Palestine is the novel’s contested setting and political question: a land understood by Jews and Arabs through different histories, claims, and fears, and whose future becomes the subject of a bitter conflict between national sovereignty and shared life. Its story is told not only through events on the ground but also through newspapers, recalled conversations, and the arguments of Shaltiel Abravanel, whose proposed alternatives to a separate Jewish state are marginalized as the conflict intensifies.

A land divided by competing claims

The novel frames Palestine as more than a territory awaiting a political settlement. In Shmuel Ash’s account, Jews arrived from far away and took land, fields, villages, cities, ancestral graves, and the inheritance of Arab children. He challenges the assumption that the local population should have welcomed the sudden arrival of hundreds of thousands of newcomers, followed by millions, whose claim rested on sacred books promising the land to them. His question recasts the conflict from the perspective of those who experienced the Zionist project as an invasion and dispossession, rather than simply as the return of a people to its ancestral home.

The competing visions are made concrete by the geography represented in Shaltiel Abravanel’s old map of the eastern Mediterranean basin. Its French title describes the countries of the Levant and their surroundings; it places Palestine, also labeled the Holy Land, across the territory of Eretz Israel and Transjordan. The map’s coloring records British and French spheres of influence, but its borders and labels also evoke a region whose political identity has been shaped by outside rule. The room in which the map hangs is part of a house near the edge of Jerusalem, but its image opens onto a far larger landscape of territorial names, imperial influence, and competing national futures.

Partition and the political turning point

The struggle over Palestine enters the narrative through Shmuel’s research in back issues of Davar. He finds a report that on June 18, 1947, Abravanel asked to present an individual minority position to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, offering an original route to peace between Jews and Arabs. The Jewish Agency leadership refused, insisting that the Agency and the Zionist Executive Committee speak to the committee in one voice. Abravanel considered defying that decision but ultimately complied; the report suggests that he may have been warned that an independent appearance would end his place in the principal institutions of Jewish society. Shmuel finds no evidence that Abravanel subsequently brought his ideas to a public debate or appealed to Jewish or Arab public opinion.

A November 30, 1947, newspaper headline declares that a Hebrew state will soon be established. The report says the United Nations General Assembly had voted by more than a two-thirds majority for a free Jewish state in Eretz Israel, while the land would be divided into independent Jewish and Arab states with economic relations and a common currency; Jerusalem and Bethlehem would be under international control. Shmuel is overcome by emotion as he reads, as though the vote were happening in front of him. The newspaper’s presentation of partition as an accomplished international decision contrasts with the unresolved human and political conflict that the decision could not settle.

A later report, dated December 21, records that Abravanel had been removed from his posts in the Zionist Executive Committee and the Jewish Agency leadership the previous day, after disagreements with his colleagues. He declined to explain his dismissal to the journalist. The paper nevertheless reports his belief that the path chosen by David Ben-Gurion and others would lead to a bloody war between the two peoples, with the survival of the Jewish population at stake, while a historical compromise remained possible. Abravanel, an established lawyer and Arabist who had served in the institutions’ leadership for nearly nine years, thus appears in the archive as a dissenting voice pushed out at the moment when partition and statehood were becoming the dominant political course.

Abravanel’s alternative and the fears behind it

Abravanel’s position was not that Jews had no right to build a home in Palestine. As Gershom Wald recounts it, Abravanel continued to believe in that aspiration, but concluded that the home should be shared by Jews and Arabs. He opposed the partition plan and the establishment of an independent Jewish state, and favored a common political future rather than sovereignty and government belonging exclusively to Jews. Earlier, he had proposed that the departing British Mandate be replaced by international rule or a provisional government under American supervision. He expected that around one hundred thousand Holocaust survivors displaced in European transit camps might be allowed to immigrate, raising the Jewish population to roughly three-quarters of a million and addressing their immediate plight. After that, he argued, Jewish immigration and political demands should pause for ten or twenty years, allowing Arab residents time to adjust to the Jewish presence.

