Shalit Abrahaaner opposed partition and the establishment of a Jewish state

Shaltiel Abravanel’s opposition to partition and the establishment of a Jewish state is a dissenting vision of coexistence: he believes Jews may build a home in the land, but only as part of a shared political and social life with Arabs. Convinced that a separate state will bring a bloody, existential war, he argues instead for restraint, dialogue, and ultimately communities living together without borders. His position isolates him from the Zionist leadership and leaves him branded a traitor, while the novel makes that accusation a measure of how costly political refusal can be.

From Zionist service to dissent

Abravanel had been a senior figure in both the Zionist Executive and the Jewish Agency for nearly nine years. For much of his public career, he continued to observe institutional discipline, voicing occasional appeals for dialogue with the neighboring people and objections to violent methods, but receiving little interest from colleagues. His doubts sharpened over time: he had once believed that Jews were establishing a home in Eretz Israel without displacing anyone or committing injustice; by the 1920s he was questioning that belief, and by the 1930s he feared that the two peoples were moving toward a collision in which only one could survive.

The decisive break came in 1947, when Abravanel openly opposed the United Nations partition plan and Jewish independence. On December 20, he was removed from his posts in the Zionist Executive and the Jewish Agency because of disagreements with colleagues. A report in Davar the following day said that he declined to explain his dismissal to the newspaper. It nevertheless conveyed his central warning: the course chosen by Ben-Gurion and others led inexorably toward a bloody war between the two peoples, with the lives of 600,000 Jews in Eretz Israel at stake. Abravanel still believed there was room for a historic compromise.

His disagreement was not simply a rejection of Jewish refuge or of the Zionist enterprise as it then existed. Abravanel argued that the immediate Jewish presence—then a small number of towns and several dozen villages along the coastal plain—was not what Arabs principally feared. From years of conversation with Arab friends in the country and neighboring lands, he concluded that they feared the Jewish community’s educational, technological, and organizational strengths, and what they perceived as the expansionist ambitions those strengths might enable. His warning was that a small Zionist beginning could appear, to its Arab neighbors, to contain a much larger and more threatening power.

A political alternative to partition

Abravanel proposed that the dissolving British Mandate be replaced by an international mandate or a provisional government under American supervision. He thought that such an arrangement could permit the immigration of 100,000 Holocaust survivors from displaced-persons camps in Europe, bringing the Jewish population in the land from about 650,000 to three-quarters of a million and addressing the refugees’ immediate plight. After that, he urged a pause: Jews should stop pressing conspicuously for a Hebrew state and allow Arab communities ten or twenty years to absorb the Jewish presence, giving calm a chance to return.

His objection reached beyond the specific partition plan. Abravanel rejected not only a separate Jewish state but also a binational state shared by Jews and Arabs. He regarded a world divided into hundreds of states, with borders, barbed wire, passports, flags, armies, and separate currencies, as an archaic and violent arrangement. Rather than hastily create another small state through bloodshed, he imagined that existing states might eventually give way to communities of different languages living alongside and among one another, without sovereignty, armies, borders, or weapons.

In the local setting, he called for Arabs, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Druze, Circassians, Orthodox Christians, Catholics, and Armenians to form neighboring communities without dividing frontiers. He proposed that children learn one another’s languages and even suggested joint schools. In his view, this would help end the British policy of division and could allow trust and personal friendship to take root gradually. Such relationships, he maintained, had already existed in places including Haifa, Jerusalem, Tiberias, and Jaffa, where Arab and Jewish families and professional acquaintances sometimes visited one another.

The grounds for that hope were historical as well as practical. Abravanel described Arabs and Jews as peoples who, in different ways, had suffered under Christian Europe: Arabs through colonial humiliation, oppression, and exploitation; Jews through generations of scorn, exclusion, persecution, expulsion, massacre, and genocide. He believed that this shared history could support empathy and understanding between them. His proposal was therefore not merely a postponement of statehood, but an effort to redirect political life away from competing national sovereignties and toward mutual recognition.

Opposition, expulsion, and silence

Abravanel tried to circulate his views in small circles among both Arabs and Jews. At least twice a month, he traveled to Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jaffa, Haifa, and Beirut, and he took part in private discussions in the Rehavia salons of intellectuals from Germany. Yet the increasingly explicit dissent of his later years separated him from his colleagues. In 1947, after he opposed both the United Nations partition plan and Israeli independence, some regarded him as having lost his reason and began calling him a traitor. He was given two hours to choose between resigning and being expelled; he resigned.

After leaving office, Abravanel made no public reply. He fell completely silent, convinced that he had no interlocutor. His isolation followed from the political circumstances as well as from personal hostility: on the eve of the declaration of the state and through the War of Independence, those around him believed the approaching war to be a struggle for life or death, in which defeat would mean their destruction. Under those conditions, his case for waiting, compromise, and shared life had little chance of being heard. The dismissal reported in Davar thus marks not only his loss of institutional position but the narrowing of the public space available to his alternative.

The traitor’s name and its cost

The label attached to Abravanel followed him into the private world of the novel. Gershom Wald explains that people called him a traitor because he maintained friendly relations with Arabs, visited them in places such as Katamon, Sheikh Jarrah, Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Beit Jala, and often received Arab journalists, politicians, labor leaders, and professors in his home. They also condemned his opposition to founding a Jewish state during the years when the war’s battles were at their height. His friendships and political argument were treated as evidence of disloyalty, collapsing the distinction between dissenting from a national policy and betraying a people.

Wald later describes the consequences of Abravanel’s position in starkly personal terms. After the war, Abravanel’s Arab friends were beyond the new borders or had been expelled from their homes in Katamon, Abu Tor, and Baka; he had no Jewish friends left, because he was the traitor. Abravanel, Wald, and Atalia lived together for roughly two years after Mija’s death, isolated in the house “like in a submarine.” Wald and Abravanel had once argued repeatedly, but Mija’s death ended their disputes; the grief left them silent. Abravanel was at ease in that silence, while Atalia cared for the men and worked several hours a day at a real-estate office on Straus Street.

Wald’s account of Abravanel’s death completes the portrait of political isolation. One evening, after the seven o’clock news, Abravanel sat alone in the kitchen, drank coffee, and read the newspaper, as he did each afternoon. His head suddenly fell onto the cup and overturned it. The right lens of his glasses shattered; coffee spread over the newspaper, table, chest, legs, and floor. Atalia found him with his face on the floral oilcloth, his forehead and hair in the spilled coffee. Wald remembers him as honest, brave, and original, while also acknowledging that Abravanel had never wanted to be a father and did not know how to be one. His death alone in the house gives physical finality to the estrangement already enacted by his dismissal and the loss of his friends.

The novel does not make Abravanel’s position an uncomplicated prophecy or vindication. Shmuel regards the attraction of Abravanel’s ideas but calls them, in substance, softened and overly hopeful; he suspects that Arabs may have been drawn less by Jewish weakness in the future than by Jewish weakness in the present. That disagreement leaves the alternative exposed to the historical pressures it sought to avert. Yet the recurring accusation of treachery also acquires a countermeaning: Shmuel argues that people willing to change are called traitors by those who fear change, and sees Abravanel’s beautiful dream as the reason he was condemned. Abravanel’s political defeat and social abandonment therefore remain inseparable from the novel’s question of whether refusing the prevailing course is betrayal—or a form of courage that its own time cannot recognize.