies for a political project that was secular, pragmatic, and modern. Wald recalls Abravanel warning that the golem would one day rebel against its creator: the irrational energies harnessed by Zionism’s founders might eventually erupt and destroy what they had intended to build. The warning frames nationalism not simply as a political program but as a force capable of escaping the control of those who direct it. Abravanel believed Ben-Gurion’s leadership had already strayed from its path, following the pull of Ben-Gurion’s policies and, in Abravanel’s judgment, drifting toward the approaches associated with Jabotinsky and Abraham Stern.

That critique explains why his removal cannot be reduced to an ordinary resignation over tactics. Wald says that Abravanel was expelled from both institutions after being given twenty-four hours to choose between leaving a resignation letter on Ben-Gurion’s desk and facing formal expulsion by unanimous decision, with dishonor. Abravanel wrote a reasoned letter, but it was concealed; no newspaper would publish it, and the public was left with silence around his departure. Years later, Atalia searched the Zionist archive for the letter or a copy and returned empty-handed. She was told not that it had been lost but that it had never existed.

The cost of an unheeded alternative

The political defeat of Abravanel’s vision becomes visible in Atalia’s account of the aftermath. She places the two communities’ losses beside one another: Jews in the land became a vast refugee camp, and Arabs became a vast refugee camp as well. Arabs lived with the daily tragedy of defeat; Jews lived with the nightly terror of revenge. Both peoples, she says, were consumed by hatred and by the conviction that justice was wholly on their side. The land filled with cemeteries and the ruins of hundreds of poor villages erased from the map. Her account does not establish that Abravanel’s alternative would have prevented these outcomes; it does show the human disaster against which he had argued for compromise.

Wald’s own history sharpens the disagreement. He admits that he and Abravanel stood too far apart for discussion to bridge their positions: Abravanel believed Zionism could not be realized through a confrontation with the Arabs, while Wald concluded in the late 1940s that it could not be realized without one. The political choice is thus embodied in a relationship that could not be reconciled. Abravanel’s proposal is not vindicated by the narrative as a proven solution, but its suppression leaves a question hanging over the course that replaced it: whether the war was inevitable, or whether the possibility of a shared political life was dismissed before it could be tested.

Abravanel’s defeat continues after his institutional expulsion. More than two years after the War of Independence, he dies alone in the kitchen of the house he shares with Wald and Atalia. After his death, Atalia searches his room, empties drawers, and looks through cupboards for his notes, articles, and manuscripts; she finds none, only his will. The absence of his private papers—including valuable letters exchanged with prominent Arabs in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Beirut, Cairo, and Damascus—leaves his political thought largely accessible through fragments, memories, and hostile public labels. Whether he destroyed the archive himself remains Wald’s inference, not a documented certainty.

The novel gives his non-statist Zionism force by setting its silenced proposal against the visible consequences of partition and war. Abravanel’s vision asks whether belonging to the land had to be secured by exclusive sovereignty, and whether shared life could have been organized without making the future of either community depend on the defeat of the other. His answer is never tested in a lasting political arrangement. Instead, the censored letter, the hidden newspaper notices, the lost archive, and the ruins recalled by Atalia make the alternative legible chiefly through the history that rejected it.