His case for patience rested on his interpretation of Arab opposition. Abravanel believed that it arose not only from resistance to the existing Zionist settlements, which he described as a small group of towns and villages, but from fear of what Jewish growth might become. In his view, Arabs were alarmed by what they perceived as Jewish advantages in education, technology, ingenuity, and motivation, and feared that these would eventually lead to Jewish expansion and control of the whole region. A reported statement by Iraqi prime minister Adnan Pachachi gives that fear a numerical form: he warned that a Jewish population of one million would be unopposed in Palestine, two million would be unopposed in the Middle East, and three or four million could not be resisted by the Muslim world. Abravanel regarded such fears—including beliefs about a Jewish plan to replace the mosques on the Temple Mount and create an empire from the Nile to the Euphrates—as a source of Arab resistance that could still be assuaged.

The measures he proposed were practical as well as political: patient and sustained dialogue, a common workers’ union, Arab access to Jewish settlements, and Arab students’ admission to Jewish schools and the university. Above all, he urged the abandonment of a separate Jewish state with its own army, government, and exclusive sovereign authority. His opponents treated such proposals as unrealistic in the face of immediate danger. When Shmuel asks whether there was any chance of surviving through peaceful means, Wald answers that Abravanel was not impressed by states at all, describing national states as rows of separate cages in a zoo. The dispute is therefore not simply between optimism and realism: it concerns whether state power can produce security without deepening the fear and hostility it is meant to overcome.

From coexistence to war and displacement

The personal histories attached to Palestine expose the costs of that political failure. Wald recalls that Abravanel maintained friendships with Arab Muslims and Christians, visited them in Katamon, Sheikh Jarrah, Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Beit Jala, and often received Arab journalists, politicians, labor leaders, and teachers at home. Some people called him a traitor or mocked him as a devoted Muslim because he maintained these relationships and acknowledged Arab opposition to Zionism. Yet he continued to call himself a Zionist, and considered himself among the few who were not intoxicated by nationalism. His political dissent arose from sustained contact with Arab neighbors, not from indifference to the Jewish community’s future.

Shmuel’s memory of childhood in Haifa contrasts earlier sociability with the violence that overtook the city. Arab customers visited his father’s cartography office in Hadar HaCarmel; merchants and the family exchanged hospitality, food, and conversation, often in English or French, and spoke as though politics need not govern their lives. Then attacks on Jewish buses, reprisals in nearby villages, the killing of Jewish refinery workers by an Arab crowd, and further reprisals broke that pattern. Jewish and Arab snipers occupied rooftops, and fortified checkpoints divided neighborhoods. In April 1948, shortly before the British withdrawal, tens of thousands of Arab residents left Haifa by boat for Lebanon. Jewish leaders appealed to them to remain, but fear—fueled by rumors that the Jews intended to exterminate them, and by the massacre at Deir Yassin—had already taken hold. Much of Haifa’s Arab population was gone almost overnight.

Shmuel also acknowledges that in Lod and elsewhere, Arabs were not asked to stay but were killed and expelled. His account refuses to treat the Haifa exodus as an isolated or uncomplicated case: it places flight, expulsion, communal fear, and armed violence within the same landscape of dispossession. He continues to wonder whether what happened was inevitable, while his father insists that the war was an all-or-nothing struggle between entire populations, with one neighborhood facing another and one house looking toward the next. That claim explains a prevailing sense of necessity without resolving the moral question Shmuel raises.

Borders, force, and the limits of resolution

Palestine’s divisions are also present in the ordinary geography of the novel. In winter Jerusalem, rusted barbed wire, minefields, walls, and warnings mark the boundary between Israeli and Jordanian-controlled parts of the city. Shmuel wanders near signs warning of mines, the frontier, no-man’s-land, and enemy snipers; the boundary is not an abstract line but a hazard that interrupts movement. A shepherd watches the western edge of the city from rocky fields extending toward the remains of Sheikh Badr. Elsewhere, the old map in Abravanel’s room places Palestine within a regional frame, while the lived landscape presents a city and a country broken by lines of control.

The political argument does not yield an easy answer about force. Wald insists that military power is necessary to prevent Israel’s destruction, but cannot turn an enemy into an ally, a fanatic into a tolerant person, or someone seeking revenge into a friend. Force can avert catastrophe for a time; it cannot repair or resolve the conditions producing hostility. Abravanel’s feared outcome—that declaring an independent Jewish state after the British Mandate ended would bring a war with the Arab world, perhaps the Muslim world, and that even repeated Jewish victories would deepen fear and prolong conflict across generations—gives this distinction a historical edge. Palestine remains the setting of both the urgent demand for protection and the unresolved question of whether security built through separation can ever produce shared peace.